 Well, it's another exciting Wednesday here at Think Tech Hawaii, I'm Chris Leetham. The show is called The Economy and You, and today we're going to be talking a little bit about technology stuff. Hey, don't, don't, don't leave, we're, stay here, because this is going to be a kind of an interesting conversation. What we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk a little bit about how do you take a seat of an idea and germinate that into something like an application or a software idea or something that you can turn into some kind of a business for your livelihood. Because, you know, Hawaii is all about small business, and today's guest is somebody who's actually accomplished all of this. Today's guest is Gabe Mott. Gabe, welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, and thank you for coming to The Economy and You. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, you're welcome. And you started a company called, your latest venture is called Houdoku. Yeah. It's an application and it's built, what kind of technology did you use for that? So it's, it's built just for iPhones and iPads. So it's on iOS, and so it's built all natively using Objective-C. Objective-C. And so my partner Dave codes, and his, you know, his, his, his best code is Objective-C. Now you can code in Swift for, for iPhones and iPads. That's right. We're still, we're still using what we, what we already built this whole thing and moving forward with it. And, and there's also a platform called Xamarin. Xamarin. Xamarin. Yeah, I've heard of Xamarin. Okay, Xamarin is for all those Microsoft. .NET guys that want to be able to write iPhone apps, but we can't, we don't have it in us to learn Swift. So we have another platform called Xamarin which allows us to develop applications for the iPhone as well. So that's kind of a cool platform. But, you know, Gabe, I really wanted to talk to today's show, talk about this whole thing about where do you start? Because, you know, I had a great conversation with somebody for a couple hours last night and they have an idea for something. They have no programming background. They've never developed an application. But, oh, hey, I've got an idea that's going to make me buku box. And, you know, that's a, that's a much easier said than done. I, I mean, there's got to be as many ways to start as there are stories of starting, you know what I mean? I mean, I think, I think it, it all, it, I guess for us, like, it was an idea literally sketched out on an app in our first, our first project. And then it was talking to kind of anybody who would listen to begin to formulate the idea and asking for resources and not expecting them to do anything for you. They're not going to, you're not going out asking for help to have them do it for you. You got, you're just doing research and then you're getting online and you're getting a key word of something you heard from somebody and you're learning this stuff to figure out what are the next steps. And for us, the first kind of break for us was finding the perfect online forum of coders around the world who are willing to help because they like the idea of the project. So it was getting sort of buy-in into the project. Yeah, I think it, like having the passion about it, getting people excited, wanting to, and wanting, people, people like to help. Yeah, yeah. But they're, they're, they're unlikely to help finish as much as they are, help you just, you know, a small step along the way. Yeah, yeah. And so it just takes a lot of perseverance. So now how long did it take you to, to develop your first app, your first application that you worked on? What was the timeline on that? Sudoku's timeline was funny because my friend Dave is a developer and he at one point had said, hey, I can code anything. Do you have any ideas for an app? Let's do that. And I was like, well, yeah, here's the idea. You know, we had been working with color for about five or six years at that point and had an idea for this idea that you could make the Sudoku for color. And so I showed it to him what the idea was. And then like a few months passed. And one day out of the blue, I get this email and I can download on my phone the basic, basic version. So, but that was interesting because the basic, you know, ours is a color puzzle, like Sudoku. And the puzzle right off the bat, the funnest thing was it's an idea and then you get to play it. You get to see the thing in action. But that first step, even though it looks cool, I mean, you're not even close. No. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like that first layer is so easy, but every layer you add just gets more complicated. And like they say, the last little bit is just the longest and toughest to get through because you now have complicated code. