building a successful product that ends up having 25 million users doesn't just happen it requires a great idea the right people and a certain can-do attitude to whether the ups and downs of the technical business design and many related activities that go into running a company to go deeper into this I talk with Bill Richards starting right now Bill how's it going well good to be here before I get too far into the conversation for the audience can you please introduce yourself

sure yeah my name is Bill Richards I'm the CTO of jog um yeah

and so what what does jog do just for

the Curiosity yeah so we help brands with video I guess like a good way to sum it up is a video vetting platform and we work specifically with big Brands like Sony Disney helping them with video screenings um so uh up until we started working with them they use uh text survey feedbacks for their screenings and we handle video so we capture the excitement um the video and stuff like that and we help deliver that to Brands and handle the Rights Management

cool you know before we hit the recording you know we're talking about video and the challenges that go into making video work really well so let me touch upon that in a little bit but before we get to all of that I'm just curious to know how to get started you know what was your first you know because I've known you for a long time you're a programmer you'd write code you're really familiar with code so how do you get started in all of this like what's the first thing you wrote was your language of choice back then and just how do you what was the beginning of your the life of Bill as a programmer and getting into entrepreneurship

yeah so actually um and I think you'll get a kick out of this um flash flash is kind of what inspired me and um you know your as I told you when we talked before like yours site particularly played like such a big role in my curiosity and my learning because it was such a great resource you were such a great teacher um and just like just like um building things in general is what is what keeps me going and what got me started um I wanted to accomplish something so I knew programming was kind of the way to do that um and then kind of what keeps my interest is is even back then that motivated me with sites like to advance I don't know if you remember that uh

Billy Bussey he used to do those really cool like 3D flashlights that would like explode and then like do the 360. um all those things early on in my career just like fascinated me and I just was like I want to do that I want to learn how to do that I don't know how I'm going to do that um so that that's kind of been my motivation when I got started flash was such a big part and my first language was action script two I believe which wasn't the greatest language at all um but and we got to actually skip three but that's kind of where I got my start I was actually my first kind of programming experience is just playing around in Flash

it's funny you mentioned action script too because you know in many ways I still feel JavaScript today is what actually two was back then and if you look at maybe typescript that might be actually three little bit but for the most part whatever was Action Group 2 ended up becoming one of the more popular languages through JavaScript ever since then

so Billy bus into advanced what got you to see those sites in the first place because most people you know I'm guessing this was like a long time ago unless you're a designer unless you're interested in this in the first place you wouldn't exactly just run into it casually they thought you're going to a school for example your friends are like hey Bill check out Billy Bussey or to advance so how did he stumble upon those in the first place

yeah so um circling back to just kind of my fascination with flash um obviously like I found Kirupa I found your site and um you got you had this wonderful Forum where we just had like this amazing community of designers developers very friendly people um did a lot of cool things like the Photoshop tennis and stuff like that so I spent a lot of time back then kind of forms where like the online place to hang out so I spent like a lot of time there and that's probably like I can't pinpoint exactly but that's probably where um it was I learned about those sites um just just being on your site being active in the community and I think I probably just saw a post or something

like that because we didn't have like the social media back then that we do today so um I want to say forums is probably where I discovered those

yep you know we had AOL Instant Messenger MSN Messenger anything like icq and things like that little you know this thing about it back then is like get a little app on the bottom right corner that would give you a notification it had a little panel they could message people and that was like the advanced technology for that point so from there what else did you do from you know from flash you know you did some really cool things since then so what was their jump from there

yeah uh so um back then I was learning flash um just like making little fun little projects you know kind of like the things that you would uh demo like just like you know the snow I remember you doing a lot of like those snow tutorials and stuff like that I was just really fascinated with that and Myspace was really popular back then so that was kind of like our social network it was growing so big and um kind of like the cool thing to do back then was customize your profile so um I had a friend of mine um she lived in California at the time I lived in Michigan um we used to play Counter-Strike a lot with each other and um we also like I

kind of met her uh she was also into programming design designing and stuff like that I met her on MySpace and we both had like customized profiles and that was another kind of big I think in a lot of people's early career back then was like learning CSS and stuff like that because the kind of the cool thing to do was customize your profile make it your own and um we noticed early on that uh Myspace had these kind of boring music players and everybody wants to express themselves personalize their things so I made with what I learned from your site kind of like my own little custom Flash Player and uh as I was just you know I just had that on my site and so many people kept asking me

to to how did I do that or can I use that um so me and my friend we were just like playing Counter-Strike and we were like what if we just made a site for this so um that's when uh as I told you mix spot was born and we just kind of made like a little quick MVP a one-page site where you could go um customize a music player and add it to your profile and um turn that into a business for six years and and mix pod was wildly popular and

my question is when did you know that what you were building was going to lead to something we spending six years on

yeah uh so in the early days like I didn't know for sure it was just like people were asking me I was like why don't I just put up a site I'm interested also in web design and web development and stuff like that um and we also uh if you remember slide and rock you back then they had a flash uh uh photo viewers so you could customize I'm sure you've seen back in the day like um they had like photos flying and you could upload your own photos and stuff like that so we started in in doing like we had one just music player and then we had we thought that was the popular thing that chase was doing uh a way to upload your photos

