He blogs at brucelawson.co.uk. He once kissed a girl and he liked it (the taste of her cherry chapstick).

Note: Please excuse the poor video quality! The audio is consistent throughout.

Whilst he’s not writing articles or running and speaking at conferences, he runs his own development and training company in Brighton called Left Logic. Generally speaking, he’s about as crazy about JavaScript, HTML & CSS as a squirrel is about his nuts during the winter!

Momento App

Oliver Waters is the co-creator and designer of Momento, the hugely popular iPhone app that collates and organises all your social feeds in a single place as well as allowing you to make diary entries of those little moments in life you want to remember. This week I talk to Oliver about his career and experiences of turning an app, originally started as a side-project into a fully fledged business.

FreeAgent

Roan Lavery is the Lead Designer and co-founder of FreeAgent, the best online accounting software out there (note: I do use the software so I am bias but it is pretty damn good). In this interview Roan takes me through how he made the transition from Creative Director for a web agency in Edinburgh to running FreeAgent as a full-time business. If you’re building or run a web app yourself you’re going to really enjoy this interview.

And if you fancy trying out FreeAgent you can use me as a referrer: Referreral Link

3rd Edition

Ethan Marcotte is an Interactive Design Director at Happy Cog. He’s a contributing author to Handcrafted CSS, Web Standards Creativity and Professional CSS and has recently collaborated with Jeffery Zeldman on the third additional of his classic Designing with Web Standards. Ethan has also been a featured speaker at SXSW Interactive festival, An Event Apart, Harvard University and AIGA’s In Control conference. Check out his blog at unstoppablerobotninja.com and find him on twitter under @beep.

The Whuffie Factor

Tara Hunt is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, karaoke lover and one of the most influential women in technology (according to Fast Company Magazine in 2009). In this weeks episode Tara talks to me about how she got started and her career to date, her love for karaoke, writing her book The Whuffie Factor, her experiences with public speaking and what she’s most excited about. You can find Tara on her personal site HorsePigCow.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Tara: Well, I like to say author, speaker, karaoke lover.

Ryan: I saw your tweets about karaoke when we were in South By South-West, I saw that you were in the Sixth Lounge.

Tara: All about the karaoke at South By South-West for sure, yeah.

Ryan: Cool. So what’s an average week like for you? Is there an average week?

Tara: Average week… Well it depends on the week, so yeah there is not really an average. Quite often I am on the road, traveling, so a lot of the average week is spent in airports and hotel rooms. My favourite weeks are at home, quite often working on my startup with my cofounders. A lot of business stuff right now, like documents and getting those ready and presentations and looking over different open source code repositories to see if there is anything we can get out of there and web architectural documents, wire framing, that sort of thing. I try and spend a lot of time reading as well, but I am particularly in love with my lifestyle because there is not really a set routine and perhaps, for me – because I am easily distractible, a set routine would be a good thing, but I can never really stick to it.

So, I wake up when I want to and I have an average thing that I do every day which is to take my dog for a walk for an hour in the park, to get my head in the right space, and then get back home and turn on my computer. Usually there is a lot of email, I haven’t really found a good alternative to email, but that seems to be where all my business opportunities are, my potential speaking engagements, it sets the stage for things I need to get done and articles I need to participate in, send in quotes for or write myself. Sometimes I get inspired to write a blog post from certain interactions in the morning.

It’s very all over the place. A lot of fussing around, checking out what sort of links people are posting and the news of the day on Twitter, like where peoples heads are at, what the latest meme to follow and figure out is. I just discovered the other day through something somebody posted on Facebook that there’s this thing, oh… what is it called? I just forgot the name of it, “scraps”, I think, no it’s “shreds”. Have you seen shreds?

Ryan: No?

Tara: So shreds are basically where you take a music video, it was started by some guy in Finland who goes by St. Sanders, he takes his guitar and he records over his interpretation of what the guitar and the vocals and whatever else, like the clapping, would sound like.

Ryan: Right?

Tara: It’s pretty hilarious. I went through all these different shreds videos and figured out, I think it was on Jimmy Kimble Live, that it was this big meme, it’s not new news, it’s quite old news. But these are interesting things to me because I like to say that if there was any job title that I was allowed to give myself it would be, like, “Curious”, I guess. I’m really curious about human beings and our behaviour in web culture, our participation and why something like shreds has been picked up by such a wide audience of people to participate in, to create themselves and then pass around. A lot of these videos have well over half a million views and hundreds and hundreds of comments on them as well as video responses to them. It’s interesting to me that it’s really a silly thing, definitely fun to watch, and that it would create a whole community around shredding, as such.

I’ve always been a karaoke lover for my own reasons, but as soon as it occurred to me that it was a huge phenomenon in our social geek community and something that a lot of us have in common, this love of karaoke, and if you’re with an average group of people where somebody says “Oh, let’s go do karaoke” then most of the people in the group are like “No, way. I’m not going to subject myself to that.” But if you’re in a group of social geeks and everybody is like “Yeahhh! Let’s go, I know ten places that I love to frequent.”

So this was such a major phenomenon in our group and I really think that it is the participatory nature of karaoke and shredding, where you get to take a video and interpret it yourself so that you are participating in it, and like anything that allows the audience to talk back in that way, or for the audience to become the artist themselves, is something that’s taken up with great gusto in our community.

Which I just find fascinating and I’m finding more and more examples of this and fascinated by it and wondering how this is going to transform general culture. Like, how is this going to transform the World and what is business going to look like ten years down the road? What is our urban planning going to look like ten years down the road? All the ways that people are finding to participate rather than idly stand by and watch others perform and just be a passive audience is what is interesting to me.

Ryan: Okay. So you mention that you’re now working on a startup, do you want to tell me a little bit about this startup?

Tara: Yeah. It’s sort of along the same threads, but once again it is putting the, formally known as passive, audience into the drivers seat. So I’m looking at something that’s near and dear to my heart which is shopping, online shopping, and putting the customer into the drivers seat.

