Shane: the hurricane happened and really forced our my hand and forced my team. My team was still pretty small at the time. We were, you know, maybe eight people. And it was like, Hey, we're running out of money and now no one has money because, you know, we don't we haven't had power in a month and water in six weeks, and you know, we're hauling water in buckets to flush our toilets, which is Which gets old after a month and a half. and how can we keep this business alive?
Josh Broward: Hey, welcome back to Founder Real Talk. I'm your host, Josh Broward. And if you are new to us, the podcast is hosted by Wisdom Partners and we work with startup founders all around the world, plus or minus seed stage a little bit. And one thing we hear all the time is being a founder is super lonely. And most of the time we, feel like we're doing something wrong, even if we're doing pretty good. And I think those things go together a lot. The loneliness and the sort of hidden nature or there's almost a unhealthy shame thing of making mistakes as founders. And so we hide from each other and none of that's healthy. It's not helpful for any of us. So this podcast is to get the real talk out in the open and make it normalize the struggle and and build some virtual community with among founders. today we have Shane Parreco Am I saying that right? I should have checked. Parreco. All right. All
Shane: That's all right. It's Parreco like Jericho, but that's close. I get Parreco all the time, no worries.
Josh Broward: right. Shane Parreco on the podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Aktiga which is a software development and product studio that builds all kinds of custom software. I started to list it all out and I was like, let's just call it custom software for all types of companies, startups, enterprises, and everywhere in between. another interesting fact, can, you might, see Shane is outside today. beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, where he's an advocate for the regional startup ecosystem. So people outside of the Bay Area, I might, A, might be surprised that there are startup ecosystems elsewhere. And B, just not know that... that in different regions, especially outside of major common startup hubs, there's a lot of work that goes into cultivating the local scene. So Shane, so great to have you here. I appreciate you taking some time.
Shane: Yeah, of course. I appreciate the invite and you know, to have an opportunity to have some real talk about the struggles of being a founder, especially in a startup ecosystem that is not the valley or not the Bay Area or not another major you know metropolis or, you know, populated area. It's the struggle I mean, I think what what a lot of people deal with in you know, in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley, there's you know, that sense of loneliness as a founder, that sense of that sense of struggle, it's kind of compounded in an environment like this where there's you know, there's fewer founders, there's fewer people, there's fewer support organizations, there's s there's fewer fewer resources, fewer opportunities for networking, fewer fewer ways to carry that burden and and share the load and And have an opportunity to have conversations about the struggle. just just it just kind of makes that whole experience as a founder even more lonely and even more challenging. And so so I I you know, when we first connected and and and you offered the ability to jump on the podcast and talk more, I was I was kind of thrilled because you know, being a a a tech entrepreneur and a tech founder, a startup founder in in Asheville in western North Carolina. especially since the impacts of the of Hurricane Helene and and how how it has, you know, like impacted business like kind of at at large and our our whole entire region and how dependent it is still on tourism, and how much of a hit so much of the of the region took because of that is just, you know, it's it's it's made that conversation even more meaningful. When I meet, you know, I meet a lot of tech folks, you know, so like engineers and product designers and developers and product managers and people who work for some of the biggest companies in California and in the Bay Area. they but they live here because living here is kind of amazing and it's a little bit of a you know, I I've heard Asheville called the San Francisco of the East. So I I I've been kind of holding on to that for a long time. It's it's a it's a it's an amazing place to, you know, to connect with. people, the art and music scene is is really vibrant and you know, but the impacts as an entrepreneur have been have been challenging. And to be to be a tech entrepreneur in this region is is not easy. And and there's not many of us, you know, I mean, I think I know all of the other tech entrepreneurs in Nashville. And there's, you know,
Josh Broward: you
Shane: I could probably count them on one or two hands, you know, so so I it the hope, my hope is by having an opportunity to talk about this it it brings some attention to the work that I'm doing here in Asheville. with my business Aktiga and the software development that we're doing for clients, the products that we're building and trying to bring to the market. You know, we're excited about this era that we live in now and how AI is accelerating, you know, and making things more affordable to build and deliver and deploy. And you know, just put sh it puts all that much additional pressure and and emphasis on on what you're building and why. You know, like who are you building it for? Are you solving a problem? Is is that problem and pain something that people are are willing to pay to solve and how much are they willing to pay, you know. So those questions from a product perspective still haven't changed in in from my from my perspective. So so yeah I'm I'm hoping that folks that that tune in and listen maybe reach out 'cause they want to follow up or or or maybe another entrepreneur hears the struggle and and they want to reach out to you, Josh, and and join the join the podcast and talk more. So I'm I'm excited to be here. Thank you.
Josh Broward: Great. One thing I think is interesting about what you're doing, especially in relation to this podcast, is it's a little bit different. You're kind of a dev house or a service based company rather than a venture backed SaaS play. Sometimes I joke, you can't throw a rock in San Francisco without hitting an AI founder. They're like,
Shane: Right.
Josh Broward: they're all over the and like
Shane: Yeah.
Josh Broward: you just sit down at a coffee shop and you're like 50-50 chance the guy next to you is a founder of something. So
Shane: Yeah. Totally.
Josh Broward: your approach is different but still genuinely part of the startup journey. Help us understand what problem you're really solving on a big picture with Actica.
Shane: Sure, yeah, no that's a great question. I think You know, we're because of this sort of the the nature of the business ecosystem in this part of the country, in this part of North Carolina, you know, a lot of people know more about, you know, the tech ecosystem in the Triangle region, Raleigh Durham, Chapel Hill, the Research Triangle. There's there's a lot of startup activity. There's a lot of venture backed businesses. There's probably half as many AI startups there as there are in the in the Bay Area and in the valley. Because everybody's, you know, kind of jumping into the deep end with with building products on top of AI, building products built on you know, like with AI as a core component of of what the product does or how it operates. so being in this part of of the state, you know, we're you know, we're not too far away, you know, North Carolina's not as big as California, but you it's Raleigh's a good three, four hours away. You know the further west you go in this part of of the country, especially when you get into, you know, the Appalachian Mountains and, you know, this kind of Appalachian region, it's it's much more spread out. It's much more rural. You know, the city of Asheville is, you know, it's teeny tiny. We maybe have a hundred thousand people that live in in town. And you know, like the Asheville metropolitan area, if you if you draw a big circle around it, you maybe get to half a million people. So we're we're not talking about a huge density of people. But, you know, what what we found as the the the value in the work and the approach. You know, I for in all in all honesty and all transparency, I did not start Aktiga to be a client services agency. I think that was more of a forcing function of, you know, bootstrapping and self funding of product business, a technology business in this part of the country. Not a lot of venture funding flows to this part of the state or really this part of the country. So I was like pretty committed to trying to build something on my own with my own money. and after almost two years of trying to make that work, the hurricane happened and really forced our my hand and forced my team. My team was still pretty small at the time. We were, you know, maybe eight people. And it was like, Hey, we're running out of money and now no one has money because, you know, we don't we haven't had power in a month and water in six weeks, and you know, we're hauling water in buckets to flush our toilets, which is Which gets old after a month and a half. and how can we keep this business alive? We're excited about the work that we're doing, you know, building the technology, especially at that time, a little over a year ago, year and a half ago now, is you know, it's exciting. AI is just starting to have these huge impacts on the development process and and it it's it's starting to feel like anything is possible and there's all this new magic, fairy dust on the on the software industry. and a lot of people got really excited about it. And obviously a lot of people went in really hard on AI and a lot of founders have started businesses and raised lots and lots of money because they're building AI businesses. and you know, without that as an option for us to say, hey, we'll just go raise some money, hey, we'll go, we'll go down the street and and have meetings with a dozen VCs and figure out which one can fund our vision. we had to figure out how to be more scrappy. And so it was like one of the things that we had landed on at that point was like, hey, we are a development company. We have a process. We really love shape up as a as an approach to planning sprints and running cycles and having design as a as an important component of our of our approach to building software. we basically were like, hey, as a team, if we're gonna keep this business alive and keep the lights on, what can we do to generate revenue? Hey, we know how to do this thing. Why don't we just offer that to people as a as a service? and almost immediately when we made that decision, we started finding people that were like, you guys know how to build software. I've got this idea, or hey, I have this legacy product, or you know, I used AI vibe coding, you know, lovable replit, you know, base 44, one of these tools to vibe code something up, but it keeps breaking. And now I need real engineers to help me with it. And so we just ended up kind of getting swamped with work really quickly. and the timing of that was kind of ideal. There was a Another Dev Shop software development company in town that had that had closed its doors you know maybe six months before. So there was kind of this gap in our market. And so bigger picture, what we're tr what we kind of stepped into was trying to become kind of the go-to technical partner, design, research, development team for the region. and and have been like, you know, I've just kind of been blown away at at how much work we've been able to find. You know, a lot of people are like, There's clients for you. In Asheville? In Western North Carolina? Like really? you haven't had to look in like Charlotte or Knoxville or Atlanta or you know, you haven't had to widen your circle to find clients. And and I've I've said like we only have had one client that's outside of our circle and they're in Charleston, South Carolina. Everybody else is literally in Asheville, in the city limits. So like we have in-person meetings regularly. The vast majority of our team now or up to twelve people are local in Asheville. We only have a couple folks that work remote. I feel really passionately about like building a local team and having an environment where people can collaborate in real time in person. and I get a lot of really great feedback from the team about how much value they get from that, how much how much fun it is to go into a room and to actually whiteboard something, not on Miro or not on some, you know, fig jam board. You