um and then slide and rock you they got all this funding they were like such a big company um and we thought that was like an interesting thing to chase so we did that for a while and then we realized like competing with these guys that have huge funding and stuff like that is just not going to work so we ended up dropping that in the music thing um early on we got pretty lucky because um Shady Records Eminem 50 Cent they all uh hired people to customize their Myspace profile and they used our music players on their site so we uh thankfully we were smart enough in The Flash Player to put a link that you couldn't like hide or remove um easily you could probably if you

messed with the embed code a little bit just make it shorter or something like that but um obviously they kept it prominently displayed so we got a ton of traffic from that and uh really it just kind of took off from there

for the link that appeared was an option where people could pay to get the link to be removed or you always have it be

visible uh it was always visible the site was always free um we never um because payments were such a hassle back then we didn't have stripe we didn't it was like you had to like call like Chase or something and set up a payment like it was like such it was not an easy task to set up payments for things so we we kept it free um it was an ad supported site um that that's kind of how we sustained our business back then

and when you say Ad supported is it was a was there a banner within your actual music player itself or were you monetizing indirectly through Myspace give me a cut of the of the item sure

yeah so we actually uh only put ads in our site never in the player itself um we kept those clean and let people do that um uh so yeah our Revenue was like Google AdSense um and we also kind of also since we were like in the music space we were partnering with thumb play who did ringtones back then so I'm definitely dating myself there about ringtones were like all their age back then so we had like a way to search for a ringtone and then we got an affiliate uh cut of that as well

so your monetization was advertising what percent was advertising what percentage was other other forms um

it was it was pretty much all advertising supported um that was um we we also like as we built out the site we realized that um there was an opportunity to build a community here around music so we actually built out profiles I built custom forms so it was kind of a destination you could actually customize your own profile on mixbot as well so you could have like your own mixpod.com Kirupa show off all your your custom players and stuff like that so we kind of just built out a community around that original idea of customizing music

player and the impressive thing is I think you mentioned that at the peak you had 25 million members using the service that's a mind-boggling number even today it's a mind-boggling number especially when you think about the state of the internet and how how popular things were before mobile devices could do so many of these things that was an even more impressive number what was your Tech stack like how did you even build something like this because I would say that you know kubernet.com was never that popular you know at its peak it had like 200 000 active members using the service the servers would go down they could not handle the Lord Beyond it it was PHP my Sequel and I'm curious to know how you ended up building this yeah

I just kind of waned it the whole time like so uh I learned flash I learned enough I used PHP PHP you know get some bad rap but it's it's you know it was it's pretty much standard on all hosting especially back then so it was an easy way to get started um it definitely was not clean code or anything like that we just kind of threw something up it worked it got the job done um it scales pretty well believe it or not um uh so just kind of like that was I would say my biggest education was learning how to manage this because we had a lot of downtime as well we started on GoDaddy shared servers uh we got an email from GoDaddy really quickly to say

you're using too many resources get off our system they basically booted us off so we had to okay what's next so we figured out we had to rent some dedicated servers those started crashing um I think on like our most popular run we had like well over a million members in a month so it was just like a constant battle like I lost so much sleep like I learned about nginx you know stuff like that to make the sites faster caching memcache learning about all those things and just scaling database too like I talked to you before like I think at its peak we had six servers so we had um just a master database and you know two uh read databases to kind of distribute the load

and then had a couple web servers to um with a load balancer in between so I did just like on the Fly figure out those things I definitely had some help from some friends in the forums and when we had to scale our database because we had so many users like hundreds uh millions of playlists hundreds of millions of songs on those playlists it was incredible like the scale um so I had to hire for Kona who were database experts if you guys Google them they're they're still in business today they're really really helpful they helped me kind of set up really an ideal setup that I could manage and also like kind of taught me what they did so um yeah I just took it one thing at a time putting

out fire after fire until we got to a stable point and then you know the next thing aroused and then I had to learn how to fix that so um the kind of in retrospect the nice thing about back then was we didn't have all these awesome Versailles and stuff like that that auto scale traffic and handle all those kind of things for us um so like under the hood this was like pre-framework too so I had to like optimize queries you know learn about indexes and databases and all those things so um really really great learning experience to help me where I am today just putting out all those Fires for six years

was it still just you and your friend and then working with percona was it did you have a team of people at this point

just me and my friend for six years we never had the need to kind of grow um you know we were able to manage it it was uh once we got it kind of stable it was just a matter of like just building cool stuff like we just kept adding new players um kind of a big motivation for me um in the early days was Winamp they had all those customized skins in the visualizations and stuff like that so we had a couple dozen players that you could customize multiple colors on each player and we had like I think it was like 12 to 15 different skins that you could choose from so my kind of um ultimate Vision was to have like a developer kit I never got to that

back then but that was kind of my dream was to just do like a new version of when I'm a modern version of Winamp so um and and also a side note on one of the things that really helped with our growth that flash helped with was it was almost like you could build mini applications within your little flash widgets right so we had players when you were like listening to uh we also by the way we use YouTube for videos so we had customizable video players when you were watching something you could actually like click a little plus button you click that it would ask you to log in or sign up with from within the widget itself so anywhere someone took the code put it on their Myspace put it

