Adam Torres and Bryan Farris discuss Motivation Driven Design™.
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Show Notes:
Motivation Driven Design™ is a proprietary service offered exclusively to Goldfish Code clients. In this episode, Adam Torres and Bryan Farris, Founder & President at Goldfish Code, explore Goldfish Code and the methodology behind Motivation Driven Design™.
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Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just sit on over to mission matters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Brian Ferris and he’s founder and president over at goldfish code.
Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you. I’m glad to be here. All right, Brian. So we’re going to get into a whole lot today. I want to go further into goldfish code, what you’re doing there, how you’re helping startups. We’re going to go into motivation driven design, which you have trademarked, and we’re going to go into that process and that methodology and a whole lot more.
But before we do that, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Brian at mission matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do, Brian, what mission matters to you?
So when I was a child, my brother and I played Legos constantly. But in very different ways, he loved to play war with the Legos. In fact, he, he devised a game that sent Lego creations tumbling off the stairs to destruction. My personality was completely focused on building. Cool creations with the Legos without any directions.
I never used the, like assemble, you know, step one, two, three directions. I just eat it. And I made stuff and left it there for him to destroy. For Godzilla. Yeah. For Godzilla, my brother, Sean, to destroy everything. And what I’ve. Realized reflecting on my career and, and my life is that I, what, the mission that really matters to me is, is building things later in life.
I, I got my hands on code for the first time and I, I started making a website for my high school and yes, I’m old enough that they didn’t have one already. So I was building things and then I actually formed my own business with a mentor guiding it and built a vocabulary training program. So ultimately what I’ve seen as a pattern through my life is that I really want to build companies, build products and do things that have some form of social benefit that give back to society.
Or, you know apparently when I was a child provide, Entertainment for my younger brother. That makes sense. It’s, and it sounds like you were, you were, I mean, you were hooked in tech kind of pretty early on, whether you were thinking about it at a tech or not, you were just building things, right. But you were kind of hooked early on.
Yeah. Well, I can attribute that to my grandfather who bought me a. Computer, like one of those computers that was, you know, this, well, you probably can’t see my arms in the video, but it was, you know, three feet tall, a foot wide east you know, maybe 40 pounds. But he bought that for me when I was four years old, five years old, and it only ran.
MS DOS, so you had to type in commands in order to use it. I’m old enough. I remember those. Yeah. For the, for the other people that aren’t old enough yet. Google it for our producer. Google it. It’s okay. Go ahead. Yeah. So from very early on, I was experimenting with how to, you know, instruct those computers to do something, you know, whatever silly thing was on my mind there as a child, but I, I always enjoyed building and creating things and have, you know, really made my career all about that.
Where did the entrepreneurial part come from? Was that also from grandpa or grandparents or parents or like, where’d that come from? That idea. Well, it’s interesting. I mean, when I was a child, there’s examples of me trying to do things, you know, go above and beyond with lemonade and stuff like that.
But really one formative story was when I was in high school, I got hired by my girlfriend’s dad. He, you know, showed up one day and handed me a bag of newspaper headlines that he had cut out and asked me if I wanted to make any money. And I was like, yes you know, I’m, I was 15 magic words, right?
Keywords. Yes. So I started doing data entry at the very point of, of data entry, but he had this idea of building a vocabulary program that could educate. From early age to end of high school and basically teach you all the words that you needed to know. And his perspective was that there’s a bunch of vocabulary programs out there that were very tailored to like SAT or something like that didn’t really.
Take into context, real life examples. And so a lot of time cutting out headlines from newspapers and he wanted to create a vocabulary program based on the advanced words and the examples that we had found in those headlines. So I was, and that’s pretty early on. That was smart. Like that’s ahead of his time back then.
Yeah. Yeah. When you were in high school. So that’s early. It was big, the beginning of when websites started coming out. Wow. And so. What we set out to do was to build the first, you know, fully kind of cloud web based vocabulary program. And that’s it. That’s pretty, do you think it’s pretty insane when you think about that now looking back, like your age and everything else, like where we’re at today, looking back, it’s insane.