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the thing about code is it sort of exponentially grows. Yeah. Yeah. The problem, of course, then is that when you write more code, you start to use more resources. You use more resources as things start to slow down. Things get, you know, you end up writing redundant code, doing things over and over and over again. And so you're looking for ways to sort of mitigate all that from a programming perspective. But just even the idea of coming up with an idea, sometimes I think it feels like it's a shot in the dark. Yeah. You know? Yeah. You have some idea and you're just going to throw it out there to the world and see what happens. And I think you really need to be creative and try different things. I mean, if I was starting right now, every month or so I get on one of those courses like Code Academy or Treehouse and I started making sure I'm kind of like up to speed on a little bit of code. But I think you can learn a lot of things. Yeah. And then this was like, you're an applicant here. This is essentially what you started. So September 20, I'd have to look at the year on that. But it was probably four or five years ago for this project where you see a little picture down in the corner there. I had an experience with design and arts and wanted to create an experience that everybody could share. And I imagined a room you walk into where you touch colors on the wall and the whole room changes colors. And I had no idea how to build that. I had no idea. I knew it would involve a projector, I assumed. But then to make things touch responsive. And it was literally, I think, the biggest piece of advice I could put out there is just make something. Just get it up and start showing it to people. Because let's say you have this idea for how it works. And you think you know the whole thing and you hire all this design team and coding team and they build it. But you could have put up one screen, in our case, had people walk in and start trying to interact with it and find out immediately that you've thought of something wrong. So that's kind of the philosophy we're doing is like the agile, iterate fast, release, test it, test it, get that cycle really sharp where you're putting stuff out and you're getting feedback on it and can make changes. And that's a very different design approach than say somebody who comes from my background, which is there's already established business practices. Like I've developed software for companies, businesses. I'm trying to figure out ways to streamline their business processes, reduce redundancy, figure out how to make their business more efficient. I'm operating at a very different level in terms of software development. So there are those types of platform, that type of development where a waterfall approach is more consistent with achieving results. Although at some point you do end up in sort of an iterative state. But in the beginning phase of software development, if Zurich will bring that slide back up again, is you start with requirements, gathering and analysis. And I've underlined it because that's really what today's topic is about. It's about that sort of gathering the ideas and putting things together and doing your homework. And then when you were doing your homework, you were going out on the web, you were talking to folks, you were talking to development teams. We were doing surveys through MailChimp, literally tabulating surveys. We were doing, we would then release mechanical Turk. You can pay a small amount, and Amazon runs a system where they'll put up, you can get user testing. People will say, I prefer this screen to this screen. We had a focus group. We were in the blue startup of Six-Celerator, and we had one of our mentors was Wanda, who was this incredible marketing person, and she led a focus group for us. And that was part of getting our requirements and that documented. And I think for someone who's new at this, it really helps to understand that like, when you show your friend an idea, they're gonna say, that's cool, right? Your friends always tell you stuff is cool because well, they like you, you know? Yeah, and even someone who doesn't know you, like we would go to Starbucks and buy somebody a coffee and say, hey, will you spend five, 10 minutes with us and just try this? And they say, oh, where do I push? And you gotta like, not, because what happens is you explain how to use it. Yeah, you can't do that. You can't do it. Yeah. But it's a lot harder than you think. You think, oh yeah, I can do that. I can keep my mouth shut and just like have them experience it. But like we were saying earlier when we talked on the phone, I think it's more revealing what they don't say, right? And how they behave, interacting with it as you're kind of building those requirements, you know? And then the thing is, how do you make sure that you're not doing testing that's sort of vanity testing or you're asking vanity questions where you're sort of elucidating a response. Because you love the answer you have and you want to get it to say, yeah, that's right, yeah. You really want this feature, right? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Now, so what kind of like when you started learning to sort of figure out like how to sort of take this idea and germinate it into something beneficial or useful, how many iterations do you think you've gone through so far? I mean, it's, I mean, we were putting out releases, you know, like we had two digits, you know, in our release, it was like 0.01, right? And we got up to 0.99, like way before, we were ready for 1.00, so I mean hundreds. We've got hundreds, we've got hundreds of builds. Yeah. Okay, so it's an ongoing process. Yeah. Now how long have you been at this working on Hudoku? From the original C probably two years, you know, but then I said like it was like about three or four months before, and I even knew that, you know, Dave was actually building it and had something to start with, but then we started it in Maui, you know, and we were doing other things and we kind of like