on their blog anywhere you could sign up from within that widget so that kind of helped us go viral because you didn't need to go to our site you could just interact with the widget make an account set up start your your player get the code from within somebody else's widget and just kind of it was like a plat mini platform that uh the more widgets we had the more like sign up opportunities we had across the web

you're making it seem like if it's trivial right it's like oh yeah I just have the sign up for him in the middle and make it work there are two parts to this one is a technical side which flash definitely made really obvious but the other parts of user experience because many people would not have made that jump to what you just did and said oh yeah I'm going to build the login directly within this because the current thinking would have probably been using the templatized approach you see in all the apps today is it's better for people to go to your website because it is that your widget is a top of the funnel activity that gets you to your main content so you deliberately made a

choice that is unfortunately very counter to what conventional wisdom today it says you should do and which was of course the right thing and very successful for you to do that what made you decide on that path because I'm pretty sure if you were reading the conventional books and the time on how to scale and grow this would have been the exact opposite of what the top recommendations would have been

yeah that's a really interesting question um I think it just boils down to I thought like what would be the best experience for the user right so like obviously we're ad supported so like I wanted people to go to my site but I didn't want to like force them to do it I wanted to just make a cool experience you know you interacting with this customized player you're like hey I want to get one of those and then you click around and you're like whoa I can sign up from within here this is amazing get the code to put it on my blog obviously when people sign up do you send them a welcome email so that is kind of like a way to get them to your

site later so um I just thought it was a better user experience I thought it was a cool thing to do and it just kind of blew my mind that like I can embed my onboarding flow within all these widgets across the web so it just felt like the right thing to do so we just did it that way

due to any a b testing or was it just uh I'm gonna try it out ship it and then iterate based on live feedback

everything I've done in my career has just been winging it just what felt right didn't do any a b testing it just like you know we made some good decisions back then timing was good I think too with the growth of Myspace and stuff like that so um just kind of you know I just wanted to build cool things you know the internet was really fun back then with all the flash sites and um I just thought it was really cool to to kind of experiment with this and just made an executive decision um just because I thought it was right it was the right thing to do back then

so what's my space your primary distribution platform

yeah it was definitely the biggest um and they also cracked down on flash at a point um in my my partner she you know she's really brilliant um she also had some really cool marketing strategies which I'll share with you in a second but she actually knew Tom from Myspace the default guy who is your friend so when that kind of Crackdown happened she was able to get us on the allow list to be still remaining on MySpace so that definitely helped sustain our growth um yeah so um

yeah and you already kind of tear this up for me yeah tell me your marketing plans because products don't hit 25 million users automatically yeah so

um obviously the in widgets registration uh was kind of a big thing um and another part of that was also to be able to log in so like if you're already a user you could um just log in and like you're like oh that that video is amazing I want that on my playlist you see somebody like okay this is a mixpod player I can just log in Click the plus add it to one of my existing playlists but also as I mentioned we had a link under the player but SEO was such a big driver for us back then so we wanted to Target like um words like playlists music player stuff like that so early on I figured I'm like we're sending out thousands in

some case tens of thousands per day widgets when we were at the peak growth I was like what if we just it's a link back right that was such a big thing back then to get someone to link back to you with a keyword so I was like why don't we just put a link under that player targeting the keywords we want to Target so we have all these people embedding code on their sites pointing back to us for keywords we want to Target so we would have like a little string at the bottom that said I made this music player or whatever term we wanted at mixpod.com and uh we just got all these link backs and I just kind of waited them by importance and we ended

up being like for music player number one like all these different terms that we wanted to Target back then just by doing some simple research on popularity um and that strategy really like rocket us to the top of Google search results back then it's obviously much more complex now but back then it was fairly easy to do as long as you had a lot a lot of people linking to you

correct and when people embedded it was it all primarily in Myspace whether they have the option of putting on their own

blogs as well anywhere so we had Specific Instructions for pretty much every social network Friendster was around back then like I think there was another one called like high five or something there was there was a lot of social networks back then it was kind of like the Golden Age of social networks pre-facebook so anyone that we saw kind of gaining traction we had like a little tab when you could get the code and you could go to your specific social network and get Specific Instructions because sometimes the code had to be altered to work on their platform um and then obviously as the social networks um kind of grew up they also had their own ways of integrating widgets like when Facebook came along

they had a developer platform so we had a we actually had a Facebook app so from within Facebook they had a very strict way to do things they had they allowed flash but you had to have a picture to click it to actually start it so it by default it didn't play or anything like that but so um yeah so we had specific uh based on ordered by popularity when you would get the code instructions and then as those social networks kind of grew and we just kind of targeted specific ones like Facebook Myspace and actually built apps on their platform to handle it yeah that's interesting to see on multiple fronts mostly because again it's only two people doing all these things you and your friend and the the variety of

tasks to describe requires a certain

level of both recognizing there's a problem and also identifies an opportunity here in this case SEO and being able to implement that as well well what was it that made you to actually be able to Branch out Beyond any small verticals of like design or development to understand all this like were you reading it were you reading about these things were you following other people who are doing siled operations in these areas and you went you know that thing they spent all this time on a subset of that could absolutely help us out in this particular area so I'm curious to hear about your thought process