So we all know that word of mouth is the strongest form of “marketing”, whether or not you can call it marketing or just the way we interact with one another, and we see evidence of this all the time. Somebody will post to Facebook or Twitter that they are buying a new digital camera for themselves, that they’ve kind of seen somebody with a Canon and seen somebody with a Fuji or a Nikon and I like all those three cameras but can people give feedback, which you’ll see in the comments or @ replies on Twitter that there are numerous “Oh, I have a Canon, I love it, it’s a really hearty camera which takes beautiful pictures. Here, take a look at my Flickr stream and you’ll get a good idea of the kind of pictures it takes in low light, in nature, etc.” Then everybody will do that with the camera of their choice or maybe with a camera that they’ve been looking at themselves, admiring and thinking about buying. Then at the end the person get’s to make a decision based on real people and real people’s feedback, not like if they’ve gone to a Canon or Fuji or Nikon representative, they’ve actually talked to their friends who have used the devices and been told how they are enjoying them.

So we see this all the time, that we’re influencing each other and we’re asking one another for opinions on shopping. So there’s a lot of recommendation engines out there and stuff, but they aren’t really vendor focused. If you go to Amazon there are recommendations based on what you buy and what your friends buy, that sort of thing. You go to, even something like, Style Feeder you get the same thing, you go to Kaboodle and even the social shopping sites and a lot of it is driven off the vendor participation.

We’re looking at it purely from the customer’s point of view. If you take a look at Blippy for instance, I love Blippy and have been using it, have you seen it?

Ryan: I haven’t no.

Tara: Okay, well it’s kind of freaky and interesting all at once. So with Blippy you put in your Amazon and iTunes account information, some people put in their credit card information, and it records, basically by pulling from the feed of transactions, everything that you buy. Then it shares it and your friends can comment on your purchases and be like “Hey, man. How did you like that movie that you watched?” I think I rented Good Hair, the documentary, on iTunes and a whole bunch of people jumped on and were like “Oh, I haven’t seen that, is it good?” and then I can answer back “Yeah, it’s great, I really enjoyed it.” That’s really interesting to me because it’s really from the point of view of purely what you buy, right. You’re getting a really good live stream of just what you’re buying and what you’re paying attention to with your money.

We’re already thinking about this in terms of like what would happen if you took this step further and you also took a step back with the privacy of it. Blippy is fabulous because you can record everything really easily, you don’t even have to do anything and it records it for you, so we’re thinking about it from a bit of a different perspective, you don’t give us any passwords or anything. But then once you’ve got all your purchase history from all over the place, across wherever you are buying, you are not only able to see what your friends are buying and comment on it, but you can also start to track who you are influencing, how you’re influencing them and what areas you have more influence in that others.

For me, personally, a lot of people don’t think of me as an electronics genius or anything. So I might buy a new remote control, something most my friends would shrug their shoulders and pass that by or maybe my music isn’t their taste, but then anytime I’ve said I’ve purchased something from Sephora, I’m a makeup junky, a lot of my girl friends will ask what my opinion is on certain face creams and certain makeup lines and whether or not I like the powdered foundation versus the liquid foundation and what kind of results I’m getting. I know a lot of them go out and buy different products because I’m using them and enjoy them.

So what happens then, on the next level, is that I can see my path of influence. If you take that data and then leverage it for better deals for perhaps even setting up my own personalised shop so that I can make affiliate money off of it, who knows, there’s all sorts of interesting ideas with that. The customer is totally in charge, there’s no bribing by vendors, it doesn’t matter what it is, it could be the smallest local store all the way up to the big giants like Sephora that you’re buying these products from. We’re going to be trying to include the online/offline shopping experience in it as well.

Ryan: Okay. So is this a service that you provide, or are you analysing other services?

Tara: This is a service where, right now, we’re in the midst of testing and setting up and then hopefully launching within the next six weeks. Just like a really tiny beta version where just tracking is involved to begin with, tracking and sharing.

Ryan: Okay, cool. Is there a URL that anyone can go to to get more information or…?

Tara: Yeah, sure. Shwowp, so “wow” and “shopping”.

Ryan: Okay, cool. So, that’s what you’re doing now. This series is called “Please Start From The Beginning” so I want you to rewind a little bit and just tell me how you got started.

Tara: How I got started… Quite, actually well I don’t know if it was, accidentally. But back in 1992, when I was pregnant with my son, I was really lost because I was about to be a young mother and somebody had pointed me towards Usenet groups and so I got a really slow internet web account to attach me to the internet and all of a sudden I was asking questions and chatting with these groups. Then I went to university, and because I was already sort of getting into it and understanding it a little bit more and more savvy, while I was in university I’d be talking to people and they’d be like “Oh, so our club here at the university should have a website but we don’t have money and we don’t know where to start.” So I started to build webpages for some clubs and for myself and for friends and then the next thing I knew, when I graduated, my first job was doing corporate communications with an oil and gas company. They didn’t hire me because I was particularly savvy in oil and gas, they hired me because they needed somebody who understood the web and where the web was going.

I thought this was quite temporary and I wanted to get into more traditional marketing and every job that I continued to get along the way was all web related because, it was like 1999/2000/2001, the bubble was just bursting, but people were really interested and not very many people, especially where I was in Calgary, Alberta, knew what they were doing on that end. So I had taught myself Flash development and Director (I was certified in Director, and yeah, it’s obsolete now), HTML, XHTML and stuff like that, a little JavaScript and stuff. I was able to understand the web stuff and so my job was Communications/Web Girl. I had no idea what was happening outside of Calgary really at the time, I was actually focused on getting out of the web because I was feeling like I was just being put into this little tiny slice. I, myself, knew that it was going to be really big but I had no idea what was in store for this wonderful World Wide Web world that I was in. So, slowly but surely, my piece of the pie started growing over the years and the more I resisted the more I was pulled into it.