It’s insane. It’s insane that this, this guy even, you know, took the time to invest in mentoring me and teaching me these skills. And, and. Graduating me very quickly. I started with data entry and he, he saw how eager I was to learn more about, you know, what am I doing the data entry for? And, you know, where are we going to take this?
And I had ideas and I think he saw my potential. And so he started investing in, you know, okay, why don’t you take some time and make a little business plan for us? And then why don’t you take some time? And, and then we, we started going around to investors. I was, I was 16 years old going around to potential investors.
And that’s remarkable. It’s you know it just, as I ended up working on that for about six years with him and as it progressed, I took on more and more responsibility, including the point when we had a team of about 20 people working for us doing all kinds of different things like recording the audio for each thing and so on.
And so I was managing this team. He kind of took me from janitor to President of a growing team pretty quickly there. And then he, he, you know, one of the employees actually did something that was you know, pretty fireable offense and he made me do the firing. And so just a lot of stuff like that was, you know, obviously that’s not something that’s fun to do, but it’s something that is an important step to take and learn and grow.
And I was doing that at a very young age. So all of that both through the fact that. This guy, Fred, invested so much time and energy into, you know, training and teaching me and helping me grow. Plus what inspired in me is in this idea that, wow, I can actually you know, lead and direct teams and I can actually build things with this and gave me this idea that, you know what, like, I don’t need to wait for a job to land in my lap or these other kinds of things.
You can go out and create businesses and make things. And I had that kind of training instilled from early on, but honestly, I also still made my own mistakes much later on in my career. After I’d graduated from college and, and worked at a few jobs and I started startups, I made some very basic mistakes in those early days.
And to me, I feel vulnerable even talking about it because it’s a little bit embarrassing, you know, with the experience and training I had up to that point that I had to. Learn firsthand some lessons that you see entrepreneurs learn all the time about no shortcuts. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs and startups that watch this show.
There’s no shortcuts. If you’re supposed to learn that lesson, you’re going to learn it. Yeah. If you’re out there listening and you think you’ve never started a business and you think that you’ve like been able to look at how other businesses have started and that you kind of know it all and that you would be able to, you know, You know, make the right choices and the right problem and solution fit.
You know, I wish you the best of luck, but it’s amazing how you can be idealistic when you haven’t done it a bunch, multiple times yourself. And so that’s actually what, you know, kind of taking it all together really motivates me is this idea that I can give back and mentor people because now through goldfish code.
You know, after 10 years, I’ve been advising and building, you know, whether it’s a product for a startup, their primary product and building their business, or whether it’s a product, internal tooling or, or a new offering for a medium sized business, whatever it is, I’ve been building and creating products for all of these years and building and creating ones that have a business use case associated with them.
And I have a lot to offer on that front that I can, I can guide people. And partly because that’s how I. Became who I am was through mentorship from, from someone else. I, I, it’s just, I think innate for me now that I really enjoy what I do because it just fits with what I’ve been doing all along before we get further into motivation driven design and kind of some of your methodologies.
I’m curious what keeps you, I know you work a lot with startups and that’s, that can be a tricky space just in general, depending on the startup. Right. But whether it’s go to market. Plan or other things that you’re doing for them. Like what keeps you in the game with working with startups? Like what, what makes that interesting for you?
Honestly, what really makes it interesting for me is the idea of applying all the strategic knowledge that I have from my experience on. You know, small and large things and being able to kind of open up founders eyes. So for example just the other day I was on a meeting with two founders.
I won’t get into exactly what they’re building, but they’re building a new, very exciting app for that’s for a specific niche. No one’s built an app like that. It’s a community kind of app that’s for that niche and they’re excited about it. And I was able to see some parallels between the concepts that they have and you know, both some of our motivation driven design framework concepts, as well as, you know, multiple other previous businesses I’ve either advised or, or built myself and You know, instantly, while they were telling me their story and their, you know, their feature goals, I started seeing, I saw a couple of flaws that I gave them feedback on, and then I saw a bunch of ideas.
And so I just said, look. You’ve been in this space for the last two years. You may already have these ideas, but based on what you’ve said and my experience, I think you could do this, this, this, and this. And you know, here’s why I think each of these are valuable. One of them was just a small little idea.