yeah um I think honestly like we just um did a little research we we just wanted to like see how far we could take this thing right so like it's it's a very rare opportunity to have something grow that's fast this big we just wanted to see how we could maximize everything so we definitely did a lot of research a lot of Googling um but there was not there was there's no like concrete manual to success right so you just kind of have to play around with things there was other sites doing like you know I told you rock you and um I forgot what the other one was but they were doing popular um photo viewers we so we looked at them a lot too because they obviously had way

more resources than us and they were huge so we looked at kind of how they were handling things got inspiration from there also just kind of just like I said winged things whatever felt right I don't think anyone was doing back then like the sign ups in the flash widget so um just um a little bit of research a little bit of just trusting your gut and just you know finding the the best path forward

nice when you mention for example what are some things you tried that didn't fully work out

um yeah good question um the video the photo viewers those um they were semi-successful but they were not nothing like the customizable music players um we also had like random widgets um which could just like like a clock a flash clock that people wanted to put like we experimented with just like these because like all these like little one-off widgets that people wanted like a clock on their website or like just like a scrolling text or something like that like um we were like what if we took all those like silly little things people want on their site and just also applied our uh customization to that so um some of those like they were semi-successful but um we experimented with a lot of things just like taking

any boring concept and making it customizable and making it you um I'm not everything was successful but um that was kind of our process and thought thought process behind all that

that is interesting because it seemed like you're experimenting to see what is it that made your product sticky was it the actual audio player itself or was it the ability to customize whatever it is we're creating so it's a customization part of it but I think it seems like it was a little bit of both but mostly the audio player was the the big one and then the customization made it you know you more successful than the other audio players that were inexistent at the time

yep yeah there was there was definitely a lot of big players in this space and this was definitely before like Spotify and stuff like that but um sort of the biggest ones that were catching fire just had a single boring player and again that's that's what we set out to change when we we started because my space had the one boring player which had the music you wanted but um You Can't customize it it just is like it looks like everyone else's so I definitely think customization was a huge huge thing for us so that was

definitely a big lesson yeah so going back to almost the beginning again it was really because you were an active user of Myspace and you like to share music or listen to music and Discover it through their UI and you found that the music player is boring so even your friend decided we're going to change that so it's really a problem that you had that you then ended up scaling to others who obviously would have the same problem as well yeah I think that's a great approach to discovering especially early on in your career when you're younger and you have the bandwidth is like you know solve a problem for yourself and then see if other people have that same problem as well yeah and I think that also gave you the

extra motivation to go through like figuring out what works what doesn't work experimenting and try things out because it wasn't purely a I'm solving a problem for some abstract version of a Persona or whatever the term you're using to describe your audience it's really a problem that you're personally having and that also interesting explains what choices made around having a login format a question really was like would I enjoy using a feature like this and if I wouldn't enjoy it it's very likely my audience would enjoy it as well so I'm going to do something that makes sense for me and then a product scale out a very dangerous approach but also one that really works if you are actually the right target audience for the ultimate user as well

which in this case you very well were

yeah I think also my lack of experience really helped me because I hadn't at that time I was um I think I was just finishing high school and starting College when I started this crazy thing and uh I hadn't worked for like a big company and um you know the web was still fairly young back then there weren't like huge uh a lot of huge sites but like I feel like if I was if I waited till later in my career I probably would have done things a little differently just because like you said it's the standard it's the way we kind of think things should happen so um I think just being naive and not knowing how things work and just you know just thinking from the ground up

like what's the best user experience here was a really good learning early on in my career and I try to always remind myself that when I'm building things like what's best for the user what what would just like you know forget the rules just do what's best here um and it served me well yep it's difficult but if you could pull it off even today that's probably the best way to still do things you know I was like to joke around that whenever

people talk about new technology for a brief millisecond my brain goes all the way back to like dial-up modems and all these things before it gets the present again so a part of my bandwidth has already been wasted on thinking about what was tried and what was done in the past February now have limited capacity think about what the future can be done what where the open roads we can take here and that's I think uh similar to your case where someone more who's done this stuff more formally in the past would have been like yeah all these approaches we've tried it didn't work context matters of course but your brain doesn't always process that you always jumps to the solution very quickly and by that time you know if you have

limited fuel to get your destination you've already wasted half of it going through things that don't work and you only have half left to go there whereas the the magical moments of fig nut housing does work goes just a little bit beyond it which the the inexperience greatly helps

yeah um another similar vein which we could probably talk about for hours here too is growing something that big was dealing with like abuse and spam I know you've had a challenge with that as well and I'm dealing in your forms and stuff like that so um early on like I installed I think it was a b bulletin or something like that but as you know like those those like get exploited non-stop you're constantly having to update those um they get just constant spam that you're having to go moderate and stuff like that so we installed that and it was just like nightmare I was like man this is just I don't even want it this isn't fun because it's just like automatic signups it's getting exploited

um you have to like put it on a separate server because so you don't like exploit your main database and stuff like that so I just deleted that and I was like well I really enjoy this programming thing why don't I just build my own custom Forum so it didn't it wasn't as feature Rich but um I built my own custom one and that eliminated a majority of the spam um and then I was able to also control like okay well no thing things like have you made a player yet have you filled out your profile things like that to enable you to actually be active on the Forum so um I had like little small things that you had to accomplish before you could

actually be active on the Forum and um again um just you know my curiosity and learning and you know like I can build a forum let's try um just you know iterating on that little by little it helped me combat spam all these things so um like we talked about reaching for kind of the standard which is installing one of these um pre-made Solutions actually worked was not a good solution so I just wanted to do something custom and then it was much easier to manage to help me with the spam and stuff like

that I'm curious to know there were we bulletin was pretty extensible same with like phpb and others why you decide to build your own as opposed to just extending the bulletin to just closing some of these gaps that you identified