Every job I had, in my post secondary adult life, was web related so the online marketing stuff just came out of that and the next thing I knew I was blogging, then there were a bunch of other jobs in between and running my own company, then being drafted down to start work for a startup in Silicon Valley, in 2005.

People were talking about it, but very few people were really just doing a purely online marketing platform, like an online community marketing platform, and that’s what I did with the startup, it was riya.com and they did facial recognition in photos. We launched within six months to a million photos uploaded, from over twenty-thousand people within twenty-four hours of launching, and it was this huge thing where people were like “Whoa, that works! So, lots of people were talking about it and she just made it happen.” Then I started getting invited to conferences and to speak about what I just did and I had no idea what I just did other than I was given a budget of zero dollars and told “Go work your webby magic.” It just evolved from there.

So now five years later I have a book and it’s all so trippy, I just really literally just stumbled my way through it. I always had this pure notion that I wanted to change the World in the way that I wanted to invert hierarchies, especially getting into marketing and feeling like there’s something seriously wrong with marketing and the way that companies view and deal with customers and see them as consumers and numbers and targets and all these awful ways, and I always thought there was something desperately wrong with that. It wasn’t until I got in, and really just gave way, to the web stuff and watched these phenomenons like shredding, these phenomenas like Rick Rolling, these phenomenas like blogging and Tweeting and all these that were happening where people really wanted to talk back and participate and contribute and be part of the experience rather than just be passive recipients. Then I realised what they key was in all of that and got really utopic about it and excited about that this is going to change all of it. We still see a lot of top-down power structures but they’re scared and they’re doing desperate things and they’re failing all over the place. We even see traditionally top-down media and corporations trying to participate and just participating badly in media because they still see this control of it and that they’re the givers and we’re the recipients, kind of. So I think over the next couple of years we’re going to see this huge drastic change and it’s exciting to me.

I know you just asked me a very simple question and I just rambled on!

Ryan: No, no, that’s the best way, that’s the best way. So what would you say you greatest achievement has been, what’s your greatest personal achievement, what are you most proud of?

Tara: Oh.. Ah, I don’t know…

Ryan: I like to throw tough questions in to see what people say!

Tara: Greatest personal achievement… Well other than being able to raise a child, from zero to almost seventeen now, and have them still be alive and have them as a functional member of society (that’s awesome), and boy, that’s the hardest job of them all, no matter what people say, probably finishing writing and finishing a book (that isn’t a plug!). It was an interesting challenge and it felt like a major achievement when I hit that, I think I saw the last line of my book, coming to the end end of it, the last two chapters, it just felt like “What the hell am I doing? I’m writing a book? I’m a web girl!” But to actually get up to that point, and write that last line, felt like a really huge achievement for me. I think it’s not just like one thing, I mean that could be like a certain peak in it, there’s like a thousand little things that lead me to live the lifestyle that I have now.

I just feel like super privileged, and I am, I just don’t feel like that. I am super privileged to be in a position where I can sleep until when I want and I get flown all over the World to speak to audiences who like to listen to me, even when I’m rambling on against corporate values being out of line with human values and things like that which I hold near and dear to my heart, but I know that’s not what they paid me to hear, they wanted easy answers and I’m not giving them. And they keep inviting me back and do that and that’s mind-blowing to me and an incredible privilege.

I think that achievement has come about because of a thousand little things along the way, things that I’ve sacrificed, the ethics that I’ve stuck to, dreams that I’ve held onto, my insane curiosity for knowledge, a whole lot of fussing along the way, lack of sleep along the way, working at jobs where I had no idea of what I was doing and sort of clambering my way through. It’s just a whole series of falling on my face a thousand times, getting back up and persevering, like being told by hundreds of people, some of the same people multiple times, “What the hell are you doing, you’re going down the wrong path.” That sort of thing, and sticking to my guns.

Ryan: So, you speak at a lot of conferences, have you got one that particularly enjoy speaking at?

Tara: Oh, uhm, gosh. I know the ones that I don’t enjoy speaking at! Most of them I do, I think probably a better way to approach it would be to say “the most interesting ones that I’ve spoken at.”

Ryan: Yeah.

Tara: I spoke at one recently, The International Cemetery and Funeral Association Annual Conference. When I was asked to speak at that I was like “Why are you asking me? This makes very little sense.” Then realised, quite quickly, that this was a really amazing opportunity to talk about something that I’m really passionate about, which is this idea that we are creating digital legacies and that it is more democratised and available to more people around the World. I had a professor point this out to me, when at university, that history was created by a couple of single stories and usually those single stories belonged to the wealthy and the privileged and, you can argue today, that there is still a certain amount of privilege involved but its wider and wider.

There are blogs on homelessness from people that are homeless, there are blogs from Iraq in the war zone, there are blogs on aging from people that are dealing with being displaced in our modern world because they’re aging, people who are living in care centres and that sort of thing, there are blogs on cancer survivors, there are blogs from people with all sorts of voices and with all sorts of experiences. The richness of our history, and the story of our history right now, it so immense. So for me to able to talk to this audience about the fact that they’re really in the business of helping us preserve our legacies and helping us discover one another’s humanity, even after we’ve passed away, was really an enjoyable moment in my speaking history. So that was an unusual, but hugely enjoyable, conference to speak at for sure. I like conferences like that which take me out of my usual techie realm and put me in front of an audience that know that the web is changing the World, but they just don’t know it changes their world. It helps me think in a different way.

I’m speaking at The Pacific Builders Association, coming up, and I just started thinking about this, like where do I begin? For me, it’s a process of I learn, I learn a lot, about their business and where they’re at and why it is they are asking this question right now and then tying these threads together with this brilliant culture that I’m so overjoyed to be part of, this participatory social web that we live in. These are the ones that are the most interesting to me.

Ryan: Okay. You also mentioned your book, what’s your book called? What’s your book about?

