Transcript
[00:00:00] Jack Vaughan: So I've recently kicked off this podcast again after about a five year hiatus and last episode we had Kyle Hamrick, senior motion designer and creative director. Today though we're moving on to my other favorite topic which is software and I imagine this will be the kind of primary dual theme of the guests that you will see on here.
[00:00:16] Jack Vaughan: You'll also probably, hopefully, see more people like I'm bringing on today and that is the colleagues that I work with at Glide because I work with some exceptional people and I want to bring you some more of their stories. So today we're bringing on Andy Claremont. Andy heads up ecosystem and community at Glide and as you'll hear he's been building and working in communities his whole life.
[00:00:36] Jack Vaughan: We kick off the podcast by talking about how the internet shaped us, the creation of the internet and our first experiences on it and particularly how it awoken us, it woke us, it woke us up. I'm not editing these intros as you can tell. To the difference in the type of people that are in the world.
[00:00:53] Jack Vaughan: Sounds obvious, but when you're young and you're online and you're meeting people that you'd never have met before, it's quite a profound experience. And also just how magical online communities can be at unifying people around a particular topic, project, and those people wouldn't necessarily work together in real life.
[00:01:08] Jack Vaughan: That really struck me listening back to this conversation. And then, of course, obviously, the the empowerment that the internet gives people to be able to build whatever they need. And as you'll hear, whether it's intranet, glide, software, WordPress, and he's done it all. And he's a true builder. He's got a great idea of the state of no code today.
[00:01:26] Jack Vaughan: And so we talk a little bit about that. And particularly the other thing that struck me from the conversation was just remembering again about how interesting it is that, of course, AI is such a buzzy thing nowadays no code used to be somewhat of a, somewhat of a buzzy thing, but I think Andy says a great point, which again, he will articulate better than I do, which is along the lines of, it's quite exciting now.
[00:01:48] Jack Vaughan: We used to have visual tools like, you know, no code tools, even back in the nineties. And that was absolutely. Not the time for them. They've been kind of rising slowly over the last 5 years. And now that AI is here, this kind of synthesis of AI and no code is kind of giving him. And I would say me as well, a sense that like, we're kind of now at a place where no code and that kind of like.
[00:02:10] Jack Vaughan: Tools for the average non technical person can actually go more mainstream, and we talk about that. So, and last little thing, as Andy said, sorry about his camera focus. Camera focus, if you don't work with DSLRs, can be really frustrating. And as always reach out on X. Let me know, or if you're on Spotify, leave any feedback in either place, love to know if you're listening, if you have any ideas about future guests or questions you might have anyway, it would just be good to connect.
[00:02:35] Jack Vaughan: So I bring you Andy Claremont. So, excluding one that you might have been born into, what is one of your first experiences of a great community that made a huge impact on you?
[00:02:48] Andy Claremont: A great community that made a big impact. You know, the, it wasn't one that I built and not, at least not initially, but it's actually a bit meta meta.
[00:02:59] Andy Claremont: There was this service called easy board that existed late nineties, early two thousands. And it was message boards as a service. You could go in and start a message board. They had networks of message boards. And I was, God, 13, 12, 13 years old. We had just gotten online a couple years prior. And this thing was like, the mecca of connecting with other people who were interested in the same things that you were.
[00:03:31] Andy Claremont: So being a kid, I was interested in like, Pokemon and stuff like that. And there were a lot of Pokemon communities. And then you end up connecting with these other kids who were also interested in Pokemon. And that was really my first step. into online communities and online forums. And it didn't become a career till much later, but like that was the formative first time.
[00:03:53] Andy Claremont: So yeah, easy board doesn't exist anymore, but I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for them.
[00:04:01] Jack Vaughan: What was it about that? Experience that was I'll put words in your mouth, but maybe you can rephrase, like, magical.
[00:04:09] Andy Claremont: The fact that I was sitting in a bedroom in a basement apartment somewhere in central Ontario, and I was chatting with folks who were all over the place.
[00:04:23] Andy Claremont: Folks in the U. S., folks in Asia, folks in the U. K., Europe. It blew my mind, you know, because growing up in a small town, You don't have those sorts of connections and the idea that kind of anything outside of your immediate Vicinity is really out there. And that was my yeah that that was my first Impression of people from other places from other cultures and I think that had a sort of ripple effect on how I think about the world and how I just Think about society and culture and everything else just just coming out of Posting about different fandom things on the internet.