I just thought it would be fun like I love building stuff that's why I set out to do this um more control more customization easier to manage I didn't have to like dive into the internals of whatever they were doing I was just like I can do this um uh I just kind of you know naively thought I could do it better um and uh just curiosity really just just wanted to see if I could do it um and just further Advance my learning so I mean that's why I set out to do this was just to learn so just took that under my wing and made it happen

no that's actually really impressive because I would say I tried and I failed at trying to build my own Forum because I was not a back-end person as much as I wanted to do as always front-end client side my skills with PHP were not deep enough was your Forum PHP MySQL based or

do you do something different yeah it was um just purely that and I just stubbornly pushed through all that and made a lot of mistakes um like I said it wasn't feature Rich like it was missing a lot of things um but I just kept kept at it you know I just wanted something really basic I stopped I stripped like all HTML out of the post and like I didn't do any formatting at first and then I slowly added that as I figured out how I can do that um you know there was definitely some packages that helped with those kind of things so I just kind of took little tasks on like when I had the bandwidth to do it and just kept improving you know you know I did this

for six years so I it was just slowly and just you know iterated on that until it was good so the interesting part is that you were doing all this while you were also working on your music player and all these activities what was your dated like was it a case where most of the things were an autopilot on things on fire everything was just on or fine so you had the bandwidth to explore and do all these things in parallel yeah uh it kind of varied day-to-day if there was a lot of fires to put out like obviously um me and it was just me and my partner she was more of a graphic designer she knew like a little bit of like CSS and stuff like that but I had

to figure out everything else and in between so I was always on call as something was you know the server was on fire um so if I wasn't putting out fires I was like what can I build today how can I make this better um and then there was definitely like some weeks where things were running smoothly and I just wasn't feeling creative so I just took some time off um I think that's important too to kind of get a break from things so you feel fresh and motivated so just kind of took it day by day didn't have any strict agendas um just uh always just passionate about learning and getting better

how do you find out what things were on fired could you have some kind of a service set up to notify you when things are broken or was it mostly just someone emailing you going Bill things are not

working a little bit of both um so we uh after as I told you we got kicked off GoDaddy we finally like found a home at a company called softlayer um I don't even know if they're still around now but um they had monitoring emails so we also uh per Kona the company that told you that helped me optimize my database they helped me set up some sort of alarms when like loads on the servers got a certain size so uh I still have actively the Gmail that I use it has I think I almost filled up the inbox with alerts because it just I could go back and look at it now but it's just like I would get flooded with emails when things were going wrong so I

just had to kind of like go through those figure out what was happening can I fix this myself do I need to hire somebody to help me like things like that but um and then on the other side obviously if I made a change uh to the site and there was something wrong I would just get a flood of like Angry emails from people so um a little bit of both I spent a lot of time just like in email didn't didn't really do too much support um I have replied to people that were genuinely having a problem and stuff like that but it was so overwhelming for just us two on support because we would get thousands of emails a day of like feature requests angry

um you know people telling us about various random things spam everything so we just kind of had to just do our best uh going through our Gmail then to get to figure out what we should focus on

your part was fairly successful in why did you not expand Beyond it you know so you could off Outsource or offload the work on support and emails and so on to someone else you know what was your thought process behind leaving it with just to both of you to handle the bulk

of it yeah that's a good question um I think it just was like we wanted to do something right like I know a lot of people like successfully like you know get this running hire some people to do it you know move on but we just enjoyed doing it we like doing it um we were just kind of play games and just work on that site and it was easy um challenging definitely um some days it was headaches but for the most part it was fun like it was kind of like my playground um kind of like your Kirupa your your site that you have it's just something fun to go on every day and just Tinker around with and knowing that like I can

make a small change in like millions of people can potentially see it and give me feedback on so um yeah that's kind of it

and at this point we're still also juggling college and mixed blood the same time or were you working full time on on mixpod yeah so I'm actually one of

those people that dropped out of school because I was so so as you know in school um in my college I was learning I was getting a computer science degree and uh they're so far behind on technology like they they were teaching uh just like you know very basic HTML things that were not helping me I was showing up to class like I was helping my teachers in a lot of cases like learn things um so I took what I was doing and I think we got our first million users and I showed my teacher and she was like what are you doing in school I was like I don't know it felt like the right thing to do so I just like thought long

and hard about that and obviously like you know your parents don't want you to go down that route they think you're just playing around but um it just kind of got in the way and we were growing so fast that I just decided that was the best decision for me it's not the best for everybody but um I just made the leap and jumped into it and I never looked back you know here we are like 20 some years later I'm still doing well um learning every day so

