 This is State Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. And aloha, how you doing? Gordo the Texar here. Welcome to another exciting and thrilling episode of Hibachi Talk. Grab yourself a libation, pull up a chair, sit down and join us, and we're going to have a ton of fun. And remember when Hibachi Talks, the world listens. Anyway, so I love saying that. It's so awesome. I think it's really important. Anyway, we have a great guest today, and we have a great subject matter today. Anyone thinks about developing apps? This is the man we need to talk to. We have an exologist extraordinaire, a visionary. But we also have my other favorite co-host, Rick's the Fundmeister. How are you doing there, bud? I'm doing well, Gordo. How are you? I'm good, eh? You just got back from Canada. I did. And what do you think of Canadians? Pardon? What do you think of Canadians? Be careful. You know what? The weather was just a wee bit cold. I didn't ask you about the weather. But we had a fabulous time. They are kind of nice people, aren't they? They are kind of nice. I know, thank goodness for that. So I'm glad you had a nice trip and stimulated their economy. They needed to do that. Anyway, I have Mark Sullivan. Mark is a, I call you a cocktail visionary. I like that. Because you've written cocktail books. You've created an incredible mobile app, which we're gonna talk about in great detail. But what we like to do is get a little background on our guests. Tell us, like, so where did you grow up? Burlington, Vermont. The Great White Coats. Oh, did they make carpets? Burlington. Call it this way, the Coats. Oh, Coats. Oh, the Frog Burlington. Okay, so Burlington, Vermont. Yeah, yeah. Raised there, high school, college, went to college there. Learned a 10 bar there in the 80s, late 80s, was some of the new while I was going to school. Worked at a large seafood house there for a while. Got a little college bar and then came out here. So you've been in the mixology business for quite some time? That's true. You look pretty healthy for someone who's been in the mixology business for quite some time. Thank you. So how long have you been in the industry? I mean, it's just a while. Well, yeah, from 86 to now, it's what? 80 and all. 30 years? 30 years. 30 years in the business. So you've seen a lot of changes. Yes, I have. So and, but why? Why would you get into this form of occupation as opposed to Mr. Maurer who just likes to count money? What's important is sort of the drinkology. That's true. There's the mixology and the drinkology. It's fun to do, meet lots of outstanding, interesting people. Nice word outstanding, I like that. And I don't know, I've worked in all sorts of situations, find dining and beach and pool and... Yeah, cause you've been in high-end restaurants. That's right, that's right. You've been in beach and pool, like you said. You're now up at the Pacific Club. You've been up there for downtown Honolulu for over a year. You're one of my favorite beverage aficionados. Oh, thank you. Over there, I come up with all these great words. So anyway, so you got into this business for a long time, but I would tell you a little bit about it because you've written also written a couple of books. And so I saw one of them online was sell for $600. A steal. I know, it included shipping. And I'm not making this up, I saw, we were looking one day and I went, look, Mark, here's your book. Someone's selling it for $639, shipping included. It must be really a good book. It is a good book, I don't know if it's that good. Yeah, it's a couple of books, just the original cocktail recipes, they were fun to do. But we're in the 21st century now, so I thought we would go mobile. So then you went mobile. So you decided you're gonna create, and then when you're looking around the table here, you say, we have a few of Mark's recipes. Look at you rubbing his hands together. So these are some of Mark's Jell-O-Shots from his mobile app Jell-O-Shot Pro. That's right. And we're gonna talk about if someone wants to develop a mobile app, what it takes to do that. Because you think about, you're not a young geeky guy. No. No offense. Kind of tech-savvy, but not that much. You're not the kind of vision I would have of someone who wants to create a mobile app. Right. And just not like him either. I'm with him, but I don't have a mobile app. He's not even a mobile app. In your case, we developed an in-mobile app. I only bring you on the show to abuse you, son. An in-mobile app, you know, that brings a whole different context. Yes, that's more of not intake, but sort of. Okay, so the other end of that. The other end of that's true. So what possessed you to say, okay, I'm gonna make a mobile app Jell-O-Shot Pro? Well, I've been making these things for parties and barbecues and stuff like that for over 20 years now, just coming up with my own original recipes. And over the past few years, every time I made them for a party or for whatever reason like an event, somebody would say to me, you know, there should be an app for me to do this. So now, if I recall, you make Jell-O-Shots for the Pro Bowl or something, when you go to the Pro Bowl or something? That's how we got started with it. Okay. Back in, I think it was 1996, we had 10 tickets to the ball game. Okay. My sister was visiting from the mainland and I wanted to do something a little kind of different, you know, for the tailgate. For the tailgate. So I thought we'll make some Jell-O-Shots. I didn't do anything fancy, but I made five batches of 15, so I made 75 of them for this. 75 Jell-O-Shots. 