[00:05:13] Andy Claremont: Yeah a bit of a ripple effect from there
[00:05:15] Jack Vaughan: What's one of the coolest things you found or remember from that time on the message boards?
[00:05:23] Andy Claremont: I think one of the coolest things was This is a bit of a a left turn. It's a bit sideways, but
[00:05:29] Jack Vaughan: we can do many of those
[00:05:31] Andy Claremont: Great was learning how to customize those message boards With what I would later learn was CSS. So those message boards were also my introduction to HTML, CSS, web development.
[00:05:47] Andy Claremont: And all I was trying to do was, like, change the color, or change the font, of a, of something on the message board. And you could do that. You had the ability to go in and customize the CSS and that opened up this whole other world of, like, well, I can build things on the web. That's cool. I love building things.
[00:06:07] Andy Claremont: I was, like, I was an arts kid. I liked crafts and making things, and now it's like, oh, I can do this on the computer, and other people can see it and they can comment on it. That's pretty, pretty amazing. So yeah, I think that was another magical moment for me.
[00:06:25] Jack Vaughan: So I'm really interested in what you said about the just the sudden realization of perhaps living somewhere where you didn't have the certain type of connections that you found online and then suddenly those being there and yet it's remote and they're somewhere else. I've always found this interesting thing to consider when you think about communities because I've always been deeply involved with communities online and involved in communities.
[00:06:47] Jack Vaughan: In my own world, obviously, like most people. But there seems to be, sometimes, a lack in both places. Often, like, unless you're living in a kind of Mecca yourself, like if you're in New York City and you're just in the right scene, you, you tend to lack sometimes some of the interests, or the people around you might not share the same interests.
[00:07:07] Jack Vaughan: But you have a community in other ways, and then you go and find it online. And yet also online, there's a kind of lack sometimes of the human, in person, visceral because of just the nature of the digital world. I'm interested in how now as a community manager or sorry, a community professional, you think about human connection and how you try and bring that into your work and the communities that you have managed and that you do manage today.
[00:07:34] Andy Claremont: I think the one word that summarizes a lot of it is empathy. And even if you don't truly understand Someone else's perspective at least putting in the effort to try to understand it's never gonna be one for one, but in those early early days of Learning how to navigate these online conversations and online relationships or someone that you're talking to has a completely different You have that common ground that you can build from.
[00:08:13] Andy Claremont: And that was the thing that I loved about online communities, is that regardless of everything else, it was you and someone else, and you were, in those days, operating under an alias, you had the common ground of something that you were mutually interested in. And because you had that common ground, it was a lot easier, I think, to be able to talk about things.
[00:08:42] Andy Claremont: that otherwise might be more divisive. Because you had like, you were already friends or already acquainted because you had this shared interest and passion about something. And in the same way that in in person communities, you have that common ground of, well, we go to the same school or we live in the same neighborhood or whatever.
[00:09:03] Andy Claremont: It's the common grounds that allow us to kind of explore the other things where we may not have common grounds. It acts as a sort of anchor, a safe anchor for us. And so bringing that over into professional, community professional stuff is Basically knowing, having a sense of if someone's being difficult in a community or being perceived as difficult in a community, when you have to get into sort of the moderation side, or just having harder conversations, being able to navigate that.
[00:09:42] Andy Claremont: Well, always having that thing in the back of your mind of they're here. I'm here. We're here because we have something in common and we're interested in the same things. And if we can keep anchoring on that as like, we want to see this succeed, we want to see this thing do well, then it makes it much easier to have the harder conversations when you're anchoring on that.
[00:10:04] Andy Claremont: So for example in product communities, customer communities, I saw this a lot of go daddy. I see it at glide. Sometimes the company will do things that you as a customer don't entirely agree with and it can be very tempting to just shut them down because you see them as problematic. I'm much more of the mind that you try to find that path forward where no one's getting shut down.
[00:10:34] Andy Claremont: It's more about mutual understanding. And of course you can only go so far with that, but that's where you start. You don't start immediately with the shut them down. And yeah, and I learned that through the empathy that formed when I was a teenager learning how to talk with someone on the other side of the planet, whose worldview is completely different from mine.
[00:10:56] Andy Claremont: But we both really lurked like Charizard or something. The, the mutual, the mutual interests keep us moving forward.
[00:11:07] Jack Vaughan: So I have no doubt that what you bring in your personality, your persona and the way that you are as a human is. Incredibly beneficial to any community that you come to, that's evident.