know, it's so much more fun to actually take a physical sticky and post-it note and stick it on the board and move it around and think about how these You know, if we're thinking system design or if we're thinking UI or UX, you know, user flow, we're you know, it's like workshopping and and and brainstorming and and working through that collaboratively with with other humans in real time is something that I think a what I hear and what I experience is a lot of people are excited to do again. You know, it's not everybody wants to be in the office every day. I don't want to be in the office every day. I think the whole return to office policy is is is is insane. I think especially when you're talking about creative people. I'm also a musician. You know, I have my first degree is organizational leadership and business management. My second degree is music. And I worked for many years as an audio engineer. And so, you know, to put it a creative person in a time box is you know, unless they're performing on stage at a festival is one of the worst things you can do. You know, that's not when people are at their at their best. And so, you know, we have tr like adopted a philosophy and approach of having a fully hybrid, you know, fully flexible schedule. We don't keep hours. You know, we say, hey, work when you want to, where you want to, when you want to. If that's early in the morning and you're a morning person and you love coffee and you get fired up when you wake up in the morning and you want to get your work done, go for it. If you're if you're a a night owl and you want to work, you know, from from midnight to two AM or three AM or four A.M., like do that. I mean I As a as a perfect example, I was up last night at 3 a.m. until 5 30 this morning working on something because I couldn't sleep and I had an idea and I had to run with it. And so it it feels i irresponsible for me as a founder to to demand a box on people's productivity. You know, I think that's one of the things that I took away the most from my my time studying organizational leadership 20 years ago in my undergrad work was you know, how productive people are is always directly tied to how how much enjoyment, how much excitement, how much pride they get out of the work that they're doing. And if they're not enjoying their work, even for a few hours of the day, but they have to work because they're like on the clock or they have to be there from nine to five, the their work suffers and the output suffers and the business suffers as a result because You're asking people to perform and produce when they're not at their best. And so we've we've really tried to embody that. Like I've tried to embody that as a leader, and I've tried to really instill that philosophy in our people. And I think not only am I seeing that positive impact on my team, but from a bigger picture perspective, I'm seeing that open the door to more conversations with clients who are like, man, your team is so awesome. And we really loved talking with. You know, Rachel, she's our director of des research and design, or we really love talking with Morgan, she's our director of marketing. Or we really loved working with one of your engineers. You know, that's music to my ears. And it means that the environment that we're creating is not only making it a better place to work, but it's also making it a more successful business. And it's making our clients like take notice and and enjoy, you know, the act of collaborating with us to bring their thing to life, whether it's an idea or some new business that needs some some technology to reinforce it or some marketing support or some design or product research or user research or whatever that looks like. You know, people come to us and we we right size our services based on their needs and and and what we find is even that approach to asking and and working towards clarity and understanding, it's almost like working with AI. You've got to give it good context. You've got to get to clarity first before you try to do anything. Otherwise it's going to hallucinate all over the place. And and we're sort of taking the same approach to the way that we work with clients and and and it's working and so it's it's it's exciting. And you know, we're starting to do more work for nonprofits in the region. We're starting to see how technology, especially in this era where you can build things quickly and you can have an impact really quickly, nonprofits are some of the least resources, least techno technologically resourced organizations in the world. I think anyone who's ever served on a nonprofit board or volunteered hours with a nonprofit that they care about, they know that pain. Like technology in a nonprofit is almost always the thing that gets the lowest priority. Because there's, you know, there's fires to put out or there's things to address or, you know, there's other more pressing problems and more important parts of their workflow. And so technology always ends up at the bottom of the list. And so now we're able to make the barrier to entry lower. We're able to reduce the cost. And we're able to help folks. And you know, they love it. They get so excited. We just did a presentation yesterday for a homeless day center in town that we're building a new entry system for and and and data tracking system for, kind of like a you know, a restaurant POS system. And I mean, like the people in the room were almost brought to tears. They were so excited. I mean, these are organizations that are still literally printing out blank spreadsheets and filling them out by hand with a piece with a piece of paper and a pencil every day. so that they can then enter those things into a database at the end of the week. And so to have a system that automates that process for them is n not only is it gonna be impactful on their workflow, but it's gonna save them so much time that they're gonna be able to focus on the things that are more important, which is trying to trying to address homelessness. You know, I mean that's I don't know if there's many more amazing missions to to support. So, you know, we get a lot out of this work and we're really excited to see how this work as an agency and supporting clients and really identifying those, you know, either nonprofits or mission-driven organizations that really need our our support, how how we can help them because, you know, it's it's it just burns so much more meaning to the work. And and anybody who's working in who's been working in tech in like the corporate environment can speak very clearly to how easy it is to burn out because it doesn't feel like there's a lot of meaning to your work. And I feel like what we're experiencing here is is is very much the opposite.
Josh Broward: It sounds like, if I kind of summarize what you're saying, the problem you're solving is local access to software development.
Shane: Yeah, very much.
Josh Broward: Local personalized access. Because the homeless shelter... it probably never occurred to them that there would be a software-based solution for intake because they're so busy passing out blankets and plates of food. And it reminds me of one of our most popular blog posts. It is called The Power of Unsexy Customers.
Shane: Mm.
Josh Broward: Maybe it's most popular just because it has sexy in it. I'm not sure. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure
Shane: Or unsexy, right? Yeah, yeah, totally.
Josh Broward: if Google sort of helped us out there.
Shane: Nice.
Josh Broward: the idea is you can make a whole lot of money and do a whole lot of good just getting people not even up to date, but like just bringing them up to one decade behind.
Shane: Yeah. Exactly. I mean that's that's so true. I mean, that's what we're seeing. And we're we're bringing them all the way into a custom system that I mean, there was one one person in the room who's part of a larger, more broader focused effort and several other organizations that are part of this effort to address homelessness in the region. And and she was like, my gosh, we have to take this and share this with all these other organizations 'cause they're all gonna freak out, you know, and it's a It's that same kind of thing. It's this the impact of just getting them up to something that's that's decent. It's it's not AI. You know, like sure we're using AI to build it so we can go fast and keep the cost down. But, you know, it's not the most cutting edge. We're not talking about frontier models. We're not you know, we're we're we're not on the bleeding edge of of of VR or XR or whatever. But just getting them up to this level is is is super exciting and and and absolutely impactful for them. So it's it's cool to hear that you guys are already kind of thinking in that vein and and and thinking about unsexy and and how impactful unsexy can be, especially if it's it's something that has that much impact on on like a workflow of people who are stressed, you know, like working in the homeless world and and providing those services, passing out blankets, passing out food, tracking somebody's mail, just asking them for their real name, you know, and and building the trust to get them to share their real name. Like that's that's huge. You know, and making it so that it's easier on those people who are volunteering and working and doing doing that that work is you know it's it's it's awesome. It's it's really exciting for us to be to be a part of it in this region and and really excited to see what other doors this kind of work opens for us, you know.
Josh Broward: Yeah, I want to pull on another thread, because I part of what you're describing is... It's at least a thread in a movement or a realization that I'm seeing that kind of as AI gets stronger and it gets more ubiquitous, there is a unique value in essentially human things. So in your case, it's like having a physical body present. to smile at and talk to and shake hands with somebody who feels uncomfortable about technology or whatever, that opens them to the solution in a way that the coolest company from Palo Alto could never do.
Shane: Yeah, I think that I think I think you said it well. You know, having having the ability to have a conversation in person and to talk about technology in a way that's not scary, and it's not overwhelming and it's not presumptuous, like, you don't know the latest thing and and how behind the times are you? gosh, I don't even think I can have this conversation anymore kind of thing. You know, like just just meeting people where they are is is is very much ingrained into our approach and what what we're finding is that it it makes it so much easier for clients to feel comfortable and to say, hey, you guys clearly know what you're talking about. You're the ones with the expertise. We trust your judgment. Let's move forward. Like one of our first clients we got came to us and was, you know, was in the unfortunate situation where he had paid another development company elsewhere in the country to build some custom software for for him and his business. And it was not what he wanted and it didn't work well and it was really buggy and they were really slow to respond and and they went offline for the holiday and the thing broke and no one was there to fix it and and it left him in in a serious jam, you know, for his business, because a bunch of his business operated on this on this software. And then when the time came, you know, after the holidays to address the problem and say, Hey, we gotta get this sorted out, there was all this friction and it didn't end well. And and not only did it end did it not end well, he didn't end up with ownership of his product. They like they held on to the code base and they wouldn't give it to him and and then it was like, you know, the lawyers got involved and it got really messy. And so, you know, he's coming to us a little skittish and like, these technology people, you know, they're gonna screw you over. They're gonna take your money and then they're not gonna deliver on the thing that they said they were going to deliver. And and we and I was like, hey man, let's just let's just do a discovery. Let's just talk about what you need. Walk us through your process. And and help us understand, help us get the clarity about what you what you need. What are what are the problems you're experiencing? What are the pains in your process? And after like two weeks of mapping it all out with him, we landed on, you just need a CRM. Like here's one and here's another one, and pick one and pay for the seats and and ready to go. And he it blew his mind. And he was like, This is amazing. This is exactly what we needed. I wish these other folks would have just told me that, you know? And
Josh Broward: wish they hadn't built a thing that already exists in a hundred forms.