Tara: My book is called The Whuffie Factor, it’s actually coming out in paperback under a different name in the next month. The different name is The Power of Social Networks because my publisher recognised that the original title appeals to our audience, who already know about this stuff, and we need to appeal to a broader audience. What it’s about is, in a nutshell, social capital in online communities. The word whuffie comes from a book by Corey Doctorow, a book called Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, and it talks about this future where there’s no money anymore and we have this currency called whuffie. We all have a whuffie score and it’s sort of implanted in a chip in our brain and I can ping your whuffie chip and get back a score and if it’s a high score I’ll know that you’re probably trustworthy or a pretty good guy, that you might have a pretty good network, probably have friends in common and that you’ve done notable things. Like creating these Podcasts is a great gift to the community so you’d get whuffie from that.

So when I was reading this, I realised that Corey’s not talking about some kind of science fiction future, he’s actually describing the kind of currency we exchange, right now, on online communities and how appropriate that is. So, you friend me on Facebook and maybe I haven’t met you before and so I’ll check the first thing, the friends in common, you look at how many friends, and who it is that your friends in common are, and then maybe if theres only a couple you’d go and check out the person’s page, maybe you’ll even Google them. What you’re doing at that point is paying somebody’s whuffie, in the same way that you figured out how to interview me for this Podcast is by going through somebody that you trusted in your comments suggesting, and you probably went and Googled me after that point and said well “Let me see what this person is about.” So you’re pinging my whuffie and found out that I had pretty decent whuffie for your Podcast and then contacted me and then after that point I did the same thing for you. I was like “Ah, okay, I’m going to click on his link and I’m going to find out who these different online networks are that you contributed to, who you are and do I want to take the time to sit down and talk with you.” So, we were pinging each others whuffie!

The book explains that, and explains that in the sense of one and one, but also like how we make buying decisions, and then teaches businesses, from individuals, to small, to large, to non-profit, to whatever creative business you’re in, how to raise you’re whuffie online.

Ryan: Okay, cool, that sounds really interesting.

Tara: Yeah.

Ryan: So, right at this minute in time, what are you most excited about?

Tara: Oh… Right at this minute in time I am most excited about the fact that it’s not only me but a lot of people are recognising the gulf, the gap, between human values and business values. It’s something I’ve been talking about for just a little while now and I actually just got back from having lunch at Cirque de Soleil. Do you know that, the organisation?

Ryan: Yeah.

Tara: Yeah, they invited me to have lunch, well (Name) from Cirque invited me to have lunch, and he discovered me through my presentation that I do called Mind The Gap and it’s talking about this gulf. He saw it and it really struck a cord with him because Cirque has been thinking about this and it gave him language to approach this. I’ve received multiple emails from people within big organisations where they are like “Yes! This is what I’ve been trying to explain and I haven’t had the language to explain it, but our company says this and they say we align with human needs and human values but this is the way that we act. There’s a big gulf between that and now I have the language to try and align the business back to our customers needs and values.”

So that’s what I’m really excited about, that thread is being picked up. It is supposed to, was supposed to, be part of my next book but doing the startup now, I don’t know if I’m actually going to be able to write that but I will continue to write about that on my blog and present on that notion.

Ryan: I’m trying to remember your blog URL, it’s horse, cow…

Tara: Horsepigcow.

Ryan: Where does that come from?!

Tara: It comes from my Mum.

Ryan: Oh, okay?

Tara: If she couldn’t remember somebody’s name she’d be like “George, John, horse, pig, cow, Ryan!”

Ryan: Hehehe. That’s funny!

Tara: It seemed like an appropriate name for a blog when I started back in like 2003, or whatever.

Ryan: Yeah, because I remember when I put your name into Google and that came up and I went “That’s a weird URL!”

Tara: Yeah. Well people generally remember it, they don’t always remember the order of the animals, but they remember it.

Ryan: Yeah, like typing in random farm animals like chicken, goats… “No, no it’s not that.”

Tara: I think I actually own a lot of animal combinations and they all point back to Horsepigcow.

Ryan: Cool. So just to wrap up then, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Tara: Erm, where would I like to see myself in the future? Hmm, I don’t know, wherever the wind blows me, right now I’d like to see myself out of the Sun that’s streaming into my living room… There we go. Which is a beautiful thing, by the way, having sunshine in the middle of March. But, yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know. That question to me is one that you’re asked a lot though life and I think that people expect you to know the answer and for it to be very goal orientated, towards that end result, but it’s always served me better to embrace whatever opportunities come my way. It makes me more open to possibilities and things change so fast, especially now with the whole participatory culture there are tons of startups and there are all sorts of people inventing cool things and more and more people are becoming entrepreneurial in spirit and with more and more people people working on solving big problems.

I just think that the World is going to exponentially explode into awesomeness in the next little while and I just want to ride that wave and be part of it and try to contribute to it the best I can whilst also trying to be just a little bit ahead of it as much as I can along the way. So that’s my answer in a round about way.

Ryan: Okay, brilliant. Well thank you very much Tara for taking the time to talk to me, that was really interesting, I really enjoyed that.

Tara: Yeah, thank you Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks a lot!

Thanks goes to Dan Millar and the guys at Decode for transcribing this interview.

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Campaign Monitor

Mathew Patterson is head of the customer support team at Campaign Monitor. Based in Sydney, Australia (so a late night recording for me) he has a background as a web designer, has spoken at a number of conferences including Future of Web Design New York and Web Directions and is awaiting the release of his first book with Sitepoint on HTML Emails (title not yet confirmed). In this weeks episode Mathew talks to me about his career, overcoming his shyness and the challenges of writing.

Interview Transcript

Matthew: Well, I don’t really have one. Campaign Monitor, where I am in the office right now, are not big on job titles so the business card doesn’t have one, but I guess what you’d call me is the kind of the head of the customer support team – that’s about 7 people apart from me: 2 from next week in the office in Sydney, 3 in the States, 1 in Canada, 1 in Norway.