One of them was a fundamental, you know, major marketing campaign kind of initiative for how to launch their product. And what really keeps me jazzed is seeing their eyes light up. When some of those, you know, ideas start coming out. And then when I see that they stopped looking at the camera and start, you know, they’re, they’re down there taking notes and typing as you’re going.
And that’s very, that’s very motivating. Cause you know, you’re providing some kind of value. And then, and it’s great to see that, you know, go happen. Get executed later on. So that’s, that’s what I really enjoyed, to be honest, but the thing that I’ve also leveraged to my advantage that helps me stay relevant as, you know, new startups are, you know, any startup is, is in theory coming to, because they have a brand new idea, they have a novel approach they have, or at least some strategic advantage over something that already exists.
Right. And so in theory, if. All of them are coming with new ideas. How can I be an expert in these different ideas? Especially because these ideas are in different fields. You know, I work with people in healthcare. I work in FinTech. I work in e commerce. And it’s, you know, across the board, it’s B2B, it’s B2C.
And the, the reality that the center thing that I recognized and where I’ve sort of focused my perspective on is the fact that. Everything that’s being built is for humans and it’s, it’s for, you know, people to be using. And at the end of the day, because of that we have to tap into the motivations of those humans and, you know, humans.
Also have like very limited attention span. That’s being pulled in lots of different ways. And the things that you pay attention to are the things that matter to you, which is what I love mission matters, right? People are really focused on what matters to them. And so when you understand and think about things entirely in the context of, of the humans involved, not just the users, but also, you know, other stakeholders, you know we’ve worked on, for example, you know, warehouse management.
Tooling for e commerce shipping platform. And you have to think about, okay, what are these employees doing? What do they care about? You know, what’s going to motivate them to do the things that need to happen. And then, you know, same thing. If you’re thinking about the total flip side of the exact same business model, where it’s the customers in an e commerce application and what’s going to motivate them.
And when you start to think about things as simply a The product or a service that’s for other humans, you can really. Apply similar concepts for completely different industries. It’s amazing what it unlocks. I want to, I want to go further into motivation driven design. Maybe let’s take a step back here and define it for us.
Like, how do you define motivation driven design? Sure. So motivation driven design is a strategic framework. And the goal of the strategic framework is to identify business Outcomes and results that we are really trying to optimize and then to define a series of features and, or, you know marketing campaign taglines and so on and so forth that can be implemented in a product or in a business or in a process that will trigger you know, motivation.
In the humans on the other end and motivate them to do the specific actions that are going to inevitably improve those business metrics. So at the end of the day, it’s a strategy framework for improving business metrics by focusing on what motivates humans. And we’re looking at all kinds of motivation.
It’s, it’s longterm sticky motivation, as well as, you know short term drive to action kind of motivation. Like you get all the time with a limited time offer or, you know, the love though, they get me, those were invented for me. Go ahead. So going, I want, okay. So now we know we have a basis of understanding for motivation driven design.
How do you apply this with clients? Like, how does it, like, why is this important? Why is this is important for startups? Like, how does it save them time money? Like, what’s the, what’s the with them for them? Yeah. So the way that we apply it is very dependent on every client’s need and current state. So, you know, at the end of the day, it’s.
Entirely a, a strategic framework and to support the business strategy. So we start with that. We always start with what is the current business strategy and context. So for example, for some startups, the current business strategy and context might be, we just need the bare bones business strategy. And so then there’s more of a, okay, is there any like fundamental tweaks that we need to do with this bare bones set of features that motivation would inspire or is there any super low hanging fruit that we can do, you know, just the way that we message things or whatnot.
And we’ll take that approach Some businesses are further along and are, you know, at a stage where they want to consider, okay, how do we take this, you know, prototype that we have and make it into a really sticky, full fledged production product that we’re now going to invest a lot of marketing into, we want that marketing to lead to capture and people staying as retained users.
So then we’re able to actually at that point, look at existing user And, you know, learn about behaviors and patterns potentially even interview users and leverage all of that in order to help dream up all kinds of ideas. There’s a portion of the whole motivation driven design process that I really love, which is the kind of brainstorm and creative process.