Shane: Yeah. Right? And in varying degrees of cost. And we picked one that was very affordable, you know, fifteen, twenty bucks a seat for a small team of half a dozen and and totally changed everything about how his business could run. And and it broke that dependency on a system that was fragile, that wasn't built well, that wasn't maintained well, that was being held kind of hostage from him. And it was his software. He paid him lots of money to build the software for him. And at the end he ended up with nothing. And so You know, the the lesson that I took from that and that I use in a lot of the conversations that we have now with clients is we're not here to sell you software. We're here to understand your problem. We're here to understand how we can help. Sometimes that's just a website, sometimes that's just some marketing content. Sometimes that is a full top-to-bottom research and design, custom development, custom product, you know, using modern frameworks and and solid deployment and good security and a good database. Sometimes that's the answer, but not always, you know. And sometimes we do discovery and we get to the end of it and it's like, hey, this idea that you have, it's not doable. You know, like the things that you want to do are not possible. And it's great that you have that idea. And, you know, maybe when AI gets to the point where it's, you
Josh Broward: You
Shane: know, conscious, it can build it for you. But right now, w with the humans and the technology that we have at our disposal, we can't make your thing happen. And so it's like, cool, high five, you didn't spend fifty thousand dollars to get there. You spend three. You know, and and you got FaceTime with warm bodies, with people who are listening and taking notes and trying to get to the root to understand what it was you're trying to do so that we could actually give them like honest feedback on on how doable it is, how how much of an opportunity is there in the market to do this kind of thing? Are there competitors? Are you gonna have to compete? Do you wanna compete? Do you just want to use one of these other software systems off the shelf because there's already so many out there? You know, and those are the questions that we always ask of the clients that come to us because we don't want to just sell for the sales sake. You know, we want to make sure that the work that we're doing actually is is gonna is gonna land well, it's gonna move the needle for the client, and it's gonna move them it's it's not only move the needle, but move them towards their goal or help them realize their thing. You know, I mean to me, you know, as a founder myself, I very well could see myself being a client of this business and coming in and being like, I've got this idea. And to be able to sit down and work through it and workshop it and brainstorm it out and and talk with people who know way more about technology than I do. You know, I think I I would have I would have jumped at that opportunity and saved myself money. But you know, I jumped into the deep end and started a tech business and I'm not an engineer. I'm not technical. I'm I'm I'm more of a business background person. But You know, I was really excited about the possibility with technology and the creative potential and then therefore the potential for working with really creative people. That part is what excites me. That's what gets me up in the morning. That's what gets me up at three in the morning. When I've got like this idea and I can't wait to share it with the team when everybody else wakes up later, you know, that kind of thing. Like that, that's part of the fun. That's part of the joy for me, you know.
Josh Broward: Cool. I love your story of how your team helped improve function for a... for the homeless shelter. We always ask people to share one of their wins, but we can just count that as one of your recent wins.
Shane: Yeah. For sure.
Josh Broward: But clearly, it's not all party hats. What is something you've learned just in the last year through failure or struggle?
Shane: You know, there there's been a couple things that have happened for us over the past year that have been hard. Obviously, if I go back a little bit more than a year, the impact of of Hurricane Helene on our business and on our region in general was significant, but it it it almost feels a little bit overplayed. in the region and how much effort there is into like still this ongoing like recovery effort and building resilience and how do we diversify our local economy and all that stuff. so I don't wanna I don't want to go too hard on that. There's still there's still a desperate need in this in this in this town for you know there were there were like over I think over fifteen hundred artist studios destroyed in the flood because the River Arts District was this haven for affordable, you know, post industrial space. For artists to have a studio, gallery, whatever. And it was a thriving aspect of Asheville, just just a little bit down the road from downtown. And all of those folks lost their lost their space. And many of them lost entire works of of like bodies of their work of of of art. so that's been like really devastating to witness. And a a bunch of our team members have volunteered with with different organizations in town trying to help with that recovery effort. So that feels less like a lesson from failure or from something hard, but really more just witnessing, a a catastrophic event, climate-related event in this part of the country. Hurricanes don't happen here. We're hours from the coast. You know, I've lived at the coast. I know what hurricanes are like. When you live at the coast, you're used to it. You know, it's like it's gonna rain, it's gonna be windy, we might lose power. Hurricane party, woo! it's kind of part of the experience of living on the coast, you know, there's always gonna be a chance that you're gonna experience that. But here in the in the mountains, was just it just it was unheard of. I mean, there were parts of town that got over over thirty five or forty inches of rain in a in a day. You know, so there's there it doesn't matter where that happens, if that happens, it's just gonna wreck everything. And the flooding was just was devastating. So, you know, to just put that down and put that aside. You know, if anybody wants to talk more about Hurricane Helene, I'd be happy to talk about that. Come to Asheville Bring your bring your family, come and visit. You know, they're they're encouraging everybody in town to say, tell people to come visit, you know, tell the tourists to come back. so I have to make that plug, at least on behalf of the Asheville people,
Josh Broward: You
Shane: the Asheville City folks that I'm connected to. so one of the things that I've learned this year that was probably one of the hardest lessons that I've had to learn as a found that I've had to learn as a founder was coming to coming like face to face with the reality of having made a personnel decision that was the wrong one. And it took me a really
Josh Broward: Hmm.
Shane: long time to realize it. and that was that was really really hard. You know, like us I in larger organizations, especially VC backed organizations, when you're hiring 10 or 20 or 30 or more people at a time, you know, and you have an organization that grows to a hundred or more really quickly, one person If it's not the right fit, you know, usually it works itself out. You might have an HR function that can help nip it in the bud or address the problem sooner than later. But but working on a smaller team in tech that's not V C backed, you know, we're not swimming in in in money. So we're we're having to pay people less than we should. You know, I I don't get paid a lot, you know, and that's one of the hard things about being a founder is knowing that I'm gonna get paid less than everybody for as long as it takes to hopefully get this business over the hump, is is is challenging, but What an impactful thing to have to live through of of thinking that I made the right decision on on a on a critical hire and and spending over a year working with that person to only realize at the end of that year, year and a half, that this is not only not the right person, but this has become toxic. And and that that toxicity has spread and now now I'm having to triage the entire team. because of the impact of of just picking one wrong person. and, you know, I think the lesson in there for me is, you know, maybe to be a little bit more mindful of the signs. You know, this this person was not just a hire off the street. This was a friend. so there was a little bit of like a personal overlap and like, no, it's working great. We'll figure it out, you know. And as it got closer and closer to the end, things got harder and more contentious and more frictiony and and really challenging to navigate and a lot of emotions and a lot of frustrations and and a lot of feeling like how did we end up here and and and gosh, like what in the world? Like this is one of the hardest, you know, emotional experiences that I've been through, personal experiences I've been through. It just so happens to be part of my business and professional experiences that I'm having to live through, which just made it that much harder. so not only did I lose, you know, an an an employee and and a really talented creative person as a part of our team, but I also feel like I kind of lost a friend, you know, and so that that was really hard. You know, the there it feels like the lessons are many. There's kind of this onion there that I've been peeling the layers on of like, okay, where did it where did I go wrong? Where did we go wrong? was it was it me not providing good guidance and structure? Was I too trusting and open and and left too much of a of a vacuum in terms of in terms of structure, in terms of expectations and agreements? Do I need to take a step back and reevaluate and reassess how we hire and who we hire and how we're setting those expectations and creating those agreements? and so it's it's definitely caused a lot of a lot of follow up conversations internally with me and my business partner. kind of our leadership team and you know it's it's it's it's been a an eye opener for sure. And so, you know, well I guess the the lesson to share with others is if you're on a small team and you don't have oodles of cash to just hire lots of people and you have to make you have to make an important hire, maybe don't hire a friend. And and if you do, make sure you do a lot of a lot of trial and a lot of testing and a lot of flushing it out. Don't go all in and commit all at once. You know, one of the things that I feel like I've had to do as a bootstrap founder is hire people in kind of stages like, Hey, let's do a thirty day trial part time. Let's do ten hours or twenty hours a week. Let's just see how it goes before we jump all the way into forty hours and and just expect that it's gonna work well. You know, I think In many ways that's one of the hardest parts of joining a new team. When you go from zero to full time, you know, there's this onboarding curve that you're climbing and you're how is this process and how do I fit in? And do I like my coworkers or do they hate me? Or am I am I qualified for this job? All the imposter syndrome stuff that comes up. it it just compounds, you know, the ability for someone new to perform at their at their peak, you know. And And and I've wanted to try to figure out some creative ways to remove some of that pressure and and create a little bit more space and say, hey, let's start slow. You know, it's like let's let's crawl before we walk, before we run, before we fly. You know, I I or or let's let's date before we get married. You know, I mean there's lots of metaphors that you can sprinkle in there, but I feel like that's one of the things that I really have been trying to integrate and and process after this after this. you know pretty major impact on the team and this this big emotional upheaval and and and you know massive ding on morale and you know not only did i have to let one person go but another person decided to leave because that person got let go so you know a small team we didn't just lose one person we lost two and that was even more impactful and so so a a lot of lessons there like go slow trust your instinct I've I've had to think more about trusting my instinct and and being more mindful of some of those not red flags, but maybe yellow flags or beige flags that come up earlier in the process and and don't just ignore those and and and I have to be able to say, was that a yellow flag? Do do I need was that like a yellow card, you know, in the in the World Cup kind of vein since we're since we're in that in that mode right now. Like is that a yellow
Josh Broward: Yeah.