[00:11:18] Jack Vaughan: But as communities scale, that's not the only way that that kind of vibe is helped and supported and managed, so Maybe it's the wrong term, I'm interested in, like, how you think of One, your skill set as a, what would you call it? Not a community manager or a, what term would you use?
[00:11:38] Andy Claremont: Skill set in the context of community, being like a community professional.
[00:11:41] Andy Claremont: I'm really
[00:11:42] Jack Vaughan: just asking the name, I keep on using the term community manager. I think community
[00:11:45] Andy Claremont: manager, you know, community manager, it's, it's the term that I use as well. And to me, I mean I know you
[00:11:52] Jack Vaughan: do ecosystem as well, and we'll get onto
[00:11:54] Andy Claremont: that later. Yeah, we'll talk about that as well. But yeah, community manager to me, it's like, this is a thing that you do, whether or not it's your, Full time job or something that you do on the side or something that you do as a volunteer Which was what I did for a very very long time.
[00:12:07] Andy Claremont: It was just an interest and a thing that I did It's all community management. Whatever your title is, if you are facilitating a community, you are a community manager.
[00:12:21] Jack Vaughan: So yeah, I guess now then as head of community at Glide and having run communities at GoDaddy and the other places that you've worked, I'm interested in how you think about the, I don't know, the feng shui of communities.
[00:12:34] Jack Vaughan: So that that flow of people coming in and out, you know, what's a good Set up what are the constituent parts and then what's your role within that like if you go away for three weeks should it run? Itself or like
[00:12:48] Andy Claremont: I I think that it's interesting because when you talk to different community managers and professionals we all have Kind of our own take on it and there were different kind of schools of thought when it comes to how do you look?
[00:13:00] Andy Claremont: after a community some are much more analytical and I don't want to say clinical, but they're very precise in how they manage a community. Others are very socially oriented, very supportive and inclusive. And I, I think a lot of that comes back to, like, what were your formative community experiences?
[00:13:23] Andy Claremont: Mine was coming through, fandoms, product support, that sort of thing. So it's a bit of a meld of, we're, we're doing some break, fix customer support stuff on one side, on the other side, we're trying to. You know, give people a good time because they're coming together around something that they like. So yeah, there's those different groups.
[00:13:44] Andy Claremont: My, my approach is trying to embrace those two sides. So generally I want community to feel like an organic experience in that this is where you go and show up and raise your hand and say, I need help with this. Or, hey, I can help you with this. And, and that back and forth to me is kind of the core of most community experiences.
[00:14:09] Andy Claremont: Everything else builds on top of that. And so my job as a community manager is to make sure the space is set up for it. Whether it be in person or virtual. To make sure that we have the right people there to both ask the questions and answer the questions and to facilitate. I don't always have the answers and it's, it'd be a terrible thing if I did.
[00:14:30] Andy Claremont: But what I can do is try to connect to the right place. And so and doing that in a friendly, fun, approachable way that's not too offbeat. I still want to be professional, but personality wise, I, it's just, I am who I am. So try to wrap all of that up into just a way of doing things within community.
[00:14:52] Andy Claremont: And then bring other people in as well to kind of, to your point, if I'm not there, can they do the same thing? Can they continue to encourage the conversation? Can they continue to Invite the questions, get the answers out of folks, bring the right people in and that gets more into the kind of professional side of how do you build up the processes and programming around a community to make sure that can happen.
[00:15:16] Andy Claremont: So if I Go away for a week. It's fine.
[00:15:19] Jack Vaughan: And where does that go wrong? Where have you seen that go wrong in communities? Where do things fizzle out? Go sour? It's more of
[00:15:27] Andy Claremont: a few different symptoms that I see. One is if the community manager is the only one really being active. To me that, like, there's clearly something wrong.
[00:15:40] Andy Claremont: The, the space isn't inviting, you're not getting the right people to show up and, and, and be present. Well, why is that? And rather than just constantly, every single day post, trying to start a new conversation by posting another thing of the day and blasting the entire channel. Kind of step back and talk to your members, reach out one on one.
[00:15:59] Andy Claremont: What is it that they're looking for? Why aren't they participating? Is there something that's missing? Chances are there is. And start from there. Another one that I see is if community is treated too much as like, A, just a, a support channel. And so it's break, fix questions coming in. How do I do this?