10 person. For 10 persons. Tailgate party and you were gone like that. Whoa. I can understand why. They're just gone. I did not make enough. It was not enough. So then that starts to stimulate. So how did you make the next year? Next time around, I thought, well, that wasn't enough. Let's double it. Let's make 150. Same amount of people there. 10, 15 people or so, you know, just having fun before the ball game. Gone like that. Go. Go. The kids slept well. Thankfully, I didn't have children back then, but. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So that wasn't enough. So the next time around, we had a few more tickets to the ball game. I think we had 20 that year. Yeah. So my friends are like, you know what you have to do? Not. You had to, so you had 150. Don't tell me you doubled it again. You doubled it. 300. 300. Were you selling them in the stands or what? I didn't have to. Didn't have to. You know why? They were gone before game time. Oh, wow. So you listed to come up with some pretty good recipes then that they were pretty popular. But how long would it, don't tell me you made more than 300. What's the most you've ever made? Oh, well, a year after that, I doubled it again and that was 600. And then after that, I sort of dared to do 1200, but I didn't really. Yeah, no kidding. How much, who has that much refrigerator space? Nobody. All this food's going back, keeping your jello shots chilled down. That's right, that's right. We've come up with so many, making so many of them, I thought, well, we'll make some funky recipes. So I started adapting cocktails for jello, like making Mai Tai jello shots or pina colada kind of stuff for kamikaze, margaritas, strawberry margaritas, the whole bit. So, and jello shots have been around for how long? Do you remember jello sets growing up? Yeah, well, yes I do. Okay. As near as I can remember. Yeah, I mean, I'm... Sort of in the college days, I... I never went to college, so I never got to experience your experience. Because you went to Berkeley? I did go to Berkeley. Oh, did you? Did you actually know how to make things in Berkeley like jello shots? I mean, that's meant spending in a kitchen. Yeah. We were, we were... All the Berkeley fans... We were nodding. I'm gonna be getting text messages like crazy now. So... I don't exactly remember where it was. I know it wasn't in a kitchen per se, but yes. When you were making them or drinking them or eating them or whatever it was you do with a jello set. Yeah, I couldn't eat it. Neither of them, neither of those locations were generally in a kitchen. That's right, okay. So, you use 600 jello shots. Okay, how many refrigerators did you have to put 600 jello shots in? Two. Filled them. I started it a couple of weeks in advance. It was a dare. It was a challenge that I had to meet. No wonder third world countries hate us. That's going on. So 600 jello shots, you go to the Pro Bowl. Thank you for supporting the Pro Bowl, which we don't have here anymore. Yeah, that's well. Well, I'll see you at the UH Games. So you got into the jello shots and then you've been doing this business for a long time. So now you decide what, I'm gonna make an app? Well, we were talking about whenever I would make them, somebody would say to me, there really should be an app for this. This would be perfect for an app. And at first, I just kind of blew it off one because I wasn't sure if it would be really functional that way. Right, too, I thought there had to be at least a dozen of them out there already anyway. So why would I want to be part of the pack? Right, and I checked on Apple and I checked on Google and I found two of which one is yours? One's mine. And so amazing. I did the same thing about a year and a half ago. I said, well, let's look into it. Let's see if there really are any out there and see if they're any good or if they do the kind of stuff that I do and there weren't. So I've got a picture that shows some of your, from your app and we'll talk about going through that development process in the second half of the show. But you know, everything you need to know about making Jell-O-Shots like a pro, but also in this show, we're gonna talk about how to make the app and how it get it put up on the way. But this is right from Mark's app, which is so cool. And the graphics are great. And Hawaiian logo on there. I like the logo. I like the color. It's very inviting. We were going for a kind of a retro Tiki kind of feel with like the beach sand and all that. It's really, really nice. So how many recipes? 