Shane: card? Do we need to actually talk more and pull aside and say, hey, what actually is going on here? Is there something else? Let's let's dig into it. so so having some structure around that has felt like, okay, next time I think we're gonna be more prepared. I think the next hire that I make is gonna be much more thoughtful. It's gonna I'm gonna put a whole lot more time into it. I'm gonna spend more time interviewing folks and and and evaluating candidates. So that's that's felt like, you know, one of one of the hardest lessons that I've had to learn is is, you know, I love working with people. I wanna hire lots and lots of people. I'd love to have my business grow to hundreds, if not thousands of of of of people and employees working for the business and shareholders. and and at this point I'm still at the beginning of this journey. I I have to be really protective of my vision and I have to be really mindful of of who I bring into the fold and and make sure that they get it and they're excited about it as much as I am, you know.
Josh Broward: Thank you for sharing that. I think that's common problem. all founders have experienced some parts of that problem, I think.
Shane: Yeah. Yeah, the personnel part for sure.
Josh Broward: Yes.
Shane: That that's the tough one. People, we're hard to deal with, you know. I think that's part
Josh Broward: Yeah.
Shane: of why everyone's like AI's just gonna replace all the jobs because AI's so much easier to deal with, you know.
Josh Broward: Well, let's let me give you the mic. We've been, for
Shane: Okay.
Josh Broward: people who've been listening for a while, you might know we've started turning the interview around, giving the guests a chance to ask me a question. So go ahead.
Shane: Nice. Yeah, okay. perfect kind of segue 'cause my question is about AI and and kind of your your opinion of it. But what I feel like I've started to see happen, you know, there's there's kind of this wave of hype, which still feels like there's a pretty strong hype machine, you know, pumping the you know, the the benefits of AI. I feel like we're starting to see a softening of like the these aggressive like job replacement numbers and you know the big AI company CEOs sort of backtracking some of those statements a little bit like, well maybe we were a little ahead of ourselves there kind of thing. but even to even like today and yesterday, I'm I've been privy to or or you know, around conversations where I'm hearing two very different ends of the spectrum when it comes to what is AI good at? What is it not? What can it be trusted with? What can it not? What will it replace? What will it not? And so my question for for you, Josh, is like where do you feel like you fall in that spectrum is like, you know, AI is is the grand wizard and it's gonna replace jobs and it's gonna do everything better than humans can, or or AI is crazy and it just is is always gonna produce a bunch of slop and that's what probabilistic LLM models are are capable of. So it's always gonna hallucinate and it's always gonna be you're always gonna need humans driving it, you know, or or do you find, you know, like your perspective Are you using tools? Are you finding that drift? Are you seeing those hallucinations? Do you feel like you're somewhere in the middle or are you are you like a are you a full on believer or or are you a are you a hater? You know, I feel like it's the the believer hater spectrum. Where on the believer hater AI spectrum are you?
Josh Broward: Alright, yeah, great frame there. I would say I'm somewhere in the middle.
Shane: Okay.
Josh Broward: And in a couple of ways. I do think AI is here to stay. For sure there is a fad element. I literally heard a founder a couple of years ago say, we chose a .ai URL. so that we could get funding.
Shane: No surprise there.
Josh Broward: And you know, I think those days are, they haven't faded, but they're fading. People are becoming a little more realistic about what AI can and can't do. And so one trend I see, Well, let me start with what AI can do. AI is great at doing the boring, repetitive stuff that nobody wanted to do anyway.
Shane: Yeah.
Josh Broward: Shockingly, it's great at functioning like a machine.
Shane: Chocker.
Josh Broward: But we found out that there's a whole lot of stuff that are machine-like. Busy work stuff. Like filling in a spreadsheet. you multiply that exponentially. And I mean, that's just gonna happen. we're gonna have that. But it's not terribly different from the advent of word processor software replacing typists. It just got easy enough, it didn't make sense to have somebody else do this.
Shane: Mm. I was I I mean I was just thinking just to dovetail into that real quick, I don't want to derail, but it it feels very similar to when like the Xerox machine happened, you know. We had we had hand copies being made for all documents until the Xerox machine came along and everyone was like freaking out that it was gonna take all these jobs and all it did was make things run smoother, you know, go faster.
Josh Broward: Everybody kind of freaks out when new technology shows up. I don't remember where I saw this. It might have been at a World's Fair at some point where they did a retrospective, but it showed like commercials and like sort of futurists talking about when household appliances became a thing. And they're like, Oh, dishwashers and washing machines. They're going to like the future of automation is what, you know, they called it back then basically is going to free us up for a life of luxury. In 1980 will only work 20 hours a week, you know, was sort of their prediction. Yeah. And
Shane: Well.
Josh Broward: of course, none of that happened. Right. And I
Shane: Right. Yeah.
Josh Broward: think. what people forget is technology doesn't replace human workers. It makes human workers more efficient. so AI isn't, it's different-ish, but it's also not different in that way. I...
Shane: Right. It's just the next evolution of what technology is, right?
Josh Broward: Right, it's making, as people learn to use it and so right now people who are really good at using it have a competitive edge. And that'll continue for a while and then it'll just be like, everybody knows how to use Microsoft Office. Like, we don't need you to take a test to prove that you can run PowerPoint, you know, like.
Shane: Right.
Josh Broward: I mean, there was like certifications for that. And
Shane: I remember, yeah.
Josh Broward: it's just an assumed thing. I think AI will become so integrated into our workflows that it becomes just an assumed thing that of course you know how to ABC whatever that function is with AI or you don't even think about it. It just happens behind the scenes for most people.
Shane: Right, it's just an extension of the workflow.
Josh Broward: Yeah, I do think some of this, I've heard some really, we talked about it earlier about the importance of humanness. So a couple of trends that I think are worth noting here. One is. there is an increasing value for, I guess you might say for two things. One is wisdom or human judgment. the other,
Shane: Mm. Yeah. Discernment.
Josh Broward: yeah, the other is real life. Whether
Shane: Mm.
Josh Broward: that is a phone call or a video call or an in-person meeting.
Shane: Yeah.
Josh Broward: Partly because... So the human judgment is you can get, like software is cheap now basically, you can get software to do whatever,
Shane: Mm-hmm.
Josh Broward: but knowing what it should do and how it should do it, that's what's expensive. And it's increasingly
Shane: Mm-hmm.
Josh Broward: expensive. And the other, the real life is trust is harder because so many things are fakeable.
Shane: Mm.
Josh Broward: And so like one of our clients does lead generation and they teach their sales reps to literally say in the first five seconds of the call, hey, thank you for taking the call. I just want you to know I'm not a robot.
Shane: wow.
Josh Broward: And then they have the sales call, you know.
Shane: Wow. That's that says a lot about where sales has been going lately, you know?
Josh Broward: Yeah, but then people start listening. I've talked to other startups who are doing things to enable people to meet in real life because you can't fake a face-to-face interaction. I mean, you can fake it, but it's not the same. It's much easier to build trust face-to-face.
Shane: Yes. Yeah, agreed. That's awesome. That's awesome to hear. I feel like, you know, I'm starting to feel and see some of that reflected in, you know, the my my news feed, my my you know, my LinkedIn feed, those kinds of things, conversations that I that I've been having that I'm starting to hear like grow in in you know how often I'm hearing those things come up in conversation of you know, like we even in even on our team, we've been talking more about like we want to keep the process of of of what we do when we're when we're supporting a client, we want to keep that human component active. You know, like whether that's a face-to-face meeting or if it's like, you know, user testing and bringing in a focus group and actually having real people, you know, to talk to, to interact with, you know, our team interacting with the client, the client interacting with their users, us interacting with their users. You know, there's just there's so much value in keeping that humanness to even to the technology that we're building. Like we still, you know, our the product that we're building is a a a product around having more effective meetings because we feel like meeting management, you know, is so much emphasis on AI and note taking, but there's not a lot of emphasis on meeting preparedness. And and to have a good meeting, you gotta be prepared, you know. So have an agenda, you know, use our product. We're launching soon. You know, I I'll plug it in there or maybe we'll drop a link or something. But
Josh Broward: you
Shane: It's called the agenda keeper, but the the idea is meetings still happen between people. You know, like we don't have teams of agents having meetings and making decisions. You know, there's still a person who's got a claim ownership for the decision to move forward. And if you're working with other people, you're gonna have to have meetings. You have to meet face to face. You can't fake that. Like you like you just said, I think that speaks to the value in that human connection, that human element of of making sure that that's still a part. of of what we're talking about when we're talking about technology. You know, like that that still very much lives at the heart of it for us, you know.
Josh Broward: Cool. Well, Shane, thank you so much for taking time to talk today. I really appreciate it. I love the conversation. I feel like we could go on for a lot longer. But
Shane: Yeah, agreed.
Josh Broward: for the sake of our listeners' schedules, we'll cut it here. But thank you.