[00:16:19] Andy Claremont: How do I do that? And then you have customer support reps just answering those community posted tickets. That's not really a community experience. It's just a support forum at that point. And while that can be part of a community experience to me that's nothing more than a public help desk.
[00:16:36] Andy Claremont: Yeah, so the, the, the pieces have to be balanced. Because you're going to have these experiences within the community, but it needs to be something that is participatory, and there are people showing up, and it's a diversity of voices coming in, it's not always the same people. And that's ultimately what we're trying to strive for, as community managers, is trying to bring those people in.
[00:17:07] Jack Vaughan: Zooming back to the early days, where you found the online communities, you would have started building not just In that space, you would have started playing around with some other tools. What was, in the first maybe 10 years of your life with computers and the internet, one of the wow moments, other than the message
[00:17:24] Andy Claremont: boards?
[00:17:25] Andy Claremont: Other than the message boards Netscape Composer. This is a throwback. This is some old school no code stuff. That's what I'm asking for. So, Netscape Composer was bundled with Netscape Navigator, I think in the 90s. And it was a way to build webpages with that writing code. So you would just build, save it as an HTML file, upload it to wherever you want to host it.
[00:17:46] Andy Claremont: And when I was first learning about this stuff, we were rolling out these new computers in our school library. And I had figured out, hey, if I build a webpage on Netscape Composer, I can save it to a network drive. And then other people in the school who have access to that network drive can open up that HTML file in the browser and see it.
[00:18:09] Andy Claremont: That was basically building intranets. Intranet pages without realizing it. And then from there I remember the school librarian saying, you know, we can actually, you can actually build a page. In this thing and we can put it on the school's website because the school has web space now and so the first That's my elementary school.
[00:18:29] Andy Claremont: The first website was a page that I built in Netscape composer and that they threw up on our web space before everything got very formal in all the schools had you know, the kind of the top down. This is what's imposed by the school board. Yeah, it was, yeah,
[00:18:47] Jack Vaughan: it was fun. That's cool. It must've made a big impression on you.
[00:18:50] Jack Vaughan: What about in the last 10 years, let's say, give or take, like what has given you that same feeling
[00:19:02] Andy Claremont: dropping the product placement of glide would be a bit much, but it's true though. The, the low code, no code space. Learning more about that. It's always been on my periphery. I was in WordPress for a very long time. Doing WordPress stuff. And then coming around to app development with low code platforms.
[00:19:23] Andy Claremont: It was like, oh, all the things that I know how to do for just websites. It's a transferable skill set. Now I can bring this over to these other tools. And learn how to build functional software. Instead of the e commerce membership site stuff that I was doing before. That was about as advanced as you would get.
[00:19:42] Andy Claremont: And now it's like, Oh no, we're building actual software that people can use internally for work or for customers or for whatever. That was, that was pretty huge.
[00:19:52] Jack Vaughan: So were you doing other than WordPress back in the day? What, what's were some of the things you touched and what were the good experiences or some of the bad experiences?
[00:20:01] Jack Vaughan: And the next question as well, will be about just. generally no code. I'm kind of interested to dig into that as ecosystem as well.
[00:20:07] Andy Claremont: Yeah. So WordPress, I came to WordPress in late like around 2007 2008 I'd been playing with a lot of different PHP frameworks and portals and, and basically things, it was an extension of the stuff I was doing with message boards because you could do a message board and then depending on these the message board software you were using, they would also have some sort of portal.
[00:20:32] Andy Claremont: Plugin or extension that would allow you to turn the message board into like a CMS for a website. And so that introduced me to content management systems. That introduced me to blogging software. And so I played around with a whole bunch of different ones. Just things that you could drop onto a, a cheap web host.
[00:20:50] Andy Claremont: That led me to WordPress. And then WordPress was kind of like my be all end all for a very long time. There were other things that I had looked at as well, that were kind of adjacent. Type 03 Drupal, Joomla, these other PHP content management systems. I played with them all, but WordPress was the thing that I always went back to.
[00:21:09] Andy Claremont: But they all, they all To me they all felt very low code because once you were able to just do the installation and you were just following instructions Here's how to get this thing installed. Once you were in you didn't have to touch much code Maybe a bit of CSS and HTML, but aside from that the the actual software took care of everything and that that excited me through kind of like the 2010s of Realizing I could use these things to build a lot of stuff And so I was freelancing and doing these things on the side.
[00:21:41] Andy Claremont: Thanks to that. And in hindsight, it was low code. It was all low code.