And we go through this. It doesn’t surprise me from those early Lego years. It does not surprise me. That’s you again with the Legos. Bring them out. for connecting. Does not surprise me. You would love that part. Go ahead. But well, the whole process is okay. As long as Sean, no, Oh, don’t worry. I told Sean, he has to stay away from my business.
Yeah, no, we, the, the entire creative process is something that is guided by the strategy. And then we go through a divergence process where it’s more kind of greenhousing and any idea is a good idea, you know, and we create a bank of ideas and then we analyze them against you know, how much we actually think that they will trigger the motivation elements that we, we’ve studied in behavioral psychology.
And then, How much those things will actually trigger the desired business metric outcome that we want, and then prioritize accordingly. So we go through it’s actually partly inspired by ideo. There’s someone who I met and really admire Jo Jocelyn Wyatt at ideo, who taught me this actually.
I think 14 years ago. But they go through a similar kind of process with their human centered design approach that’s not too different than we’ve taken inspiration from. But the, the whole idea is in a design process, you have to have these divergence and convergence cycles until you slowly converge on the final output.
And so the entire process of taking a a business through motivation driven design, the goal is really. To generate as many ideas as possible that could help their product be more effective at the business outcomes and then to systematically analyze those ideas that we generated and use that as a way to prioritize things and a lens and a framework.
And so you know, like anything, it’s just another way of. Looking at the world systematically and starting to generate and brainstorm new ideas. Yeah. That’s, that’s it. The bottom line. Speaking of new ideas and or new technologies. You, I mean, you’ve been, you’ve been in this game since high school. I mean, easily.
So what excites you right now? You have a unique vantage point. You’ve been there since the beginning really of a lot of this technologies. What excites you right now, whether it’s in technology or otherwise, like what gets you like. Optimistic for the future, just in general, like what excites you in tech?
Oh, wow. I mean, there’s so much that’s happening. That’s very exciting right now. You know, I think as being part of the generation that has the privilege to remember when there was no internet and then we had the dial up bing, bong, bong, bong and I remember that transition and you’re also the transition of you know, before having, before having cell phones at all and then having cell phones that were dumb phones and then having smartphones and each of those transitions fundamentally changed society, but they also changed what businesses were capable of doing and they created new business model opportunities.
You know, Peter Drucker. Famously always talks about how changes in technology or in legal or anything like that creates doors of opportunity. And it’s the first movers in those moments that win. And so when you look at all of those changes and you know, Having lived through them, what excites me right now is the kind of struggle that we’re going through as a society to figure out how generative AI should fit into our lives and how it should work.
You see it now on everything and it’s just everywhere. And, and there’s a lot of places where it’s, it doesn’t really work or it kind of creates noise and. You know, you see the value for example, I, I I’ve been experimenting with AI meeting summary notes, takers. I actually see the potential more than I see the value right now.
The value right now is, is marginal. It kind of summarizes things, but I know it’s going to learn and it’s going to get better. For sure. Right. And so what excites me is that as a society, we need to figure out how we’re going to use these. And build products appropriately so that we can use them. I also am a big believer that you know, that we used to live in a world.
I I’ve been telling people this little analogy we used to live in a world where the, the way to be successful and be the most productive was to know things. If you knew how to. Fix a carburetor on a car. You were the go to person that could do that. You know, if you knew how to do this and, and, you know, you could teach someone else how to do it and you were invaluable and then along came Google and suddenly the skillset that was critically important was knowing how to search Google to find the, the way to do something you don’t need to know how to do anything.
Like at this point, so many of us, we don’t know how to do anything. Even something we know how to do. We forgot how to do it. We have to look it up again. And so that’s okay. That’s the skill, but now with generative AI we are moving into a new. Where the skill is no longer like just knowing how to look it up is not good enough.
What you need to know is how to leverage gen AI tools. And I don’t just mean chat GPT. I mean like all these other ones that can like plug into your email or into your documents or into writing code for you or, or helping to create things. You need to learn how to use those and how to use them effectively.
And then you need to train. Yourself, the skill that we have as humans that the A. I. S. won’t be able to do for quite some time is. The having the eye for curation, right? And knowing, okay, out of all the noise that’s being generated here. What is the actual stuff that if I put it together, it’s going to be very compelling and useful in whatever context or use case that I have right now.