75. 75 recipes. 75 recipes. Yup. Who's in charge of quality control? And why are you looking at me like that? You guys during the break. During the break, I'm in charge of quality control. And if you do quality control, I'll monitor him. Absolutely. So 75 recipes. That's what I've been making for years and they've all been crowd pleasers. I have over 100 recipes, but I came down to, thought this was a nice round number and all of the recipes in the app are all that I've made dozens and dozens of times. Everybody loves them. And you've got in the app too, and is there some secrets about making these correctly? And so, sure. We did a little section for like a how-to make them yourself. Things you'll need, sort of like kitchen equipment that you need. Your DIY do it yourself, I think. And then we had a little section on tips and tricks on how to make them come out right every single time. Yeah, I know. One of the things I think is you don't, what's that, don't use sugar-free? That's right, because jello shots come out a little less firm than regular jello. Okay. And if you use sugar-free jello, it comes out even less firm than that. So it ends up being all gooey and kind of like that. It's a gooey shot. So don't use sugar-free. It's raw. Okay. Sorry, you're talking about that. So, I wouldn't say that. That just wouldn't work. So it comes out a little bit so less. So you got, so there's tips and techniques in this. So it's not just the recipes, there's tips and techniques. Do I get, so, well, I have an idea for a jello shot pro 2.0. We get to rate them. Ooh. Or I get to go through all of them. And drive. You can do it. I'll call my internalist and say, my liver's about to be shot. So we'll go. We can rate the different flavors on jello. Yeah. See, there you go. Yeah, you can use my liver as a gauge. There you go. What's going on? You still have one. Well, it's out for debate right now. The liver is out for debate. So, so all of these 75 you have experienced in your lifetime. Oh yeah. Every single one. And you look so young. It's amazing. Thank you. Well, not every day. No, not, okay. Oh, okay. That's a clarification there. Not every day. So, so they got 75. So what's the most popular one that you would, that you see right now? Oh, by far, that one right there. The acid one? Surfer on acid? By far. By far? Okay. I have not tried the surfer on acid. We should hurry up for the break. We can arrange that over the break. One'll be missing shortly after the comeback is one guy. So, that one by far. By far. Has Jagermeister and Shambord and coconut rum in it. Oh, sounds, it sounds. By far the best one of the bunch. Okay, so anyway, we're coming up on halfway through. So like I said, we talk about this and then we're gonna talk about how you got this app published and how you got it up on all the different sites which is in and of itself a challenge. I go through a lot of these Jell-O-Shop pros just to get the damn thing there. Anyway, so we'll be back in a minute. In case you haven't realized, we're talking about a mobile app development. Jell-O-Shop. Jell-O-Shop with Mark Sullivan and Rick's the fundraiser. He's so cheap he won't even buy the Jell-O-Shop. I have to buy them for him. Anyway, we'll be back in a minute when Angus has a gadget. I can hardly wait. 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On behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech Hawaii's 30-plus weekly shows, thank you for your generosity. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. And welcome back to Hibachi Talk. And we've got Angus coming back here to give us a gadget. Angus, Angus, buddy. How you doing? Over here, buddy. Look to the camera. There you go. Oh, hey, Alex. How you doing today? Wow, we're doing real well. Hey, mister, hey, sir. How's it going, sir? Awesome. Oh, I see you have Ed Sullivan here. Is that your uncle? That's one of them. That's awesome. You know, I really love your jello shots. Oh, thank you. Oh, so good. Anyway, I gotta figure out a way to make it faster. So I got a gadget for you. Very thematic. Make the show thematic. It's called a jellynator. Oh, what's that? Yeah, well, I got a picture of it. And it's actually a real gadget. You can make your jello shots faster. Faster. Faster. Wow. So get ready. You know that 1,200? You're going to make 1,200 of them. And you got that gadget right here. So my gadget on the link is the jellynator. Or the jellynator or the jelly terminator. You know, I had one of those jelly thingies early, and I couldn't talk anymore. I'm