Ryan: OK, so you’re quite spread out then.

Matthew: Yeah, so, we’re a Sydney-based company, but the customers are not Sydney-based. The customers are mostly (probably 60%) in the States, and then probably another 35% or something all around the world, and only just a small amount in Australia so in terms of customer support most of it has to be done outside of our business hours.

Ryan: OK, so for people who don’t know what Campaign Monitor is, do you want to just tell us a potted version about what the service is?

Matthew: Sure can. So, if you’re a web designer, say you’re an agency or a freelancer or whoever you are, you do web design and you have clients who need to send email newsletters, or email notifications or invitations or whatever they want to send. You can use Campaign Monitor as a web application – it’s all hosted on our side and we take care of all the tedious handling of bounces and unsubscribes, and the reporting on the campaigns that you send. You can do all that online, and your clients can log in online and do that themselves as well, and the whole thing’s kind of rebrandable so you can offer it as a service under your own name to your clients. And probably the really cool part is if you want to do it that way, if you want to rebrand it, then you can have your clients pay us transparently, so they don’t know – they just assume it’s you. They can pay a rate above our bases rates, and anything that you charge them above what we charge you we’ll send back to you once a month, so you can make some good cash that way.

Ryan: OK, cool. So, what’s an average week like for you?

Matthew: Well, a lot of my time now that I spend in the office is just looking after the whole support team, so it’s finding out what’s going on this week – have we got any product releases going on this week, changes to the application which are going to cause customers to have new questions. Looking after actual first-level support, which I still do quite a bit of, so that’s just answering questions from customers about “Why does Outlook 2007 not show my background image?” and the answer is because it can’t, because it uses Microsoft Word to render emails, which was a stupid decision – nice work Microsoft. So there’s quite a bit of that, there’s actually quite a lot of work involved with a remote team, in just making sure that everybody knows what’s going on and everyone is still kind of clear on what we need to be doing this week and where are we trying to head as a company. So we spend a lot of time chatting, doing this video chat with the other guys when we can match our time zones up, and using the intranet, kind of sharing information that way. I spend time talking to developers, so working with the developers about “How can we improve the actual application so that we’re not having the same questions over and over?”, “What are the customers asking for?”, because I guess it’s part of my role really, representing the customers within the company, because most of the developers are not web designers, in the modern times they don’t really do any design so they haven’t really used the product as the customer uses the product, which is for their clients, so they need that information to come back from the customers via the support team and via me to them so they know what’s working, what’s not working and they can kind of understand how they should be designing things and developing things.

Ryan: OK, so how long have you been with Campaign Monitor? From the beginning, or did you come in later?

Matthew: For about 3 years. Campaign Monitor itself has been around for about 5 years. When I started, so that’s 3 years ago (well, over 3 years ago) there was just the 2 founders and 1 developer. Now we’re up to 23, 24 people. The guys, they were pretty excited actually, when I came in the first day I started the most exciting thing was that now we have 4 people we can finally play doubles on the table tennis.

Ryan: Brilliant (laughs). They have a fussball table at the barn, at Headscape barn when I go down, so it’s always good to have 4 people playing on that. So rewind a little bit, take me back to the start of your career. How did you get started out, what’s your background?

Matthew: Right, well, I don’t know how far we’re going back here.

Ryan: All the way, start from the beginning.

Matthew: First job, it was 1885 (laughs). My first job was actually a paper boy, as many people probably had the same job, so I did that about my local area when I was quite young, and the interesting thing about that actually was that I have 2 younger brothers who look quite similar to me, so similar that we all were paper boys at around the same time but we kind of alternated weeks, and so many of the customers never figured out that there was more than one of us. So we eventually developed a kind of game where you would try and set up the most awkward conversation for the person who was next week, so that when they got to the same person again they’d ask them about something completely bizarre, and you’d have to just try to survive that conversation and leave it for the next guy.

Ryan: Good customer support training!

Matthew: Exactly, yes: “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about but I’m going to be nice and polite about it.” The main thing I learned from that is that you always want to go to the house of the young guy who’s been drunk on Saturday night, because on Sunday morning you’d get an awesome tip, he just empties out his entire pockets. So, that was the first thing I did. After school, when I finished my high school and I was trying to work out what I was going to do (I was going to go to university presumably) I didn’t really know what I wanted to do – something to do with computers. This was back in 1994 when I finished school, and so I just fell into an IT degree, which is kind of the most, well, the least specific kind of degree to do with computers that you can choose, I didn’t have to specifically do anything. The very first day I went and had a look at the course outline for the I.T. degree, I’d chosen the computer science specialisation and I quickly realised that there was a lot of maths involved, and so I swapped on day 1 to business specialisation instead which was an excellent decision – avoided a whole bunch of pain there. The degree, when I started in 1995, the commercial web was kind of really, really early still. In these days, to get onto the internet from home via the university I was using Lynx, so seriously text browsing, and Yahoo! was really just a list of websites, there was no search at that time. So early days, and there was only a very tiny bit of HTML involved, like I did 1 course in 4 years I think, so there was just a few days’ worth of that, and we made Geocities websites – pretty sweet – I guess that’s probably gone now, since Geocities just got shut down, there’s a very sad loss of history there. I did that for…that degree was 4 years, and at some point during that I started working at a “proper job” which was a firm that offered financial planning seminars and financial planning skills to accountants, and I got in there on a support desk, and this was a series of products which were all based on Microsoft Office products so there was a kind of product which was an Excel spreadsheet essentially that you bought, and it did a whole bunch of ridiculous calculations and it constantly broke, people would change things accidentally and it would stop working, and the Word macros would stop working so there was a lot of support with people ringing up and and saying “Why is my Microsoft Word margin suddenly wrong?”, I kind of did that over the phone, it’s a fun job.