[00:21:46] Jack Vaughan: And what about some of the modern tools before coming into glide? Was there anything that, that you chanced across that was,
[00:21:53] Andy Claremont: Yeah power platform for Microsoft. So at GoDaddy, I did a lot of backend processes and systems and things like that.
[00:22:02] Andy Claremont: So almost like a building internal apps and We were a Microsoft environment, and so we had Power Platform, and so we started looking at Power Apps, and Flow, and things like that, Power Automate. And, yeah, timing wise, that was just, like, almost right before I ended up switching over to Glide, so, Some of those ideas, the use cases I had from doing things internally at GoDaddy carried over into how I thought about Glide and building things with Glide.
[00:22:30] Andy Claremont: Yeah. So
[00:22:31] Jack Vaughan: as part of your role now, Head of Community, Head of Ecosystems and Partnerships, right? Like the, the, is that the title that I've got right?
[00:22:39] Andy Claremont: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's nebulous. Yeah, when I came, so when I came in, when I first came in ecosystem was a a mix of advocacy field marketing basically go out and tell the world about glide.
[00:22:53] Andy Claremont: That was the intent. And my work quickly shifted into also doing things with our experts. And then community was added to it. around this time last year, and the ecosystem side kind of fell off. So, now that we're coming back to it, it's really figuring out how, how does Glide show up within these ecosystems.
[00:23:20] Andy Claremont: Part of that is the tech partnerships. And so, the tech partnership side is fairly new to me. I've worked with tech partnership teams for a long time, but I've never really built a motion from the ground up, and so I'm looking at that within the context of community. Right. So if community is like us bringing our customers together, well, part of our community is our experts who are solution partners.
[00:23:47] Andy Claremont: So I'm also thinking about tech partners as, as part of that community scope. So if you integrate with glide or we have mutual users who are doing, doing things with glide and your product, how does that fit in? How do, how do we make things better for everybody? How do we inject some value and some good stuff?
[00:24:09] Andy Claremont: So that's how I'm thinking about it right now. Yeah, it's nebulous.
[00:24:15] Jack Vaughan: So, at this stage, you're going to have a pretty good lay of the land, at least better than I do, or the average person working in this space, of where no code has come from, where it is today, and possibly some ideas about where it's going.
[00:24:29] Jack Vaughan: I mean, like, no code was this buzzy thing about three or four years ago, and now there's this thing called AI, which is obviously quite buzzy. It's, it's cooled down a bit in certain ways, but I'm interested in your perspective on, like, Is it still growing massively in terms, in terms of organizations?
[00:24:43] Jack Vaughan: Are there like huge, huge numbers of tools still being built? These are kind of basic questions, but I'm just trying to prompt you to give a state of no code. That's what I'm
[00:24:53] Andy Claremont: interested in. No code, low code is not going anywhere. I think no code as a term we're seeing captured more by the aspiring entrepreneur startup.
[00:25:02] Andy Claremont: When we look at enterprise and business for work scenarios it's all about low code and I think it was Forrester that recently dropped a report. Just. Kind of trendlining the projected growth of the low code as a space. It's right up there with AI It's not getting as much buzz because it's more about the the the it's very it's it's not as sexy I guess because it's the practical like Understand.
[00:25:31] Andy Claremont: I I think it's very sexy, but I don't know about the rest of the world if they're as obsessed with it as we are but AI, AI is very futuristic and very like, Oh, think of all the potential things that we can do with it. It's
[00:25:45] Jack Vaughan: so
[00:25:46] Andy Claremont: mysterious. We're living in the future. It's the
[00:25:49] Jack Vaughan: future is now. My, my SQL and Google sheets is less mysterious.
[00:25:53] Andy Claremont: But AI, when you start taking that in practical terms, what are you doing with that? Well, to work with it, you're going to be using low code software and where are you going to be storing the output of that data and things that you create? There's always a SQL database in the background somewhere storing all this data.
[00:26:08] Andy Claremont: you can't get away from that, but it's, it's more of a known quantity and I think low code is becoming more of a known quantity, but the opportunity for it is very much on, on the upswing. And so when I think about where low code started, you go back to visual development in the nineties, even in the eighties on the Mac working with, what was it?
[00:26:32] Andy Claremont: FileMaker, Pro HyperCard, like all these things that were about how do we create software without syntax. We're, we're at the point now where I can actually, you know, cross the chasm and bring more people along. And, and I think up till this point, it, we weren't quite there yet. And I think AI is going to help with that too.