started, you know, building this on the side, and then a few months later, we had a chance to kind of show it to an audience at an event and we had 500 people kind of play with it, and we're like, oh, this is, this could be something. And then it was like, it took all that time before we were like, oh, we're gonna actually make a startup and incorporate and try to like bring this out to the world. So now, two years, that's a lot of time on a software application. Yeah. That's a long time. Yeah. So how do you maintain your energy? Oh, that's a great question. I think the thing about what any sort of startup gets into is you realize the lows are really low. They're really hard. Nobody else cares about you anymore. And you're on this like vacuum. It's not feeling any low. You're just going along. But then the highs, we went to Europe to launch our beta of this newest app two months ago at StartupFest Europe. And because we were like from Hawaii, they were like, what are you doing here? And we stood out and we got to meet with like these world-class museums. Like the Prince of Holland got us connected to the museums out there. And so those highs are just like really high, much more thrilling I think than an regular job for me. Wow, wow. And so let's go back and sort of focus in on what we're talking about, sort of the getting this going. So I would like to have Zuri bring up the next slide if you don't mind Zuri. Okay, so one of the things that we use to try and help us sort of map our ideas is something called UML modeling. And we use things like case diagrams, which is basically a graphical depiction of the interactions among the elements of the system. So in other words, this is sort of what the user's doing, you know. So a user is sort of an actor and you build a use case scenario and you talk about the things that the user's going to be doing with the application. Now these are tools that also help you to sort of define your ideas and also communicate them with your developers, right? So and one of the reasons I wanted to bring this up is because these are tools that if you're going to develop software, I feel help you get your point across, make your point, lay out your ideas and your concepts in a meaningful way. And so I don't know, Zuri, could you bring up the diagram of the stick, the little people, the one that has a couple of characters on each side and all the bubbles, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a use case diagram of somebody going up and walking up to an ATM machine and using the ATM. So you're gonna insert your card, you're gonna enter your PIN number, you're gonna select an account and then select a dollar amount and so on. So this is sort of defining what the user's doing. Now, in the use case diagram like this, so you may have a security system that's doing some validation and checks to make sure, one, it's not a stolen card. Two, that maybe you got actual money in the account, you know, that you're taking out and if the card is stolen or something like that, that it would take the card. And also, now if the card isn't stolen, of course, when the transaction is over, give you your card back, you know. So this is an idea of what a scenario, what that kind of a scenario looks like. Now, for your software, okay, you have probably from the user's perspective, you have a lot more going on, there's a lot more interaction. I'm curious if you do this too with enterprise stuff, but like for us, it was really important to take the use case, let's say an art teacher in the classroom, that's a use case. She's gonna teach some color concepts to some students. So that would be one use case and that would be a designer who wants to help some clients brainstorm on colors. Two different uses, but our app fits both of those. And so I don't know if you guys did this, but we would take that example of that teacher and we would literally create a persona. This is a woman in her 40s, she does this in the classroom and try to like really understand everything she does outside of the app and then we put the app in her hand and we try to draw it, illustrate a story. Like what story are we telling with her and how does the app need to best respond to her? Kind of like earlier you said, we have our own preconceived ideas that we should do, but we find out she wants just that one button right there, not all these other features here. Yeah, it's called feature adoption. So yeah, so we're gonna take a quick break. We got a one minute commercial break that we're gonna take and we're gonna come right back. And that's actually a very interesting point. So we're gonna talk about that more here at The Economy and you and we'll see you in just one moment. Aloha, this is Reg Baker with Business in Hawaii. We're a show that broadcasts every Thursday at two o'clock. We would love to hear from you and you can reach us in several different ways. We have a hotline that you can call in at 415-871-2474 or you can email us at thinktecawaii.com or you can tweet us at thinktec-hi. Looking forward to hearing from you and seeing you on our next show. Aloha. Hey everybody, my name is David Chang and I am a new host for the show, The Art of Thinking Smart. I'm really excited to be able to share with you how to get the smart edge in life. We're gonna have awesome guests in the military, business, political, nonprofit world. So no matter what background you're from, we have something for you. Please