Ryan: (sarcastically) That sounds like a really fascinating job, that one.

Matthew: You want to do that for your next career, I’m sure.

Ryan: Been there, done that myself.

Matthew: ‘Cause I could get you in there, it’s probably still going.

Ryan: No, you’re alright, you’re alright.

Matthew: OK, alright. So I was there for a couple of years, but we had people ringing us up with all kinds of computer problems because as soon as they know they can get support from somebody they’ll just ring anytime anything goes wrong, and I literally spoke to a guy who rang and said “I’ve just reformatted my computer and now none of your software works, I’m not sure what to do.” Well, this is going to be a fun phone call.

Ryan: The best one that comes in is “My kettle’s broken.” “Well, what’s that got to do with us?” “Well it’s got a plug on it, hasn’t it?”

Matthew: But at some point during that job, I literally heard over the other side of the cubicle, just poked my head up and heard people talking about the website for the company, so this is probably 1996 or 1997 sometime, and all websites were pretty ugly, and just by basically having an opinion and saying “Maybe we should try this” somehow I managed to kind of blag my way into being the webmaster of the company, which is what you could do in those days when nobody knew what they were doing with websites. And I had taken that over and that became my job then until the end of university, and I also strangely ran the support team eventually as well so I kind of completed a career circle at this point, back to doing that again, but this is a much nicer place to work. So that was my first job, and I left there because I got poached. One of the managers of the company left to start an internet company during the whole first web bubble, I guess, in 2000 maybe. She left and she took a whole bunch of people with her, so 6 or 7 of us, and we started working on this company which was kind of what Mint.com is today, except 10 years ago and not good – they’re the essential differences. Because in those days, the banks didn’t want to work with anybody, they wouldn’t let you access…there was no API access to anything, so we were doing a system which involved basically scraping sites and pages and you can imagine how reliable that was – every time they made a change to anything it would all stop working. But it was a fun time, we never really got to the point of the promised fabled land of beanbags and coffee machines. We got through all the VC money, didn’t really sell anything to anybody, and at some point it was pretty clear that it was all going downhill, and we all started jumping ship. I left from there, where my job was basically web design again but with a product that never really got sold and a website that never really got finished because we never finished the product, a lot of the time I actually spend kind of doing internal designs and just trying to keep it all from going crazy, in terms of “making the office at least a nicer place to be”. But I left there, and went to pretty much the opposite company you could choose after an internet startup was to go to the Australian Stock Exchange, the financial industry where when I took that job for some reason everyone thinks that all people who work in the Stock Exchange are on drugs. It’s kind of a stockbroker thing, I think everyone’s imagining that the whole Stock Exchange is full of stockbrokers, which of course it’s not, they don’t have a trading floor – it’s all electronic, even when I started there. So anyway there was no drugs, at least not in the web team, surprisingly.

Ryan: And you asked, did you then? “I searched everywhere and there weren’t any!”

Matthew: I looked in the stationery cupboard, it was just pencils. So I was there and they’d never had a web designer before so I was the first web designer. They’d had, you know, consultants and marketing companies building stuff before. It’s kind of been the theme of my career I think, which is probably because of the time I started in the web industry which was quite early, nearly all my jobs have been “the first person to do this” or “this is a new role” as opposed to replacing people so I’ve kind of always had the opportunity to design my own job out of that. So at the Stock Exchange I started doing a lot more kind of IA, working with the developers in business analysis side of things, and looking after a bunch of people who the Stock Exchange liked to call “webmasters” but who essentially used FrontPage to create monstrocities and post them on the website, which as you can imagine was some beautiful work from people who were not in any way computer people. I literally had to start a newsletter internally, again linking to my current job, a newsletter to say to people “this is a page that looks like what it’s meant to look like, and this what your pages look like, and you see how this font here is enormous and pink? That is not really what we want on the Stock Exchange website”. And you learn that most people don’t really have any sense of design at all. Like, I’m not a designer, I don’t really have any kind of design background, I’ve picked up whatever I’ve picked up along the way, but most people literally would not know that the page was terribly wrong, they wouldn’t understand a stylesheet. They’d look at the page and go “it’s fine, it looks perfect exactly like your page” and there was kind of a career moment for me where a realised I could probably have a job in this area as long as I want, because clearly this is not a common skill.

Ryan: You can just bluff.

Matthew: Well I thought I was bluffing and it turns out I wasn’t bluffing.

Ryan: So does that lead you into Campaign Monitor, or was there somewhere else after that?

Matthew: There’s a long and complicated chain of events, but basically I left there to go overseas, I went to the UK for a couple of years and I worked for a hotel booking company there in the UK, which was bought later by Priceline, the American price searching site advertised by William Shatner, which is awesome, so the day that they bought us for quite a lot of money they sent over a box full of William Shatner bobble head dolls (laughs). It was pretty much the best thing that came out of that acquisition, as opposed to…I guess apart from the money. He’s actually still up on my window, don’t know if you can see him, but he’s still sitting there today.

Ryan: I thought you were going to say you’d got to meet William Shatner, that would’ve been pretty cool.

Matthew: That would’ve been good, but no, we just got a bobble head doll of him which doesn’t look exactly like him. It kind of looks more like Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek, but still we got a bobble head doll, and he’s still lasting. But that was another internet company, so I went from there, left and as Australians always do had a 2-year working holiday. I lived in Cambridge, which is a really nice place, and left there to come back to Sydney and kind of freelanced for a while, ran my own business. I did a whole bunch of contracts for all kinds of interesting things, like some News Corp websites and the National Rugby League website. Basically, I didn’t really want to work in an agency, and in fact I didn’t really want to work for too long as a straight HTML coder which is like all of those agency jobs where you go in and they give you a design and you just build it, which seems like a career that’s not going to be around for ever. So I started looking to get out of that, and I took a job at the Taronga Zoo, which is the big zoo in Syndey, and I took kind of a part-time job as the web designer there, which is a pretty awesome place to work if you want to be a designer and wander round the zoo after hours when there’s no one there. That was pretty sweet. Also the best view of Sydney harbour is from in front of the Giraffess in Taronga Zoo.