that is great to hear because you fall down a defined path of like a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates here so it's not completely unheard of but I agree though like just thinking back at that time it's I think it's more accepted now as I feel like it's more accepted now to kind of take that leap and do this you see like all these various opportunities where formally you get to sign up to an incubator or a program where they encourage you in some ways to drop out and undo these kind of activities so it's quite the leap though to do it back then so that's a great form of risk taking that has paid off really well for you

yeah we actually did Branch out a little bit with some other products I had some uh success with a site called tube shop which uh was uh there's a little flash interface you could load up any YouTube video and clip um an interesting part out of it you know they have that now that feature and I think tube child was definitely like an inspiration for them because it was so wildly successful we advertised it a little bit on our site but um it's just a simple site you could put in a YouTube url load it up I made a custom trimming interface on uh in Flash you could Target the part you want to trim to share with somebody because back then you couldn't do that they didn't

even have like that little you query program where you could start it at a certain time um this was in the earlier days and it was wildly popular with teachers the teaching environment because they wanted to share things in the classroom that they found on YouTube videos so it made a little thanks to flash I um I didn't actually have to trim the video at all I just loaded it up seat to the start time and then stopped it using just like a little timer at the end time on their clip so the player had the illusion of the start to end it didn't it didn't show the full time I showed like your trim duration and everything like that it was just a little trick and

Flash to make it look like it was trimmed didn't alter the video didn't do anything against their terms of service loaded up the full video seek to the part you want and stop it at the part you want to stop and you could also add a little um little comment on why you trimmed that if you're sharing it with somebody and stuff like that so and then we hosted a little page for you to share that also showed a little like CSS a little bar in the clip view trimmed like so you could see in the grand scheme of things which which parts were clipped and then you could also see the full video there was a link to it so we definitely experimented with a lot

of things

that's really I was about to ask exactly how he stored the video so it was almost a case where this still the original video is still on YouTube The Flash Player took the video Source from YouTube itself and just gave the visual treatment that gave you just a trimmed content part of it yep that is actually really cool and I I can go deeper into asking how you came up with the idea and so on but I make it to that in a little bit but I do want to talk about getting back to mixpot a bit again you talked about you had all these social networks that you've provided Integrations for and also had a Facebook app as well and of course today we know

that for the most part Facebook is the app that replaced all the apps you've listed in terms of a page we can connect with other people and so what happened next when my space started going to go down in popularity and Friends turn Orchid and all these things so how did

you manage the transition yeah there was a lot of things going on back then obviously Steve Jobs famously killed flash as you know um like uh just kind of you know made it irrelevant um I kind of fought that for a little bit as we discussed um because there was this looming thing I had to learn called Objective C which was really foreign to me really difficult very verbose language to learn um didn't know C either um started kind of like tinkering around that because I new like I needed to get this iPhone app done um so I ended up hiring an agency to do that um and uh got version one and there was really successful because I could advertise it on my site I think we were

like top 20 in the music category or something like that um and then I found out very quickly that I didn't know much about like contracts or anything like that the agency I hired did not give me the code to what I paid for they just delivered the app so like I couldn't make any changes me being a programmer I was like oh this is annoying and I didn't want to pursue like legal action and I also didn't get that in writing or anything like that that they owed me that so I just stubbornly was like okay I'm Gonna Learn Objective C I knew this was like kind of where we needed to take our business because Flash was dying so stubbornly I just you know started quit

started quit as I'm continuing building out the site um and uh eventually I got it got enough to get like a version one replace the one I paid for that I hired somebody to do um and just stubbornly push through that and then as you mentioned kind of Facebook took over out of the blue excuse me um we transitioned there by actually building out an app um within the Facebook platform so I had to learn the ins and outs of there they early on especially they always change their platform it was very frustrating because we constantly like it felt like a whole new business I had to run because they're always changing the rules they're always changing like their platform you know it's new it's

growing um expected but I remember it being like a big hassle because they had a lot of restrictions um it just wasn't the same Facebook was like their profiles are very boring very corporate which people liked for a long time because you could discover your friends but they were very like just you know the blue and white interface like um you could put this little widget on there that was customized but it wasn't the same Vibe as Myspace so um things like you know we had like this initial curve when we transitioned to Facebook as being the primary source but um ultimately like it we had like this jump for Facebook and then it just started slowly declining and then Facebook got rid of flash everyone

everywhere got rid of Flash and um yeah so just like that was kind of the initial Descent of the business when

flash was dying was it the theme of answer this right now by what you just said was it the death of flash that made it difficult to continue mixed spot or was it that people's preferences that changed where if you built a great HTML to this javascript-based player on Facebook it just wasn't getting that much traction

um yeah I think flash was definitely a big portion because it stopping is fun for me too because I really enjoyed the way like you could build things and Flash and customize them and um if you know JavaScript definitely had a lot of the abilities of flash have but I feel like we definitely one flashlight we took a step back right like it was very basic things in JavaScript um it wasn't as fun there wasn't like animation tweens or like it just it just felt like we like took a step back for a little bit things now are great but back then it just wasn't as fun for me too so that was kind of like a big decision when we ended up shutting down the