Shane: Of course, Josh, thank you so much. And and again, if there's ever an opportunity to join in the future, I would I would I would leap at the chance and and otherwise I I I hope that this brings some value to the folks that are listening and and if they want to learn more, reach out to me or reach out to Josh.
Josh Broward: Thank you.
Josh Broward: Hey, welcome back to Founder Real Talk. I'm your host, Josh Broward. And if you are new to us, the podcast is hosted by Wisdom Partners and we work with startup founders all around the world, plus or minus seed stage a little bit. And one thing we hear all the time is being a founder is super lonely. And most of the time we, feel like we're doing something wrong, even if we're doing pretty good. And I think those things go together a lot. The loneliness and the sort of hidden nature or there's almost a unhealthy shame thing of making mistakes as founders. And so we hide from each other and none of that's healthy. It's not helpful for any of us. So this podcast is to get the real talk out in the open and make it normalize the struggle and and build some virtual community with among founders. today we have Shane Parreco Am I saying that right? I should have checked. Parreco. All right. All
Shane: That's all right. It's Parreco like Jericho, but that's close. I get Parreco all the time, no worries.
Josh Broward: right. Shane Parreco on the podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Aktiga which is a software development and product studio that builds all kinds of custom software. I started to list it all out and I was like, let's just call it custom software for all types of companies, startups, enterprises, and everywhere in between. another interesting fact, can, you might, see Shane is outside today. beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, where he's an advocate for the regional startup ecosystem. So people outside of the Bay Area, I might, A, might be surprised that there are startup ecosystems elsewhere. And B, just not know that... that in different regions, especially outside of major common startup hubs, there's a lot of work that goes into cultivating the local scene. So Shane, so great to have you here. I appreciate you taking some time.
Shane: Yeah, of course. I appreciate the invite and you know, to have an opportunity to have some real talk about the struggles of being a founder, especially in a startup ecosystem that is not the valley or not the Bay Area or not another major you know metropolis or, you know, populated area. It's the struggle I mean, I think what what a lot of people deal with in you know, in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley, there's you know, that sense of loneliness as a founder, that sense of that sense of struggle, it's kind of compounded in an environment like this where there's you know, there's fewer founders, there's fewer people, there's fewer support organizations, there's s there's fewer fewer resources, fewer opportunities for networking, fewer fewer ways to carry that burden and and share the load and And have an opportunity to have conversations about the struggle. just just it just kind of makes that whole experience as a founder even more lonely and even more challenging. And so so I I you know, when we first connected and and and you offered the ability to jump on the podcast and talk more, I was I was kind of thrilled because you know, being a a a tech entrepreneur and a tech founder, a startup founder in in Asheville in western North Carolina. especially since the impacts of the of Hurricane Helene and and how how it has, you know, like impacted business like kind of at at large and our our whole entire region and how dependent it is still on tourism, and how much of a hit so much of the of the region took because of that is just, you know, it's it's it's made that conversation even more meaningful. When I meet, you know, I meet a lot of tech folks, you know, so like engineers and product designers and developers and product managers and people who work for some of the biggest companies in California and in the Bay Area. they but they live here because living here is kind of amazing and it's a little bit of a you know, I I've heard Asheville called the San Francisco of the East. So I I I've been kind of holding on to that for a long time. It's it's a it's a it's an amazing place to, you know, to connect with. people, the art and music scene is is really vibrant and you know, but the impacts as an entrepreneur have been have been challenging. And to be to be a tech entrepreneur in this region is is not easy. And and there's not many of us, you know, I mean, I think I know all of the other tech entrepreneurs in Nashville. And there's, you know,
Josh Broward: you
Shane: I could probably count them on one or two hands, you know, so so I it the hope, my hope is by having an opportunity to talk about this it it brings some attention to the work that I'm doing here in Asheville. with my business Aktiga and the software development that we're doing for clients, the products that we're building and trying to bring to the market. You know, we're excited about this era that we live in now and how AI is accelerating, you know, and making things more affordable to build and deliver and deploy. And you know, just put sh it puts all that much additional pressure and and emphasis on on what you're building and why. You know, like who are you building it for? Are you solving a problem? Is is that problem and pain something that people are are willing to pay to solve and how much are they willing to pay, you know. So those questions from a product perspective still haven't changed in in from my from my perspective. So so yeah I'm I'm hoping that folks that that tune in and listen maybe reach out 'cause they want to follow up or or or maybe another entrepreneur hears the struggle and and they want to reach out to you, Josh, and and join the join the podcast and talk more. So I'm I'm excited to be here. Thank you.
Josh Broward: Great. One thing I think is interesting about what you're doing, especially in relation to this podcast, is it's a little bit different. You're kind of a dev house or a service based company rather than a venture backed SaaS play. Sometimes I joke, you can't throw a rock in San Francisco without hitting an AI founder. They're like,
Shane: Right.
Josh Broward: they're all over the and like
Shane: Yeah.
Josh Broward: you just sit down at a coffee shop and you're like 50-50 chance the guy next to you is a founder of something. So
Shane: Yeah. Totally.
Josh Broward: your approach is different but still genuinely part of the startup journey. Help us understand what problem you're really solving on a big picture with Actica.
Shane: Sure, yeah, no that's a great question. I think You know, we're because of this sort of the the nature of the business ecosystem in this part of the country, in this part of North Carolina, you know, a lot of people know more about, you know, the tech ecosystem in the Triangle region, Raleigh Durham, Chapel Hill, the Research Triangle. There's there's a lot of startup activity. There's a lot of venture backed businesses. There's probably half as many AI startups there as there are in the in the Bay Area and in the valley. Because everybody's, you know, kind of jumping into the deep end with with building products on top of AI, building products built on you know, like with AI as a core component of of what the product does or how it operates. so being in this part of of the state, you know, we're you know, we're not too far away, you know, North Carolina's not as big as California, but you it's Raleigh's a good three, four hours away. You know the further west you go in this part of of the country, especially when you get into, you know, the Appalachian Mountains and, you know, this kind of Appalachian region, it's it's much more spread out. It's much more rural. You know, the city of Asheville is, you know, it's teeny tiny. We maybe have a hundred thousand people that live in in town. And you know, like the Asheville metropolitan area, if you if you draw a big circle around it, you maybe get to half a million people. So we're we're not talking about a huge density of people. But, you know, what what we found as the the the value in the work and the approach. You know, I for in all in all honesty and all transparency, I did not start Aktiga to be a client services agency. I think that was more of a forcing function of, you know, bootstrapping and self funding of product business, a technology business in this part of the country. Not a lot of venture funding flows to this part of the state or really this part of the country. So I was like pretty committed to trying to build something on my own with my own money. and after almost two years of trying to make that work, the hurricane happened and really forced our my hand and forced my team. My team was still pretty small at the time. We were, you know, maybe eight people. And it was like, Hey, we're running out of money and now no one has money because, you know, we don't we haven't had power in a month and water in six weeks, and you know, we're hauling water in buckets to flush our toilets, which is Which gets old after a month and a half. and how can we keep this business alive? We're excited about the work that we're doing, you know, building the technology, especially at that time, a little over a year ago, year and a half ago now, is you know, it's exciting. AI is just starting to have these huge impacts on the development process and and it it's it's starting to feel like anything is possible and there's all this new magic, fairy dust on the on the software industry. and a lot of people got really excited about it. And obviously a lot of people went in really hard on AI and a lot of founders have started businesses and raised lots and lots of money because they're building AI businesses. and you know, without that as an option for us to say, hey, we'll just go raise some money, hey, we'll go, we'll go down the street and and have meetings with a dozen VCs and figure out which one can fund our vision. we had to figure out how to be more scrappy. And so it was like one of the things that we had landed on at that point was like, hey, we are a development company. We have a process. We really love shape up as a as an approach to planning sprints and running cycles and having design as a as an important component of our of our approach to building software. we basically were like, hey, as a team, if we're gonna keep this business alive and keep the lights on, what can we do to generate revenue? Hey, we know how to do this thing. Why don't we just offer that to people as a as a service? and almost immediately when we made that decision, we started finding people that were like, you guys know how to build software. I've got this idea, or hey, I have this legacy product, or you know, I used AI vibe coding, you know, lovable replit, you know, base 44, one of these tools to vibe code something up, but it keeps breaking. And now I need real engineers to help me with it. And so we just ended up kind of getting swamped with work really quickly. and the timing of that was kind of ideal. There was a Another Dev Shop software development company in town that had that had closed its doors you know maybe six months before. So there was kind of this gap in our market. And so bigger picture, what we're tr what we kind of stepped into was trying to become kind of the go-to technical partner, design, research, development team for the region. and and have been like, you know, I've just kind of been blown away at at how much work we've been able to find. You know, a lot of people are like, There's clients for you. In Asheville? In Western North Carolina? Like really? you haven't had to look in like Charlotte or Knoxville or Atlanta or you know, you haven't had to widen your circle to find clients. And and I've I've said like we only have had one client that's outside of our circle and they're in Charleston, South Carolina. Everybody else is literally in Asheville, in the city limits. So like we have in-person meetings regularly. The vast majority of our team now or up to twelve people are local in Asheville. We only have a couple folks that work remote. I feel really passionately about like building a local team and having an environment where people can collaborate in real time in person. and I get a lot of really great feedback from the team about how much value they get from that, how much how much fun it is to go into a room and to actually whiteboard something, not on Miro or not on some, you know, fig jam board. You know, it's so much more fun to actually take a physical sticky