join us every other Thursday at 10 a.m. at thinktec-hawaii.com or on the art of thinkingsmart.com. I look forward to seeing you. Yeah, and we're back. Hi, I'm Chris Lietzman, this is the economy and you thank you for watching. We're talking about developing software, developing an idea and converting that from the napkin and turning it into a code or turning it into a computer program that people will actually get a chance to use and sort of what that's like and what it takes to get involved in that and get started. And today's guest is Gabe Montt. Gabe works with, has been developing a software called Houdoku, Houdoku, let me say that right, which is an iOS app that works on your phone. And I guess it's a game or is it like with objectives? Well, we see the idea of color, like the color perception, understanding color, like we see that it actually is a really important thing for people now that everybody has iPhones and smartphones and screens and is producing imagery and the power of the image as a means of communication as everything more powerful than it is today. Like it's always been true, the image is worth 1,000 words but we believe that people don't actually know how to sort of have much visual literacy and speak color grammar, so how do they see color? So our app is a tool that helps you do that, but it also right now, the new app is a photo sharing app. Where you're probably on Facebook, maybe I don't know if you know people that are on Facebook. Yes, I would deny it though, I'm not there so my daughters don't can keep posting stuff, sorry. And they put Instagram and your daughter's probably like, how many likes did I get? How many likes did I get? We sort of think people are looking for a deeper experience of photo sharing. Like, did you really look at my photo? Did you actually spend time with this photo from my trip to Madagascar? Did you look at it? And so what I would do, I would take a photo, wrap it into a color puzzle, send it to you or post it on the feed and you have to solve the puzzle to get the reveal which is the photo. And so we're positioning this as a way to engage deeper, to slow down, relax, get color therapy and also see it as a brain cognition tool. Well, that's interesting because we stop reading, we now we scan, right? We now don't even read stuff and if it takes me more than two seconds to read it, yeah, I start to wander. My brain starts to go in different places and I'm going, wow, I can't believe my attention span has turned into this sort of two, less than two seconds or I'm ready to move on to something else and I'm lazy, I've gotten lazy now. I don't like to read, I just go to video. I mean, don't you think, it may be it's going to get worse but I think almost all of us that have our little phone devices, I think we all have that feeling of we're on it too much, we have this addiction to it, it's this technology, it's making us even less and our attention span shorter and shorter. And that's it, we're becoming less engaging, I think, in communication and in conversation. With each other, yeah, yeah. And I sort of think there's probably already but there's sort of a backlash against that of like people taking a weekend off of a screen, there are apps, there's an app called Calm that I use, it's a meditation app and it sets up like every day, five minutes and it's funny because it's using technology to try to be more engaged with the world and yourself but we sort of see Hidoku in line with those kinds of apps, we're not trying to make you sort of more of a digital addicted being but you step back and use color therapy. See, I went and joined Zen Monastery when I was in my 20s, it's been a year there, so I'm like, that was my way of getting away from the world and but now we've got an app for that. You're Zen Monastery, they do have one called 40 Years of Zen and you get your 40 Years of Zen, they measure your brain waves and tell you the same results from this like one month program biofeedback. Somehow it just doesn't feel as deep and meaningful. It doesn't sound like it, yeah, it doesn't. So let's get back to what we were talking about because this is really when we, I wanted to have this show because I want to encourage folks out there, if you've got an idea, don't be afraid to step up and engage and find resources and talk to other people about your idea. You may have some, and I hate to use this word, paradigm shifts as you go along and realizing that maybe your original idea didn't have enough, it didn't have a lot of legs to it. Maybe it sounded really good but maybe it didn't have a lot of legs and so sometimes what you're doing is you take that original idea and you pivot into different directions and maybe you go into a different direction but also one of the things that we talked about is as you're developing the app, as you said, you wanted to get feedback from the users. One of the issues early in cell phone or smart phone marketing was feature adoption. In not just in terms of all the things that you can do with a phone, I mean most of us don't use everything that's on our phone. And if we're developing an application, what parts of that application are being adopted? Which ones are easy to use and which ones require a little more thought and maybe need more effort in the design? That's funny, I had a meeting with some younger guys that were applying to our program and they had this really cool idea for an app and they were like, how