business was like all right am I having fun doing this um so we just kind of collectively decided at some point um just to shove down and uh we both had other career things popping up too so

that sounds very reasonable because you didn't build a company formally where you had like a large team of people to support and all that it you know it started off you had a problem you wanted to solve it and you are having fun hacking away at these things and that was no longer there it's your primary motivation for what kept you doing this for six years went went away and so let's talk about the the shutting down the service then like that's a complicated thing in how you pull all the logistics of it off did you have a formal moment where you said we're no longer going to be in operation or just that it just gradually go into just

declining with less people using it yeah so we both kind of my partner and I just uh started pursuing like other career opportunities and then kind of put it into like a maintenance mode for a bit um and then uh there was also some other challenges so we grew so big I think we were like a top 10 API partner for YouTube um and then YouTube Built out this thing where uh music labels can manage their content on YouTube and we actually started getting blocked because we were so successful um could never find out a reason like uh from them we actually got um I remember I got interviewed by Google they were like kind of like curious about my site and they had I think it was like an

intern to like just I think they were building Google wave at the time so I think they were very interested in social sites um I interviewed with them they asked me a bunch of questions about how my site works and stuff like that and then shortly after like we started getting blocked on YouTube so I don't know like there was any correlation to that but um and and you could certainly just change the um the Flash Players URL and get unblocked but I didn't want to play a game of cat and mouse and we tried to contact the labels it just you can't get through to them so um a lot of those decisions made it easier then when those things started popping up um I think it was just like you know we

were on their radar we were so big and they didn't like that they weren't in control of it so um you know to this day it's still kind of a mystery but um thankfully we each had sort of our own career things kind of flourishing at the time too so um and then it just boils back down to is this fun is this you know like stuff like that so we just collectively I think um I think we gave a little bit of notice there wasn't much but then we just shut it down and put a note on the site saying uh the reasoning uh and then just for like transparent about it and then uh that was it what was the user reception like

uh we I think we put up like uh follow us on Facebook and Twitter thing if you wanted to talk about it so we got like anything from like people asking uh about exporting their content and stuff like that so I built like a quick little tool so anyone to ask I would export um kind of all their data for them I didn't have like a self-serve thing um it was just uh it wasn't like actually believe it or not a ton of people that asked for the data so we just kind of took it on a case-by-case basis but I definitely wanted to honor the people that you know spent so much time on my site I had just kind of like a little internal tool and I kept like

one instance of the database running that I could export it for them so and I think it was in like XML format so it wasn't like I'm sure they didn't know what to do with it either but I gave them the data so I was trying to just do

right by the users yeah I was curious to know what exactly was going to be exported because I wasn't sure we're going to be explaining the actual audio files themselves or was going to be just their preferences of like their playlists or whatever they liked or made

their own essentially yeah so we we didn't actually host any of the files um we allowed you to use like the YouTube API we allowed you to input your own URLs to media and stuff like that so we never hosted anything so I just exported the URLs so like imagine you made like 20 playlists on our site um you wouldn't want to have to go remember where all those URLs were like or like you know you might know them but putting them together in those organized playlists I thought that would still be valuable for people and like I said like we didn't get thousands of people asking for that when we shut down but there was a handful of people that were like oh crap

I want that data I spent years organizing my perfect playlist so um that's why we exported XML so if those people wanted to um to have that data you could also customize so even if you use made a video playlist um another cool feature we had was you could override the titles because like sometimes the titles are really weird and like um SEO you know people would do on YouTube and stuff like that so you could override those make those look nice and pretty in the player too so all that work you put in I just wanted to make some sort of way for people to get that data out of it

that's actually really really nice that you did that there's also before like gdpr and other like formal requests that you'd have had to do to even if like you mentioned only 10 people out of the 25 million would have ever asked for it the legal requirements to provide that would have been one of those things that would have slowed you down today yep on that so now that you're you're now with mixed pod and you you decide to end it how do you feel about all that because you spent six years of your life doing spending time on this and you've ridden the the highs of it all the way to the top what was going through your brain where you're like okay I'm done

with this

yeah um um I think like I just you know it's definitely a it was a Bittersweet moment because it was a it was a fun thing to do it was you know I for the longest time I was like man I'm always going to be chasing this success like how do I ever achieve that again moment uh but also like I realized very quickly that um that was like invaluable education those six years right so like um as we chatted before like I I was trying to figure out what was next for me after mixpod and um uh I ended up doing uh in the very early days when these coding boot camps came along I did one in Seattle I was living at Florida

at the time I just fully immersed myself um it was called code fellows um which was part of techstars back then and uh they were teaching Ruby on Rails and I'm coming from flash PHP I was like let me just learn something that I have known nothing about I wanted to be like you know the biggest idiot in the room the most I knew nothing at all about Ruby I was just like let me just go do this for a month um I was fortunate enough to be able to afford to go out there and just live there for a month immerse myself in it um and I found out really quickly that like all those years of just grinding through problem after problem not