[00:26:55] Jack Vaughan: So what kind of a, so yeah, today. Like, how likely is it for your average non technical worker to think, Yeah, I could build that. Like, when compared to, like, how they might throw up a spreadsheet. And like, how far off do you think we are from your average person? I know we can't quantify that. Kind of just being comfortable with the fact that they could, or at least someone in their very close team could just build
[00:27:20] Andy Claremont: something.
[00:27:21] Andy Claremont: I think, I still think we're a couple years out to where it's completely ubiquitous. I think on a kind of a company standpoint, business standpoint where we're seeing the most headway is with automation, process automation, using the software that you already have. That's getting people to start thinking about functionality.
[00:27:42] Andy Claremont: In terms of data, that's a bit of a known entity for your average. Knowledge worker who needs to store data in some structured way. Yeah, they're still going to continue using spreadsheets for now. But we're starting to see that kind of UI visual layer come in with you know, something as benign as forms.
[00:28:02] Andy Claremont: Looking at Google Workspace and how they've gone about it, just connecting forms to Google Sheets, it's not actually data, data in. Data accessible hook that up to looker or whatever you want. Now we can start rocking that data You know that we have the components. I have the pieces now. It's the case of like, how do we bring this all together?
[00:28:25] Andy Claremont: and I think that's gonna be the the evolution that we see over the next several years of Yeah, the existing big work workplace environments Making that more of a seamless experience, because it's still kind of clunky right now. They need to get up to glide standards. Ha! And then we also see the more purpose built enterprise y stuff, like ServiceNow
[00:28:50] Andy Claremont: continuing to grow and I expect more things to emerge a little bit further down market. So, Airtable's trying to go that way, other platforms are going that way, we're kind of coming at it from the other end as Glide, yeah, so, yeah, to what I was saying about being on the cusp, we have all of these different environments moving towards low code at the same time.
[00:29:17] Andy Claremont: And all coming from their, their points of origin. And we'll get there, but we're not there yet. It's gonna be, I think, another, another several years before we are there. At that point of convergence.
[00:29:28] Jack Vaughan: Feels sometimes to me like, we certainly see it glide, like, people pulling together. a bunch of different things in one place and kind of like Hammering them together and they they're very brittle these systems I guess the questions I want to ask are like what are the categories of Of loco tools that you see today and do you imagine there being that many categories in five years time?
[00:29:49] Jack Vaughan: Like can you see this rolling up into a a core set of tools or core
[00:29:53] Andy Claremont: approach? I think what needs to happen is we need to Really do more education as As an ecosystem, as, as a a category. This is one of the reasons I teamed up with Sahil here in Toronto to start No-Code Toronto as a meetup group, is that we want, we know that there's opportunity, but opportunity needs better awareness of the space as a whole.
[00:30:24] Andy Claremont: When you look out at how people define no-code. You have these different clusters depending on the tool and platform that a person is using. People who are building websites with Webflow think of Webflow as no code. You're building SaaS platforms with Bubble, you think that's no code. These are all no code and low code technologies, but we don't have a sort of unified voice talking about the practical aspects of building with low code.
[00:30:54] Andy Claremont: So remove the specific tool from the equation. Talk more about how to approach low code development. And there's a lot of things that are common knowledge and software development when it comes to things like structured data. Basically how do you deal with crud apps, create, read update, delete these fundamental concepts of software development that when you're coming into it from the low code side.
[00:31:23] Andy Claremont: You may have no concept of, because that's compartmentalized as this is software development that's programming or we're no code or we're low code. We don't need to think about that. You absolutely do. Now what we've replaced is the IDE. You no longer have your syntax and you're not compiling and dealing with all this DevOps stuff.
[00:31:40] Andy Claremont: But you're still creating software. And so we still need to have the understanding of what does that mean to create software? What, what considerations do we have to have? And that's where I think we need way more education in order for this to work. Otherwise you will continue to see the sort of slapdash people pulling things together every which way, because they don't know, they haven't learned the, the principles because they're not looking for those principles.
[00:32:06] Andy Claremont: So that's where I think we need to be as a, as an ecosystem, a no code, low code ecosystem, especially for work. Get, get these principles into folks heads and they'll be. better able to build the tools that they need to build with far less frustration than they're having right now. And that's a long answer, but.