Ryan: I’m trying to think where that zoo is, because I have been to Sydney but I can’t think where the zoo is. Is it the other side of the harbour then, over the bridge?

Matthew: Yeah, well it’s kind of on the side, so you can see thr harbour bridge and the opera house and everything right across from Taronga Zoo.

Ryan: Is it near the theme park thing where the ferris wheel is, near there?

Matthew: It’s kind of, yeah, not really worth explaining.

Ryan: I’m just interested (laughs). Anyway…

Matthew: Why do we all have Google Maps? We can look it up afterwards.

Ryan: OK, moving on.

Matthew: It’s a sensational location. You get on the ferry, you go across the harbour, and you end up at the zoo where you can look back across the harbour the other way – it’s really beautiful. But for a while, I was there and Campaign Monitor were looking for somebody. I had only recently found out that they were very local to me, I didn’t know. I was a customer, and yeah, I had no idea that they were in the south of Sydney where I lived. After I started at the zoo, literally the first day, that job went up and I sent them an email saying “What are you doing offering a job now, the day I start another job?” because I was a big fan, and they gave me a call and said “Come and see us anyway” and poached me from there, so I had to quickly resign after only a few months at the zoo. I came here, and I’ve been here for 3 years which is pretty much an all-time record for me.

Ryan: Yeah, it sounds like it. OK, so looking at everything you’ve done, what are you most proud of? What do you look back on and think “That was a good job”?

Matthew: I guess a big thing for me has been that I’ve always been pretty shy in the past, like in high school I was in the nerd group. I’m pretty sure that everyone, like 99% of the people that watch your show would probably put themselves in the same group, right?

Ryan: What a sweeping generalisation!

Matthew: That’s what I’m all about, that’s what Australians do. You’re all a bunch of nerds. So I was pretty shy, so I found that difficult, but moving to the UK and literally knowing nobody there, and having to basically find a job and start working and talk to people, showed me that you can do it, that I can do it. Coming out of that, I started saying yes to things and so after moving here to Campaign Monitor someone said “Do you want to go and do a talk in New York?”. I’d never done that before and so the first time I did a presentation was literally in the middle of New York, to 500 people at Future of Web Design. So it’s taking those steps and being able to say “Yep, I’ll give that a go”, and I think that was kind of a big turning point for me. Otherwise, I think that my best work is probably still to come, you know, I’ve moved out of the straight design role and now I’m trying to learn how to be a manager and look after a team, especially a team where half of the people I never see in person, and 1 person I have literally never met except by phone and Skype. So that’s where I see all the good stuff happening, now.

Ryan: I didn’t realise you’d spoken at a conference before. Is speaking at conferences something you’d like to pursue more in the future?

Matthew: Yeah, definitely, I’ll try and get a couple in this year hopefully. I spoke for one of the Web Directions conferences last year. Because a lot of our customers are web designers, we attend a lot of conferences as well, so I guess I’ve seen a lot of really good speakers, some of them really inspiring. Like I was just in Perth on the other side of Australia last year and I saw Derek Powasek and he was awesome, just watching him be able to explain things and get people excited was a really good experience, and I thought if I could be a tenth as good as him I would love to do that. There’s a little work to go there, probably at 1 percent at the moment.

Ryan: There’s some scarily confident speakers aren’t there? You look at them and think “Oh, my god. How are so you confident on stage?”

Matthew: Yes, well I just watched your Andy Clarke episode a little earlier this week. I was there, when he was saying @media was the first time he spoke in 2005, I was there and saw him speak and had no idea that was the first time he’d ever spoken because it certainly did not look like that. He was pretty amazing for, you know, a first time.

Ryan: He’s kind of made to talk, isn’t he, Andy?

Matthew: He is some kind of genetic government programme to create a super-speaker, that’s probably what’s going on.

Ryan: He’d love that as well. So looking at the industry at the minute, what are you enjoying the most? What are you keeping your eye on, and the most excited about?

Matthew: The whole web industry?

Ryan: Yeah, or just what you’re involved with.

Matthew: I think the big thing that’s going on for us now is there seems to be a move towards mobile. That seems to be where everything’s going. If you have the internet when you’re everywhere, as opposed to just when you’re in front of your computer, it makes a big difference to how you use it. I was just at South by Southwest (as you know, you were there) and having no local SIM card and not wanting to pay ridiculous price for roaming, I was disconnected from the internet except when I could get to the hotel or convention centre or whatever. It made me realise how much I rely on having that connection all the time now, it’s like I’ve lost part of my brain.

Ryan: It’s like a life support machine, isn’t it?

Matthew: Yeah, people would ask me questions and I’d be like “I’ve no idea, I don’t know and I can’t find out because it’s not working”. So if I potentially have access to anything when I’m mobile, and potentially with these new larger format mobile devices like your iPad and what and not, I’m very excited to see what people are going to do that changes the way I spend my life when I’m not at my desk. Because I don’t want to spend life at my desk, but I do want to see what people are going to come up with and I think we’re kind of really at the start of that, which is kind of where we were with websites in 1995 when I was starting there. You could do anything, nobody knew what you were meant to do, there was no kind of obsession with “That’s not how you’re supposed to use that technology”, so I think we’re going to see all kinds of interesting things, like what’s his name? The Chatroulette piano guy, you seen him? If you haven’t seen those videos you should go and watch them. He’s a guy who just gets on there with his piano and basically makes up videos about the people he sees popping up in Chatroulette, which is amazing. It’s amazing, it sounds ridiculous…

Ryan: Yeah, it does sound ridiculous actually.