losing my sight. Not really good. Anyway, Mark, thank you for introducing me to Jello Shot Pro. I can hardly wait to 2.0. And as I say it behind the back of my segment, let your wing gang be free, or here you be. Aloha, go jello. Well, thanks, Angus. That's really good. We're glad that you're here with us today. And we're going to be looking for the jellynator. I think that that might be a way to consume them. I think we ought to get one for the show, a jellynator. Just have it hanging around every day. Yeah, well, let's put it on a drone and throw it over it. Perfect. OK, so the first part of the show, we talked about your background. And you've been in this business a long time. We talked about the recipes and everything is happening. So now you've got this mobile app. OK, so when you don't have the mobile app, you've got to develop it. So what do you do? How do you develop a mobile app? Well, first off, I decided to get all the content I wanted to put on there ready. So we went through all the recipes and cleaned up the wording and all that. And wrote the little bits about how to and the tips and tricks and all that stuff. And then I set about shooting photos for each one. So I thought each recipe should have a photo to show what you're going to turn out with. And that took some time making shots of all different colors and putting them in shot glasses and plastic cups and things like that. Where was quality control? Did you have to call me again? I know. I don't think we had met. I know we had not. I was a while ago. And I shot the photos in my kitchen with my sons who were 8 and 10 at the time, helping me stage the photos with flowers and little hool dolls and all that stuff. They must have had. There's a dad child bond. They had a ball. And they're quite proud of their work. And so am I. They did a really awesome job. That's very cool. And so we got all the content together. And then I thought, well, how am I going to build it? Yeah. How are you going to build it? Can I do it myself? You're not a pro there or something. I have kind of rudimentary skills and HTML and stuff, but just not really enough to do that. So I looked around it. There are lots of places online where you can get some DIY software. There are lots of people online that you can hire to do it. And I looked into the DIY stuff. And it was just way past my knowledge, experience, and my pay grade, really, to get to that. Well, you get a lot of tips. That's what I do, but still. But still. That's not in the grade. So there are a couple of services that I tried, but I just could not get the app I was trying to build to do what I wanted it to do. So you were using an outside third-party developer. Did you go offshore like to India or did you try any of those kinds of things? There's a ton of those, too. But I wanted to keep it local because I wanted to deal with somebody who I could talk to in person to discuss design ideas and all that stuff. So you found someone locally here that could do this? I did. Oh, good. We need to have that person on the show, or person, so whoever they are. So tell me. Wahine Net Designs. Wahine Net Designs. She did an awesome job. And we just, we sent me an estimate and we agreed on that and went and sat down and talked about design ideas to kind of feel what we wanted. I said, you know, I wanted to have kind of a tropical sort of a retro-tiki kind of feel. And I wanted the elements to be that way. And sent her all the photos and put her to work. Wow. So how long did it take? I'm not going to ask you how much it costs. But because she may, if she gets any business from this. I hope she does. She can ship me some really good stuff for us. So how long did it take to develop this app? To get it from that point to when it would be ready to upload, it took six weeks, a couple of months. So a couple of months for her to develop that. Sounds pretty fast. Both platforms, Android and the iOS for apps. So that was my question. So you decided to go on both platforms, so the Android and the Apple platforms. So you got it developed, took about, let's say, two months, six weeks to two months. And you were ready to launch. That's right. OK, now, and how easy was that? So I think for someone who wants to develop the app, and I've been joking and having a lot of fun on this thing. But if you're going to develop that, there's a lot of, I would say, I liked what you did at the beginning, is you got all the content done first. Yeah. You knew what you were going to do. And now with the content, now you're going to say, OK, now I got the app. She develops the app for you. And now you've got to go to Apple or Google or whatever. Apple and to Google and to Amazon. And anyone can upload an app there and sell it quite easily. Amazon was free to create a developer account. Google Play was a one-time fee. And Apple iTunes is a little bit more, and it's an annual