So that’s got me, you know, very excited is, is thinking through how all of that’s going to come together and how we’re going to, you know, support greater connection in our communities through that. Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I’m hopeful and it is wild times we are living in. I often think about like other things that happened in the past.
It’s like, can you imagine when you first thought about like, we’re going to get in a car instead of being on a horse, we get to travel cross country. We get to do all these other things. Like I can’t even imagine. So what the next generation, even after we’re, you know, long gone are going to be seeing, like, they’re going to look back at us like what they used to do.
What? Meeting that word summarized like that, that’s dumb. Like, no, but I’m, I’m excited to see, you know, what happens next. And I think it’s super interesting times that we’re living in and being in the United States to sell all the, all the opportunities we have. I think it’s amazing. That being said though, Brian what’s next?
I mean, what’s next for you? What’s next for goldfish code? What, what’s on, what’s on the agenda for you? Sure. So you know, goldfish code just hit our 10 year anniversary. Congratulations. That is, that’s amazing. A lot of reflection on this, you know, and you got to treat yourself to something special, like a trip or something to commemorate.
What are you going to, how are you going to treat yourself for this, man? You have to, you have to put you on the spot because I’m doing it for a very specific reason. Many business owners, they just can’t. Go over milestones, they take them for granted and they think that that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
And if you don’t like celebrate those big ones, then you’re not going to remember them and time’s going to keep passing. So that that’s me on my philosophy stump over here. How are you going to celebrate the 10 year? If, if you could say. And if you haven’t decided yet, you can tell me later, but you got to celebrate, man.
I’m old. I haven’t actually decided on that formally, although we did just have a really wonderful full team get together and gathering. So pretty spectacular. But. I will put some thought into that. Yeah. You’re inspiring me, . Yeah, you gotta do it. Something I, I know one, I have a friend who, he gets watches.
I have another friend who they do, like, goes on a trip or something else. Like, but as entrepreneurs this isn’t easy. Like, before you know it, you know, God willing, you’ll be at your 15th or your 20th. Like, you wanna, you wanna like commemorate these things. There’s a lot of, I know with, with without you telling me there’s a lot of blood, sweat, tears that went into you getting to 10 years and surviving.
You know, creating your teams and everything else. Like, you know, there’s a cost for that. Yeah. Well, so at the 10 year Mark, we’ve been reflecting and you know, Oh, along those 10 years, it’s been a series of slightly different journeys. We were in different, completely different chapters and scales and whatnot.
And now the company’s in a really good place. I have a rockstar team behind me that, you know, is just doing so well at executing on every level of the business that at this point we’re, we’re more thinking, okay, for the next five year chapter, it’s more about looking. Broader and engaging with more people in our, in our network.
So I’m starting to work on putting together a partnership ecosystem with founders other advisors, other service providers. Basically anyone that’s involved in, you know, building good businesses, building good products and in advising and doing strategy, and we’re trying to bring those.
Resources together and bring people that are really focused on good quality doing impactful work and that, you know, have an appreciation for this idea of, of human, you know, psychology and motivation and that want to Collaborate and build things. So if you find yourself in that group definitely feel free to reach out to me.
You can find me on my LinkedIn. You can also find me at goldfishcode. com that contact us form. It will eventually trickle to me. So feel free to ping me in any way. I’m, I’m really looking to meet anyone and help anyone. Very willing to help people. Find the right person that they should be talking to.
So at this point, I’m just excited to be part of the, this next chapter of you know technology development in the world and and looking to get involved and meet others that are excited to be part of that. So definitely feel free to reach out for. Amazing. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put the links to to the website and everything else in the show notes that you can just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with us and you haven’t hit that subscribe or follow button yet, we welcome you hit that button because this is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new entrepreneurs, new executives, hopefully new inspiration. That’s going to help you along in your journey as well.
So we don’t want you to miss a thing. Again, a daily show each and every day, new episodes, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Brian, man, this has been so much fun. Big shout out to Sean for always creating new opportunities for you to build. All right. Thank you so much.