Matthew: …yeah it does. You can look it up on Youtube, it’s quite popular. He kind of looks like Ben Folds, and then Ben Folds has done a version of him, it’s all very confusing, it’s a bit of a mess. But it’s that kind of thing that…you could never predict that. Nobody’s going to design a system for letting people randomly sing songs about random people they see on the internet, but someone makes that platform possible and someone will come up with the ideas, and I just think we’re going to see some amazing stuff over the next few years.

Ryan: So just to wrap up then, you touched on it a little bit but where do you see yourself in the future, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Matthew: This is one of those awkward interview questions isn’t it? It’s to be in your seat!

Ryan: You haven’t got a job at the end of it, so don’t worry. (laughs)

Matthew: Right, no chance of success. I try not to predict too far into the future. I think…there’s no way I could have know in my 10 years, I guess, of working in the web industry what I was going to end up doing. Certainly I never predicted I’d end up having the same job I had 10 years ago, except in a very different environment, so I don’t worry too much about it because I’ve always kind of gone with the flow of what’s there, and I think the main thing I’d like to do is just to keep changing, keep learning. I want to make sure that when opportunities come up, I’m open to saying yes. The thing I’m doing right now, I’m just finishing a book for SitePoint, basically because they said “Does someone there want to write a book?” and I said “Alright, I’ve never done that before”. I certainly see myself being part of this company for a long time. I think…I’ve worked in a lot of places as I explained in tedious detail earlier, and this size of the company and the culture we have here is very rare, so whatever I do I guess it’ll be trying to stay involved here and make Campaign Monitor a more useful product. And the company, just to keep building it up, and just to be involved in the web industry whatever happens in the next 5 years. I mean, that’s like a thousand years in corporate time, right?

Ryan: Yeah, OK, so you just mentioned your book – you didn’t say that earlier, we could have talked about that! So when does your book come out?

Matthew: I think the plan is to print in April, so sometime April/May.

Ryan: Right, so it’s finished then I take it?

Matthew: Pretty much, yeah. I was writing parts of it in the hotel at South by Southwest last week, trying to get it done, which possibly was a mistake.

Ryan: Can you tell us anything about it? What’s the topic?

Matthew: Sure, so it’s HTML email. Basically it’s for web designers who are getting asked about doing HTML email and want to work out how you do it. It’s kind of one of those areas where it sounds easy because it’s just HTML and CSS and you already know all that, right? But the problem is that the rendering engines in the email clients themselves are kind of stuck in 1998-style tables. So there’s a lot of tricks and there’s a lot of work you have to do to make your modern web design work in email clients, because you don’t just have Opera, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. You’ve got 5 different versions of Outlook, web-based email clients, mobile email clients, and you’ve got 10 different desktop versions to deal with, and they are all much more variable than modern day web browsers are. So the book is kind of giving you an easy way to learn “How can I take my skills, apply them to this other area and hopefully build up my business and get a good stream of revenue?” because email marketing is one of those things that companies will do over and over consisently, as opposed to designing a website which they do once. So we get a lot of designers who want to do that, want to work out a way “How can I do something which is going to produce me income consistently and help me build up my business?”, so that’s what the book is for.

It also goes through a whole bunch of the stuff like “How do I help my clients actually send good emails?” because…when I do talks, I like to start with the question “Who hates HTML email?”, just to get a bit of a hands-up, and it’s usually about 50-50. Half the designers in the world kind of hate the entire idea of it, and get quite angry actually, which is fun. Just last week, I was talking to Jeremy Keith about it, and what I told him was (because it’s the first time I met him) “I talked to Andy Budd about this, and he really hates HTML email”, and he said (adopts Irish accent) “Yes, I’ve never done HTML email myself and I never want to, I’m never going to start, in my whole life, never want to send one”. That’s pretty typical, especially of web standards people, for whatever reason, they have the idea in their head that that email is just meant to be text, like it was written on a stone tablet and passed down to us: “Email is for text. If you put HTML in there, you are some kind of psychopath and you should probably be shot”. So, I may have slightly overexaggerated his opinion there. The book goes into a little bit about it as well, which is to say that HTML email is here. If you use Outlook, you’re already using it unless you’ve specifically turned it off. If you use Apple Mail, you’re sending HTML email. Any kind of business is going to send it, whether there’s designers involved or not. Part of the reason everyone hates it is because it’s so ugly, it can be really abused, and part of the reason it’s so ugly is that web designers hate it and won’t do it, so the way forward of course is for designers to put some effort in and make it useful, make it practical, and just do some really nice newsletters that are easier to read than just plain text. There is a reason we have different fonts and things, we don’t just use monospace fonts in all our books – you know, just buying textbooks, they have different formatting and different size headings and stuff, and you just can’t do that with plain text, right? So there’s a bit of selling of the whole idea of HTML email, and then how do you actually do it and how do you do it well. So, that’s the book.

Ryan: OK, and what’s that called?

Matthew: Er, that’s a good question, and I’m not sure of the answer. I think it’s going to be something like ‘Beautiful HTML Emails’. It’s kind of the style of Elliot Jay Stocks’ book, apparently.

Ryan: Yeah, the ‘Sexy Web Design’ one that he did.

Matthew: Yeah, so it’s similar, in terms of colour and image and that kind of thing, and the way it’s put together, it’s a similar model to that. And I’m sure you’ll be able to find it and we’ll promote it on campaignmonitor.com, so that’d be the place to actually find out about it when it actually gets published. Yeah, it’s been a really, really long process, but I’m quite excited to be at the end of it now, and I think a lot of people will find it useful. Especially people who aren’t Campaign Monitor users, because we’ve covered this information a lot on our blog and our resources over the years, but there’s a lot of web designers who are completely outside of the web application loop, especially people inside companies, and hopefully they’ll find it useful.

Ryan: OK, brilliant. Well, thanks a lot Matthew for taking the time to talk to me, that’s really interesting, and I’ll speak to you soon.

Matthew: Thank you so much.

Thanks goes to David Goss for transcribing this interview.

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