fee. Annual fee, so they've got the portal so you can move your app up. That's right. But they're not going to let you just take that app, move it up, and then they just put it out there without some kind of quality control or whatever. Did they get to taste all the recipes? I wanted to send them some samples. I can see they Google the app going. Well, I don't know about this app. I'm on number 37. And it's only Tuesday. Well, when you create a developer account, when you go to upload your app, you build your own storefront page yourself. You can upload the photos that go with it, put out a bullet point app description. You can tag the page with keyword tags, that kind of a thing. So you've essentially got to build your own portal for them to then begin to agree to accept a look at your app as it's coming up there. So you have to send up all the photos that you've pre-done. You have to send up all your descriptions that you've pre-done. Screenshots, all that. All the screenshots and all that stuff. And in addition, you have to have the app. And you upload the app with it as well. The app, our app is a very small file. It's only like 8 megabytes because all the photos with the recipes are all hosted online. So it's not, they don't go in as part of the app. So it doesn't take up a lot of storage space. Ah, so that's a good concept and a good thought on this, that I don't have to have everything in the app. Because it could be a gig. That's too big of an app. Yeah, it would have been. With all those photos, 75 photos? With the photos, it would have been a really big app. It would have been like 80 or 90 megabytes. And that's a big app. That's a big app. So then you got it up there. So how did you do that? So did you send them all at the same day? Or did you do the each one? I started building the Google page and the iTunes page on kind of the same day, sort of in the same time frame. OK. And you did the same thing for both. Same thing for both. OK, so we got to move fast if we're down to two minutes. I hate this and haven't. So you set it up. And there's an approval process. Takes how long? Takes well. For Google, it was really fast. It was less than a day. For Apple, it was five or six days. They accepted it first time? No, they both rejected it the first time. The photos weren't exactly what they wanted. I had to change that. Google was really quick with the next approval, but Apple took a couple of days. Apple took a little while. They're a little more picky. Yeah, demanding. Justidious? Kind of. OK, I'll let it work today. They should have had a quality control. That's right. So I like the sequence though. You did all the content first. You then got the app developed. You set up your pages on Google and Apple. You then sent the app up for them to authenticate. Then you had to go through the vetting process, which took, you said Google was like a day or two? Google was like, got rejected in two hours. I re-submitted it after making a change. They accepted it two hours later. And then six hours later, it was up. Well, that's not true. Amazon was the same way. They didn't reject me because I knew what I had to fix. OK. And Amazon was like 12 hours. Apple was the last guy I took. They took a while. They rejected me after two days. I resubmitted it, rejected me again after two days, and then had me change some other stuff. So it's not bad though. You go through all this process and so on. So the total duration to do the, from the photos to get it up online? Six months? Oh, the whole thing was really closer to a year, finding a designer and all that stuff. So that's the thing to know. Anyway, so for those watching this show, you've learned about Google Shots and recipes. You've learned about the app. I got another shot. So when you download the app, you can get a hold of Mark here. Email right to me. Email it right to Mark, Jell-O-Shop Pro, to get in touch with you. Like us on Facebook, Jell-O-Shop Pro on Facebook. Facebook. Follow us on Instagram. And Instagram. And where else? That's it. That's it for now. Instagram and Facebook. Follow them on that. So at the end of every show, we give our guests a autograph solo cup. And so this is for your number 139 in the series. Awesome. You can put that up on the shelf with who knows what. Can't wait. I can't wait either. So anyway, we have a tagline we say at the end of your show to make sure everybody pays attention. At least our two followers in Canada. There's two. And now your sister. And now your sister. That's right. Anyway, Gordo the Texar, Rick's the Fun Monster. You're awful quiet today. I'm sorry. You guys were just going at it. There was nothing to say. You're stacking up Jell-O-Shops too, I might ask. Yeah, that's why I'm quiet. Yeah, you're hogging them. You're hogging them. Anyway, like we say at the end of every show, one, two, three, how are you doing? I'm doing better now.