knowing like you know a lot of times it wasn't good Google resources I don't even think stack Overflow was available early in the days then either so um I had to dig in Forum to find out things ask questions just you know just you know keep trying until it worked was kind of like my Approach so I found out then that like for me like things came easy because like I've been through fires so like just like even though I didn't know these programming languages it was very easy for me to pick up because it's just like my natural um muscle memory was to just figure it out you know like yeah there was no other option I had to just figure it out so I took to the to Ruby on Rouse

um very easily I love the way it was set up and then I found there was this framework called laravel which is the PHP version using the same exact Concepts and then I was like whoa like they even have built-in queue support I already know PHP this is comfortable um it's it's uh you know Taylor who made that framework one of his kind of mantras is developer happiness and just I felt so productive in there and I found a home from there and then obviously I continued my iOS development too so um I took a job as an iOS Developer an agency out here in Los Angeles did some cool apps and stuff for agencies uh big companies like Red Bull and stuff like that

fox ADHD which is like this really cool animation show that they had I like learned all about gifts and putting together iOS apps and I found that um when I was at this agency I actually had a lot more knowledge than I thought I did because I never formally worked at a company and I I kind of positioned myself as more of a junior developer I I didn't like I'm I'm I always assumed I didn't know as much as formally trained people but when I actually got on the job like you know I actually knew a lot and you know I quickly got pushed into the lead there um you know so um yeah so definitely I looked at looking back it was invaluable experience it sucks that like I couldn't

take it all the way to a sustainable business to today but I learned so much and it was um I loved that experience it made me who I am today no that's great to hear because many people when they get to that moment they they're too paths there one is the more

productive path that you took which is I'm going to relearn see what I know what I don't know and get back into it and others try to just kind of follow the Wayside like and I'm gonna try other things that are in the same vein without recognizing the context and reality of where you are right now so that's actually really cool and that you learned Ruby unrails and so on Echoes so much what we often hear about programming languages is that once you learn one really well and then you learn the ins and outs of like how to detect a problem how to have the general idea of like first recognizing that you have a problem and then knowing how to search the right put the right keywords

together in Google or in your Forum to figure out what it needs to be that makes outside of syntax changes everything else be very simple and I think the other part I think you really learned is around just people how do you build products how do you scale how do you deal with partners and clients and you know even if it was going to be like a consulting company like you know they wanted broker database for example those real skills that you don't learn in college by any means and when you look at people who join in junior positions at these industries so many Studies have shown that it takes several years for someone to unlearn what they learn in college to be productive in the real

world as part of building it you completely bypass all of that and then some by having built something in the open though it's very popular so you learned about the technical side of things the business side as well as just the how to keep a pretty much a very steady head on you as part of realizing case of fire let's figure out how to solve it and let's make progress as opposed to basically becoming a you know a source of Chaos

yeah another thing I really took pride in was was uh figuring out bugs like I actually really enjoy when there's like some like unknown thing that like especially when in the mix pod days when like it affected millions of people like I'd get a weird report but I really love like I found out about myself that I love diving into and like figuring out just pinpointing where that is and how to remedy it like it to this day I love it um and it's definitely a great skill to have to kind of like take in information and pinpoint to where like that comes because it's often not where you expect it to be right as you know um so um that that was another skill

that I didn't even know that I was developing on all those years but it's called me so much in my career today and especially now as a CTO like it's it's super helpful because I can just almost just from listening to my my team talk I can sometimes just figure out where it is just because I'm from my experience

exactly the key word really here is experience you know if I like summarize like the multiple ways we can categorize how what you and I just talked about right now a big part of it is that you've been there and done that which is the core part of what experience is as opposed to academically learning about something and you're pretty much a case study here on how being there and doing some of these things and being right in the middle of it gives you an edge in terms of being able to recognize what an outcome might be even if you're no longer directly involved in having to do the implementation itself which is really fascinating and a great spot to be in

yeah it helps me not overthink things too because like developers I've noticed too as I hire more people get caught up in like what's the perfect way to do this I'm like well you know there isn't a perfect way there's many ways to do it and it's going to change over time so we just got to come up with the best solution for now and just kind of revisit that um in the future so um I I don't definitely like that's helped a lot too so like uh early on like I'd have people come to me and say like well you have all this experience what should I do I'm like well what do you think you should do and just kind of let them you know mull it over and get

through it and come up with a solution and sometimes even if I know it's not like really the wrong path it's a little bit of the wrong path I'll let them do that just to learn too so um yeah it's a experience yeah that's the biggest thing um that I'm thankful for in this whole journey

that was a fantastic summary I didn't start a conversation here and this is great I learned a lot about all of this and even though I've known about the work you've done it's just great to hear directly from you on some of the ins and outs of it which are often lost in both history and in details that no one really you know dives into anymore so thanks again for coming on and there are a lot more things that I know you've done that I think at some point in the future we want to touch upon

absolutely thanks so much for having me and I'm I'm so glad to see that your your site is still thriving I've learned so much from you from your site and I just can't thank you enough because I I really do feel like I can pinpoint in time like just that era of Kirupa and like just all the the tutorials I wrote my first tutorial on your site so um I just want to make sure to give you

your props um thank you um uh you are appreciated it's all teamwork there's a group of people who've made it work you're a big part of it I think about Community is that every person who contributed to that played a big role in its overall success so you I just get the credit as well