[00:32:27] Jack Vaughan: Oh, it's a great answer. So just segueing a little bit you're also a great educator and I'm interested in how you think about your skillset as it stands today. Cause we've mentioned the community. We've mentioned the ecosystem, which is relatively new thing for you. I think you mentioned like as it stands today, what would you say?
[00:32:46] Jack Vaughan: How would you look at your skillset? What are the different constituent parts that, one, make up what you do at Glide, and also if you were to go out into the world after Glide, what would you be marketing?
[00:32:56] Andy Claremont: Oh it, I am, I'm very much a generalist, I guess. I've done all of these different things.
[00:33:05] Andy Claremont: Community is where it kind of comes together. Yeah. So, if you think about community, aside from just like the, like I talked about the break fix conversation and all that, but community experience is the thing that drives people in. Education is a big part of that. One of the reasons people join community is to learn, to upskill.
[00:33:27] Andy Claremont: We're seeing a big surge right now in the community space of educational platforms wrapping themselves around the concept of community. So people will come in to learn something and then they stick around to be with the other alumni of whatever program they went through or whatever cohort they were in.
[00:33:48] Andy Claremont: It's a great way to connect around, right? Just like you go to school, you stay in touch with your friends from school, post secondary, same thing, community forums around these shared experiences. So education is part of that. And I always just loved. Teaching stuff. So it's very much baked into how I think about community experiences.
[00:34:08] Andy Claremont: Education is part of it. But then there's also the events, the experiences that can be very unstructured. So the, the event planning, like all the end to end of that, doing that as well. And then all the technical operational stuff as well. So it, these things can all be a value on their own. But where I really get excited is when they wrap around some sort of like.
[00:34:32] Andy Claremont: experience, customer experience program. So yeah.
[00:34:36] Jack Vaughan: So within that generalist skillset, where does sales and marketing sick sink sit for you? Like describe yourself as a marketer or a salesperson. Have you ever sold anything
[00:34:48] Andy Claremont: in your life? I have quite a bit, but I'm, I think I'm terrible at it. I'm not a business development person.
[00:34:54] Andy Claremont: I'm not a sales person or a sales rep. Why do you think you're terrible at it? Because I'm not going in for the, I'm not good at going in for the close. I can get very excited about things, clearly. I can get other people excited about things. But then when it comes to the actual transaction, I am so ready to just give things away for free.
[00:35:12] Andy Claremont: Because I'm so excited about it. That's not good for business. It's not good for sales. Ha ha ha ha. So, the way I think about what I do in relation to that, It's, it's finding opportunity and being able to hand things off. So, my entire approach to marketing is very much rooted in education. I'm going to educate, try to teach something new, inspire, excite people, the same way a good teacher does.
[00:35:35] Andy Claremont: Like, I'm going to get you excited about the subject, not just throw rhetoric at you. So, doing that on the marketing side, all the way down to what is the specific thing that you're trying to do. Do I have an answer for that? How can I support you help you in that? And to me, that's when we start getting into the sales handoff of.
[00:35:55] Andy Claremont: You're trying to do this. Oh, you can totally do, fix that with this thing here. Oh, okay, you want to talk more about what that's going to look like for you? Let me introduce you to my, my buddy, Sean, or Ian, or Jane, or whoever, who can have that conversation about what that looks like. So I'll, I'll lead them up to the door and then, then send them on their way.
[00:36:17] Andy Claremont: Yeah, that's how I think about what I do in the context of marketing.
[00:36:24] Jack Vaughan: And who are some of the most important people who've been in your life? Mentors? Figures? And how have they impacted you? Like, has there been anyone on your journey that has been in the field that you work in now? Or has this been an avenue that you've really carved out yourself and the figures are?
[00:36:40] Andy Claremont: A lot of great faculty at St. Lawrence College, the advertising program I went to graduated into the recession. So a lot of what I learned wasn't super relevant anymore.
[00:36:50] Andy Claremont: But the connections and inspiration and what I picked up from them, like the teachers I really liked and who I thought did a great job, I try to. Take bits of what they did and their approach and carry it on. And Kip Tuckwell was a, led the advertising program and he saw a lot in me and a lot of the opportunities I got were because he kind of set me up for success.
[00:37:17] Jack Vaughan: And then How did you find learning when you were younger? Was it a string of roses? It was a mixed
[00:37:23] Andy Claremont: bag. It was a mixed bag, my friend. You can kind of tell with all the books behind me, but like, I, I'm a voracious reader. I love learning new things, but I don't have a ton of respect for teachers who who don't seem to respect the work that they're doing.