and post-it note and stick it on the board and move it around and think about how these You know, if we're thinking system design or if we're thinking UI or UX, you know, user flow, we're you know, it's like workshopping and and and brainstorming and and working through that collaboratively with with other humans in real time is something that I think a what I hear and what I experience is a lot of people are excited to do again. You know, it's not everybody wants to be in the office every day. I don't want to be in the office every day. I think the whole return to office policy is is is is insane. I think especially when you're talking about creative people. I'm also a musician. You know, I have my first degree is organizational leadership and business management. My second degree is music. And I worked for many years as an audio engineer. And so, you know, to put it a creative person in a time box is you know, unless they're performing on stage at a festival is one of the worst things you can do. You know, that's not when people are at their at their best. And so, you know, we have tr like adopted a philosophy and approach of having a fully hybrid, you know, fully flexible schedule. We don't keep hours. You know, we say, hey, work when you want to, where you want to, when you want to. If that's early in the morning and you're a morning person and you love coffee and you get fired up when you wake up in the morning and you want to get your work done, go for it. If you're if you're a a night owl and you want to work, you know, from from midnight to two AM or three AM or four A.M., like do that. I mean I As a as a perfect example, I was up last night at 3 a.m. until 5 30 this morning working on something because I couldn't sleep and I had an idea and I had to run with it. And so it it feels i irresponsible for me as a founder to to demand a box on people's productivity. You know, I think that's one of the things that I took away the most from my my time studying organizational leadership 20 years ago in my undergrad work was you know, how productive people are is always directly tied to how how much enjoyment, how much excitement, how much pride they get out of the work that they're doing. And if they're not enjoying their work, even for a few hours of the day, but they have to work because they're like on the clock or they have to be there from nine to five, the their work suffers and the output suffers and the business suffers as a result because You're asking people to perform and produce when they're not at their best. And so we've we've really tried to embody that. Like I've tried to embody that as a leader, and I've tried to really instill that philosophy in our people. And I think not only am I seeing that positive impact on my team, but from a bigger picture perspective, I'm seeing that open the door to more conversations with clients who are like, man, your team is so awesome. And we really loved talking with. You know, Rachel, she's our director of des research and design, or we really love talking with Morgan, she's our director of marketing. Or we really loved working with one of your engineers. You know, that's music to my ears. And it means that the environment that we're creating is not only making it a better place to work, but it's also making it a more successful business. And it's making our clients like take notice and and enjoy, you know, the act of collaborating with us to bring their thing to life, whether it's an idea or some new business that needs some some technology to reinforce it or some marketing support or some design or product research or user research or whatever that looks like. You know, people come to us and we we right size our services based on their needs and and and what we find is even that approach to asking and and working towards clarity and understanding, it's almost like working with AI. You've got to give it good context. You've got to get to clarity first before you try to do anything. Otherwise it's going to hallucinate all over the place. And and we're sort of taking the same approach to the way that we work with clients and and and it's working and so it's it's it's exciting. And you know, we're starting to do more work for nonprofits in the region. We're starting to see how technology, especially in this era where you can build things quickly and you can have an impact really quickly, nonprofits are some of the least resources, least techno technologically resourced organizations in the world. I think anyone who's ever served on a nonprofit board or volunteered hours with a nonprofit that they care about, they know that pain. Like technology in a nonprofit is almost always the thing that gets the lowest priority. Because there's, you know, there's fires to put out or there's things to address or, you know, there's other more pressing problems and more important parts of their workflow. And so technology always ends up at the bottom of the list. And so now we're able to make the barrier to entry lower. We're able to reduce the cost. And we're able to help folks. And you know, they love it. They get so excited. We just did a presentation yesterday for a homeless day center in town that we're building a new entry system for and and and data tracking system for, kind of like a you know, a restaurant POS system. And I mean, like the people in the room were almost brought to tears. They were so excited. I mean, these are organizations that are still literally printing out blank spreadsheets and filling them out by hand with a piece with a piece of paper and a pencil every day. so that they can then enter those things into a database at the end of the week. And so to have a system that automates that process for them is n not only is it gonna be impactful on their workflow, but it's gonna save them so much time that they're gonna be able to focus on the things that are more important, which is trying to trying to address homelessness. You know, I mean that's I don't know if there's many more amazing missions to to support. So, you know, we get a lot out of this work and we're really excited to see how this work as an agency and supporting clients and really identifying those, you know, either nonprofits or mission-driven organizations that really need our our support, how how we can help them because, you know, it's it's it just burns so much more meaning to the work. And and anybody who's working in who's been working in tech in like the corporate environment can speak very clearly to how easy it is to burn out because it doesn't feel like there's a lot of meaning to your work. And I feel like what we're experiencing here is is is very much the opposite.
Josh Broward: It sounds like, if I kind of summarize what you're saying, the problem you're solving is local access to software development.
Shane: Yeah, very much.
Josh Broward: Local personalized access. Because the homeless shelter... it probably never occurred to them that there would be a software-based solution for intake because they're so busy passing out blankets and plates of food. And it reminds me of one of our most popular blog posts. It is called The Power of Unsexy Customers.
Shane: Mm.
Josh Broward: Maybe it's most popular just because it has sexy in it. I'm not sure. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure
Shane: Or unsexy, right? Yeah, yeah, totally.
Josh Broward: if Google sort of helped us out there.
Shane: Nice.
Josh Broward: the idea is you can make a whole lot of money and do a whole lot of good just getting people not even up to date, but like just bringing them up to one decade behind.
Shane: Yeah. Exactly. I mean that's that's so true. I mean, that's what we're seeing. And we're we're bringing them all the way into a custom system that I mean, there was one one person in the room who's part of a larger, more broader focused effort and several other organizations that are part of this effort to address homelessness in the region. And and she was like, my gosh, we have to take this and share this with all these other organizations 'cause they're all gonna freak out, you know, and it's a It's that same kind of thing. It's this the impact of just getting them up to something that's that's decent. It's it's not AI. You know, like sure we're using AI to build it so we can go fast and keep the cost down. But, you know, it's not the most cutting edge. We're not talking about frontier models. We're not you know, we're we're we're not on the bleeding edge of of of VR or XR or whatever. But just getting them up to this level is is is super exciting and and and absolutely impactful for them. So it's it's cool to hear that you guys are already kind of thinking in that vein and and and thinking about unsexy and and how impactful unsexy can be, especially if it's it's something that has that much impact on on like a workflow of people who are stressed, you know, like working in the homeless world and and providing those services, passing out blankets, passing out food, tracking somebody's mail, just asking them for their real name, you know, and and building the trust to get them to share their real name. Like that's that's huge. You know, and making it so that it's easier on those people who are volunteering and working and doing doing that that work is you know it's it's it's awesome. It's it's really exciting for us to be to be a part of it in this region and and really excited to see what other doors this kind of work opens for us, you know.
Josh Broward: Yeah, I want to pull on another thread, because I part of what you're describing is... It's at least a thread in a movement or a realization that I'm seeing that kind of as AI gets stronger and it gets more ubiquitous, there is a unique value in essentially human things. So in your case, it's like having a physical body present. to smile at and talk to and shake hands with somebody who feels uncomfortable about technology or whatever, that opens them to the solution in a way that the coolest company from Palo Alto could never do.
Shane: Yeah, I think that I think I think you said it well. You know, having having the ability to have a conversation in person and to talk about technology in a way that's not scary, and it's not overwhelming and it's not presumptuous, like, you don't know the latest thing and and how behind the times are you? gosh, I don't even think I can have this conversation anymore kind of thing. You know, like just just meeting people where they are is is is very much ingrained into our approach and what what we're finding is that it it makes it so much easier for clients to feel comfortable and to say, hey, you guys clearly know what you're talking about. You're the ones with the expertise. We trust your judgment. Let's move forward. Like one of our first clients we got came to us and was, you know, was in the unfortunate situation where he had paid another development company elsewhere in the country to build some custom software for for him and his business. And it was not what he wanted and it didn't work well and it was really buggy and they were really slow to respond and and they went offline for the holiday and the thing broke and no one was there to fix it and and it left him in in a serious jam, you know, for his business, because a bunch of his business operated on this on this software. And then when the time came, you know, after the holidays to address the problem and say, Hey, we gotta get this sorted out, there was all this friction and it didn't end well. And and not only did it end did it not end well, he didn't end up with ownership of his product. They like they held on to the code base and they wouldn't give it to him and and then it was like, you know, the lawyers got involved and it got really messy. And so, you know, he's coming to us a little skittish and like, these technology people, you know, they're gonna screw you over. They're gonna take your money and then they're not gonna deliver on the thing that they said they were going to deliver. And and we and I was like, hey man, let's just let's just do a discovery. Let's just talk about what you need. Walk us through your process. And and help us understand, help us get the clarity about what you what you need. What are what are the problems you're experiencing? What are the pains in your process? And after like two weeks of mapping it all out with him, we landed on, you just need a CRM. Like here's one and here's another one, and pick one and pay for the seats and and ready to go. And he it blew his mind. And he was like, This is amazing. This is exactly what we needed. I wish these other folks would have just told me that, you know? And
Josh Broward: wish they hadn't built a thing that already exists in a hundred forms.