do we get a developer? And they were so fixated on how do we get a developer? And I was like, God, once you find a developer, you still have a lot of work to do on your end. I was like, you guys sit down and look at, draw your little screen and every button there, you need to describe exactly what happens when you click that button. All the possibilities. What happens if they close the app right now? And you need to draw those out like the chart you're talking about. You can do that. You can start learning how to do that but it's just logic and steps and a lot of work, right? Oh yeah, and then of course that's not even considering all the aspects that a programmer has to look at because if you're a developer then you're gonna look at things like the architecture. Is it gonna be used across multiple platforms? If it's only gonna be work across a phone and it can all be self-contained, great, that's great. But if it's an application that's gonna be used across multiple platforms then you have to sort of have all your business logic as a separate platform and then whatever interface that you have is gonna connect to that. But basically it's a separate development environment. My co-founder and I would have these battles where I don't know if this is at all true in the enterprise software world but with the app you've got lots of SDKs where third party companies have built the automated, small piece you can put into your code and he just fights me. No more SDKs, no more SDKs. And I'm like, yeah, but this one's gonna tell us how many of our audiences coming back and will segment them. Yeah, except the next build that they have breaks your code. That's exactly what happens. Don't do that to me. I don't want you breaking my code. Because then you, so here are the things that sort of the weird and the wonderful about and the exciting thing of software development is that you've got all these people out there doing all kinds of weird and wonderful things that you can go and grab and use but you also have to remember that you may use it in a testing environment but you're not gonna wanna release in your release code, you're not gonna wanna have that in there. Right, right. Well, I'm not gonna let him watch this show. Yeah. It is funny, we probably have like 10 different SDKs in there and that's his thing. He's like, they're gonna go out of business. But what happens, one of them fails and it's like that brings everything down. So yeah, that's a thing you gotta consider. Yeah, yeah, because you know you need to know one of the things of course with your right application is that it's got some way of handling those issues. If something fails that your application has some sort of dependency on, can you get around that? If you can't get around it, it brings your app, it's a chain of events, it brings you down with it. So these are all sort of the exciting things. And of course, if your applications are data driven and you've got data back in, back ends to these things, of course, is that connectivity is an imperative? What happens if you don't have connectivity? Will it still work? Will it allow you to do certain things and then when it gets connectivity, sort of push out or go back and retrace some of the stuff that it's done previously. And we have two of our sort of heaviest users are on the airplane all the time and they loved our first app because it worked offline. The new one is all cloud-based, all getting these live puzzles and it doesn't work. And we've got to balance these people that are putting a lot of pressure on us to make the offline version with how much work that is and is it worth it for the other users? How, where does that rank on the needs from our user base? So how do people find out about your app? I mean, one of the reasons I asked you on the show is so you could tell people about Hudoku and where do they find it? How do they download it? Is it available? It's available now. We have on the App Store, you can just go to the App Store for, totally for iOS, right now, not Android. Okay, just for the iOS right now. You go to the App Store and you just type in Hudoku, H-U-E-D-O-K-U and we have another one called Same, Same or Different. It's a game about color relativity. You can kind of like pick whether these colors are the same or different and it kind of tests your vision. Boy, if you're a colorblind, that must really tick them off. I know it's funny, we have a button. You can, people with a colorblind can filter and see just puzzles that they can solve that have red and green removed from those. Is that right? Okay, cool. But the funnest one, if anybody's actually into this, likes color, wants to hide photos and share them behind puzzles, sign up for our beta. And that's Hudoku.xyz and then you can get the beta version that's actually live in Holland and you can see what all the Dutch are doing right now. Okay, very cool. Well, it was great having you on the show, Gabe. And thank you so much for coming on. I mean, one thing about this show, we don't always know, we have one person that may have signed up to be on the show, but somebody else gets them before you do and so I'm glad you decided to come on today. Absolutely. It was absolutely fun. Pleasure to meet you. And I'm Chris Lethem. This is The Economy New and I hope to catch you next week right here on OC16 with Think Tech Hawaii. And I'll see you all next time. Ha ha, thank you. Cool, that was fun. Yeah, yeah.