Shane: Yeah. Right? And in varying degrees of cost. And we picked one that was very affordable, you know, fifteen, twenty bucks a seat for a small team of half a dozen and and totally changed everything about how his business could run. And and it broke that dependency on a system that was fragile, that wasn't built well, that wasn't maintained well, that was being held kind of hostage from him. And it was his software. He paid him lots of money to build the software for him. And at the end he ended up with nothing. And so You know, the the lesson that I took from that and that I use in a lot of the conversations that we have now with clients is we're not here to sell you software. We're here to understand your problem. We're here to understand how we can help. Sometimes that's just a website, sometimes that's just some marketing content. Sometimes that is a full top-to-bottom research and design, custom development, custom product, you know, using modern frameworks and and solid deployment and good security and a good database. Sometimes that's the answer, but not always, you know. And sometimes we do discovery and we get to the end of it and it's like, hey, this idea that you have, it's not doable. You know, like the things that you want to do are not possible. And it's great that you have that idea. And, you know, maybe when AI gets to the point where it's, you
Josh Broward: You
Shane: know, conscious, it can build it for you. But right now, w with the humans and the technology that we have at our disposal, we can't make your thing happen. And so it's like, cool, high five, you didn't spend fifty thousand dollars to get there. You spend three. You know, and and you got FaceTime with warm bodies, with people who are listening and taking notes and trying to get to the root to understand what it was you're trying to do so that we could actually give them like honest feedback on on how doable it is, how how much of an opportunity is there in the market to do this kind of thing? Are there competitors? Are you gonna have to compete? Do you wanna compete? Do you just want to use one of these other software systems off the shelf because there's already so many out there? You know, and those are the questions that we always ask of the clients that come to us because we don't want to just sell for the sales sake. You know, we want to make sure that the work that we're doing actually is is gonna is gonna land well, it's gonna move the needle for the client, and it's gonna move them it's it's not only move the needle, but move them towards their goal or help them realize their thing. You know, I mean to me, you know, as a founder myself, I very well could see myself being a client of this business and coming in and being like, I've got this idea. And to be able to sit down and work through it and workshop it and brainstorm it out and and talk with people who know way more about technology than I do. You know, I think I I would have I would have jumped at that opportunity and saved myself money. But you know, I jumped into the deep end and started a tech business and I'm not an engineer. I'm not technical. I'm I'm I'm more of a business background person. But You know, I was really excited about the possibility with technology and the creative potential and then therefore the potential for working with really creative people. That part is what excites me. That's what gets me up in the morning. That's what gets me up at three in the morning. When I've got like this idea and I can't wait to share it with the team when everybody else wakes up later, you know, that kind of thing. Like that, that's part of the fun. That's part of the joy for me, you know.
Josh Broward: Cool. I love your story of how your team helped improve function for a... for the homeless shelter. We always ask people to share one of their wins, but we can just count that as one of your recent wins.
Shane: Yeah. For sure.
Josh Broward: But clearly, it's not all party hats. What is something you've learned just in the last year through failure or struggle?
Shane: You know, there there's been a couple things that have happened for us over the past year that have been hard. Obviously, if I go back a little bit more than a year, the impact of of Hurricane Helene on our business and on our region in general was significant, but it it it almost feels a little bit overplayed. in the region and how much effort there is into like still this ongoing like recovery effort and building resilience and how do we diversify our local economy and all that stuff. so I don't wanna I don't want to go too hard on that. There's still there's still a desperate need in this in this in this town for you know there were there were like over I think over fifteen hundred artist studios destroyed in the flood because the River Arts District was this haven for affordable, you know, post industrial space. For artists to have a studio, gallery, whatever. And it was a thriving aspect of Asheville, just just a little bit down the road from downtown. And all of those folks lost their lost their space. And many of them lost entire works of of like bodies of their work of of of art. so that's been like really devastating to witness. And a a bunch of our team members have volunteered with with different organizations in town trying to help with that recovery effort. So that feels less like a lesson from failure or from something hard, but really more just witnessing, a a catastrophic event, climate-related event in this part of the country. Hurricanes don't happen here. We're hours from the coast. You know, I've lived at the coast. I know what hurricanes are like. When you live at the coast, you're used to it. You know, it's like it's gonna rain, it's gonna be windy, we might lose power. Hurricane party, woo! it's kind of part of the experience of living on the coast, you know, there's always gonna be a chance that you're gonna experience that. But here in the in the mountains, was just it just it was unheard of. I mean, there were parts of town that got over over thirty five or forty inches of rain in a in a day. You know, so there's there it doesn't matter where that happens, if that happens, it's just gonna wreck everything. And the flooding was just was devastating. So, you know, to just put that down and put that aside. You know, if anybody wants to talk more about Hurricane Helene, I'd be happy to talk about that. Come to Asheville Bring your bring your family, come and visit. You know, they're they're encouraging everybody in town to say, tell people to come visit, you know, tell the tourists to come back. so I have to make that plug, at least on behalf of the Asheville people,
Josh Broward: You
Shane: the Asheville City folks that I'm connected to. so one of the things that I've learned this year that was probably one of the hardest lessons that I've had to learn as a found that I've had to learn as a founder was coming to coming like face to face with the reality of having made a personnel decision that was the wrong one. And it took me a really
Josh Broward: Hmm.
Shane: long time to realize it. and that was that was really really hard. You know, like us I in larger organizations, especially VC backed organizations, when you're hiring 10 or 20 or 30 or more people at a time, you know, and you have an organization that grows to a hundred or more really quickly, one person If it's not the right fit, you know, usually it works itself out. You might have an HR function that can help nip it in the bud or address the problem sooner than later. But but working on a smaller team in tech that's not V C backed, you know, we're not swimming in in in money. So we're we're having to pay people less than we should. You know, I I don't get paid a lot, you know, and that's one of the hard things about being a founder is knowing that I'm gonna get paid less than everybody for as long as it takes to hopefully get this business over the hump, is is is challenging, but What an impactful thing to have to live through of of thinking that I made the right decision on on a on a critical hire and and spending over a year working with that person to only realize at the end of that year, year and a half, that this is not only not the right person, but this has become toxic. And and that that toxicity has spread and now now I'm having to triage the entire team. because of the impact of of just picking one wrong person. and, you know, I think the lesson in there for me is, you know, maybe to be a little bit more mindful of the signs. You know, this this person was not just a hire off the street. This was a friend. so there was a little bit of like a personal overlap and like, no, it's working great. We'll figure it out, you know. And as it got closer and closer to the end, things got harder and more contentious and more frictiony and and really challenging to navigate and a lot of emotions and a lot of frustrations and and a lot of feeling like how did we end up here and and and gosh, like what in the world? Like this is one of the hardest, you know, emotional experiences that I've been through, personal experiences I've been through. It just so happens to be part of my business and professional experiences that I'm having to live through, which just made it that much harder. so not only did I lose, you know, an an an employee and and a really talented creative person as a part of our team, but I also feel like I kind of lost a friend, you know, and so that that was really hard. You know, the there it feels like the lessons are many. There's kind of this onion there that I've been peeling the layers on of like, okay, where did it where did I go wrong? Where did we go wrong? was it was it me not providing good guidance and structure? Was I too trusting and open and and left too much of a of a vacuum in terms of in terms of structure, in terms of expectations and agreements? Do I need to take a step back and reevaluate and reassess how we hire and who we hire and how we're setting those expectations and creating those agreements? and so it's it's definitely caused a lot of a lot of follow up conversations internally with me and my business partner. kind of our leadership team and you know it's it's it's it's been a an eye opener for sure. And so, you know, well I guess the the lesson to share with others is if you're on a small team and you don't have oodles of cash to just hire lots of people and you have to make you have to make an important hire, maybe don't hire a friend. And and if you do, make sure you do a lot of a lot of trial and a lot of testing and a lot of flushing it out. Don't go all in and commit all at once. You know, one of the things that I feel like I've had to do as a bootstrap founder is hire people in kind of stages like, Hey, let's do a thirty day trial part time. Let's do ten hours or twenty hours a week. Let's just see how it goes before we jump all the way into forty hours and and just expect that it's gonna work well. You know, I think In many ways that's one of the hardest parts of joining a new team. When you go from zero to full time, you know, there's this onboarding curve that you're climbing and you're how is this process and how do I fit in? And do I like my coworkers or do they hate me? Or am I am I qualified for this job? All the imposter syndrome stuff that comes up. it it just compounds, you know, the ability for someone new to perform at their at their peak, you know. And And and I've wanted to try to figure out some creative ways to remove some of that pressure and and create a little bit more space and say, hey, let's start slow. You know, it's like let's let's crawl before we walk, before we run, before we fly. You know, I I or or let's let's date before we get married. You know, I mean there's lots of metaphors that you can sprinkle in there, but I feel like that's one of the things that I really have been trying to integrate and and process after this after this. you know pretty major impact on the team and this this big emotional upheaval and and and you know massive ding on morale and you know not only did i have to let one person go but another person decided to leave because that person got let go so you know a small team we didn't just lose one person we lost two and that was even more impactful and so so a a lot of lessons there like go slow trust your instinct I've I've had to think more about trusting my instinct and and being more mindful of some of those not red flags, but maybe yellow flags or beige flags that come up earlier in the process and and don't just ignore those and and and I have to be able to say, was that a yellow flag? Do do I need was that like a yellow card, you know, in the in the World Cup kind of vein since we're since we're in that in that mode right now. Like is that a yellow
Josh Broward: Yeah.
Shane: card? Do we need to actually talk more and pull aside and say, hey, what actually is going on here? Is there something else? Let's let's dig into it. so so having some structure around that has felt like, okay, next time I think we're gonna be more prepared. I think the next hire that I make is gonna be much more thoughtful. It's gonna I'm gonna put a whole lot more time into it. I'm gonna spend more time interviewing folks and and and evaluating candidates. So that's that's felt like, you know, one of one of the hardest lessons that I've had to learn is is, you know, I love working with people. I wanna hire lots and lots of people. I'd love to have my business grow to hundreds, if not thousands of of of of people and employees working for the business and shareholders. and and at this point I'm still at the beginning of this journey. I I have to be really protective of my vision and I have to be really mindful of of who I bring into the fold and and make sure that they get it and they're excited about it as much as I am, you know.
Josh Broward: Thank you for sharing that. I think that's common problem. all founders have experienced some parts of that problem, I think.
Shane: Yeah. Yeah, the personnel part for sure.
Josh Broward: Yes.
Shane: That that's the tough one. People, we're hard to deal with, you know. I think that's part
Josh Broward: Yeah.
Shane: of why everyone's like AI's just gonna replace all the jobs because AI's so much easier to deal with, you know.
Josh Broward: Well, let's let me give you the mic. We've been, for
Shane: Okay.
Josh Broward: people who've been listening for a while, you might know we've started turning the interview around, giving the guests a chance to ask me a question. So go ahead.
Shane: Nice. Yeah, okay. perfect kind of segue 'cause my question is about AI and and kind of your your opinion of it. But what I feel like I've started to see happen, you know, there's there's kind of this wave of hype, which still feels like there's a pretty strong hype machine, you know, pumping the you know, the the benefits of AI. I feel like we're starting to see a softening of like the these aggressive like job replacement numbers and you know the big AI company CEOs sort of backtracking some of those statements a little bit like, well maybe we were a little ahead of ourselves there kind of thing. but even to even like today and yesterday, I'm I've been privy to or or you know, around conversations where I'm hearing two very different ends of the spectrum when it comes to what is AI good at? What is it not? What can it be trusted with? What can it not? What will it replace? What will it not? And so my question for for you, Josh, is like where do you feel like you fall in that spectrum is like, you know, AI is is the grand wizard and it's gonna replace jobs and it's gonna do everything better than humans can, or or AI is crazy and it just is is always gonna produce a bunch of slop and that's what probabilistic LLM models are are capable of. So it's always gonna hallucinate and it's always gonna be you're always gonna need humans driving it, you know, or or do you find, you know, like your perspective Are you using tools? Are you finding that drift? Are you seeing those hallucinations? Do you feel like you're somewhere in the middle or are you are you like a are you a full on believer or or are you a are you a hater? You know, I feel like it's the the believer hater spectrum. Where on the believer hater AI spectrum are you?
Josh Broward: Alright, yeah, great frame there. I would say I'm somewhere in the middle.
Shane: Okay.
Josh Broward: And in a couple of ways. I do think AI is here to stay. For sure there is a fad element. I literally heard a founder a couple of years ago say, we chose a .ai URL. so that we could get funding.
Shane: No surprise there.
Josh Broward: And you know, I think those days are, they haven't faded, but they're fading. People are becoming a little more realistic about what AI can and can't do. And so one trend I see, Well, let me start with what AI can do. AI is great at doing the boring, repetitive stuff that nobody wanted to do anyway.
Shane: Yeah.
Josh Broward: Shockingly, it's great at functioning like a machine.
Shane: Chocker.
Josh Broward: But we found out that there's a whole lot of stuff that are machine-like. Busy work stuff. Like filling in a spreadsheet. you multiply that exponentially. And I mean, that's just gonna happen. we're gonna have that. But it's not terribly different from the advent of word processor software replacing typists. It just got easy enough, it didn't make sense to have somebody else do this.
Shane: Mm. I was I I mean I was just thinking just to dovetail into that real quick, I don't want to derail, but it it feels very similar to when like the Xerox machine happened, you know. We had we had hand copies being made for all documents until the Xerox machine came along and everyone was like freaking out that it was gonna take all these jobs and all it did was make things run smoother, you know, go faster.
Josh Broward: Everybody kind of freaks out when new technology shows up. I don't remember where I saw this. It might have been at a World's Fair at some point where they did a retrospective, but it showed like commercials and like sort of futurists talking about when household appliances became a thing. And they're like, Oh, dishwashers and washing machines. They're going to like the future of automation is what, you know, they called it back then basically is going to free us up for a life of luxury. In 1980 will only work 20 hours a week, you know, was sort of their prediction. Yeah. And
Shane: Well.
Josh Broward: of course, none of that happened. Right. And I
Shane: Right. Yeah.
Josh Broward: think. what people forget is technology doesn't replace human workers. It makes human workers more efficient. so AI isn't, it's different-ish, but it's also not different in that way. I...
Shane: Right. It's just the next evolution of what technology is, right?
Josh Broward: Right, it's making, as people learn to use it and so right now people who are really good at using it have a competitive edge. And that'll continue for a while and then it'll just be like, everybody knows how to use Microsoft Office. Like, we don't need you to take a test to prove that you can run PowerPoint, you know, like.
Shane: Right.
Josh Broward: I mean, there was like certifications for that. And
Shane: I remember, yeah.
Josh Broward: it's just an assumed thing. I think AI will become so integrated into our workflows that it becomes just an assumed thing that of course you know how to ABC whatever that function is with AI or you don't even think about it. It just happens behind the scenes for most people.
Shane: Right, it's just an extension of the workflow.
Josh Broward: Yeah, I do think some of this, I've heard some really, we talked about it earlier about the importance of humanness. So a couple of trends that I think are worth noting here. One is. there is an increasing value for, I guess you might say for two things. One is wisdom or human judgment. the other,
Shane: Mm. Yeah. Discernment.
Josh Broward: yeah, the other is real life. Whether
Shane: Mm.
Josh Broward: that is a phone call or a video call or an in-person meeting.
Shane: Yeah.
Josh Broward: Partly because... So the human judgment is you can get, like software is cheap now basically, you can get software to do whatever,
Shane: Mm-hmm.
Josh Broward: but knowing what it should do and how it should do it, that's what's expensive. And it's increasingly
Shane: Mm-hmm.
Josh Broward: expensive. And the other, the real life is trust is harder because so many things are fakeable.
Shane: Mm.
Josh Broward: And so like one of our clients does lead generation and they teach their sales reps to literally say in the first five seconds of the call, hey, thank you for taking the call. I just want you to know I'm not a robot.
Shane: wow.
Josh Broward: And then they have the sales call, you know.
Shane: Wow. That's that says a lot about where sales has been going lately, you know?
Josh Broward: Yeah, but then people start listening. I've talked to other startups who are doing things to enable people to meet in real life because you can't fake a face-to-face interaction. I mean, you can fake it, but it's not the same. It's much easier to build trust face-to-face.
Shane: Yes. Yeah, agreed. That's awesome. That's awesome to hear. I feel like, you know, I'm starting to feel and see some of that reflected in, you know, the my my news feed, my my you know, my LinkedIn feed, those kinds of things, conversations that I that I've been having that I'm starting to hear like grow in in you know how often I'm hearing those things come up in conversation of you know, like we even in even on our team, we've been talking more about like we want to keep the process of of of what we do when we're when we're supporting a client, we want to keep that human component active. You know, like whether that's a face-to-face meeting or if it's like, you know, user testing and bringing in a focus group and actually having real people, you know, to talk to, to interact with, you know, our team interacting with the client, the client interacting with their users, us interacting with their users. You know, there's just there's so much value in keeping that humanness to even to the technology that we're building. Like we still, you know, our the product that we're building is a a a product around having more effective meetings because we feel like meeting management, you know, is so much emphasis on AI and note taking, but there's not a lot of emphasis on meeting preparedness. And and to have a good meeting, you gotta be prepared, you know. So have an agenda, you know, use our product. We're launching soon. You know, I I'll plug it in there or maybe we'll drop a link or something. But
Josh Broward: you
Shane: It's called the agenda keeper, but the the idea is meetings still happen between people. You know, like we don't have teams of agents having meetings and making decisions. You know, there's still a person who's got a claim ownership for the decision to move forward. And if you're working with other people, you're gonna have to have meetings. You have to meet face to face. You can't fake that. Like you like you just said, I think that speaks to the value in that human connection, that human element of of making sure that that's still a part. of of what we're talking about when we're talking about technology. You know, like that that still very much lives at the heart of it for us, you know.
Josh Broward: Cool. Well, Shane, thank you so much for taking time to talk today. I really appreciate it. I love the conversation. I feel like we could go on for a lot longer. But
Shane: Yeah, agreed.
Josh Broward: for the sake of our listeners' schedules, we'll cut it here. But thank you.
Shane: Of course, Josh, thank you so much. And and again, if there's ever an opportunity to join in the future, I would I would I would leap at the chance and and otherwise I I I hope that this brings some value to the folks that are listening and and if they want to learn more, reach out to me or reach out to Josh.
Josh Broward: Thank you.