[00:37:41] Andy Claremont: So if teachers were clearly, like, disinterested or disengaged from the material or from the students I was a bit of a trash student for them. Because I, I didn't, I didn't pay attention. But for the ones who are really, really good, like, I, I really wanted to go the extra mile for them. So you know, stay after class, go in for office hours, ask a lot of questions, be a bit of a caner so yeah.
[00:38:04] Andy Claremont: It depended on the faculty, honestly, and the subject.
[00:38:08] Jack Vaughan: What are you learning today? What's your edge right now of something that you're really trying to upskill
[00:38:13] Andy Claremont: in? I am, so I'm in the middle of reading Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. You know, classic. History, economics, sociology. A little bit of philosophy because it, I think there's so much of that, that, that realm of thinking that is applicable to the things that we deal with every day and, and just to kind of like better understand the world that we're in and, and where we fit.
[00:38:44] Andy Claremont: And aside from that I don't know, I've always had a very keen interest in business topics and, and world history and that sort of stuff. And so I tried for a long time to get more into like classic literature or even, you know, fantasy. Like when I, when I was young younger, I was a When you try somehow.
[00:39:09] Andy Claremont: Yeah. And it's like, it just feels like homework. Like I'm, I'm going through Wealth of Nations, which I'm sure is homework for someone in college. But I'm actually enjoying reading it. I tried getting through some other fantasy stuff and classic lit and it was a slog. I felt like I was on, doing a book assignment.
[00:39:24] Jack Vaughan: And it doesn't feel like a slog now? It doesn't, no.
[00:39:27] Andy Claremont: I'm just like, it just makes you think. And I love those books that you're flipping through and it's just making you think and you get these little ideas and moments of inspiration. Little aha moments,
[00:39:36] Jack Vaughan: yeah. What about a skill or an area that you're not working on that if we were in the Matrix and you had one upload, what would
[00:39:45] Andy Claremont: you choose?
[00:39:46] Andy Claremont: I would love to be able to play the piano. Ah, okay.
[00:39:52] Jack Vaughan: That's kind of a separate, separate question.
[00:39:56] Andy Claremont: Yeah, I have, I've, I've tried. The, going back to childhood, I always like had a keyboard or something. Electric. Keyboard. Might a keyboard off to the side. But it, my mom asked me little,
[00:40:06] Jack Vaughan: it's great thing to have by your desk.
[00:40:07] Jack Vaughan: I've had it for years. I can't, I couldn't get up to this office. Obviously. That's
[00:40:10] Andy Claremont: been my background. , I had a little MP K Pro sitting on my desk for a very long time, but I ended up selling it. Selling it because I wasn't using it. It was just collecting dust. And that was kind of the classic problem for me.
[00:40:21] Andy Claremont: I remember being being a kid and my mom asking me point blank Like do you want a keyboard or do you want a computer in your room? You can choose one and I said, of course i'm going to get the computer Put the pc in my room. And that's kind of been it like it's always just been In a choice when you have limited time and especially now when you have a kid and everything else what do you spend your time on for me?
[00:40:43] Andy Claremont: It's It's work, books, and history and then I, I live voraciously through Youtubers, showing you how to, teaching you music theory and different instruments, and I'll just watch that, and it kind of hit, the dopamine hits, even though I'm not actually doing anything. So I'm getting, I'm getting the musical hit without performing.
[00:41:09] Andy Claremont: Yeah.
[00:41:10] Jack Vaughan: So if you did have a weekend, totally for free, with family, we're just having a great time somewhere else, you had no errands or work to do, what would you do? Reading,
[00:41:22] Andy Claremont: Piano and watercolors. I love painting. Ah, okay, yeah, yeah. I remember seeing that somewhere. That's great. Yeah, that'd be my other escape.
[00:41:30] Jack Vaughan: Alright, two last quickfire questions. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? What is it
[00:41:36] Andy Claremont: called? Telekinesis? Moving things with your mind, force, that sort of thing. Just open doors, shut doors, don't have to get up. It's like the ultimate lazy superpower. Nice. Bring that thing to me, it's over on the other side of the room, I don't want to get up.
[00:41:50] Jack Vaughan: And what about And you don't, this doesn't have to be a quickfire one, if you could build any product, let's say any product you can imagine, like more advanced than any tool that you've ever built or used, and there was no limitations on kind of like team or resources or your input, you could just sort of manifest it into existence.
[00:42:12] Andy Claremont: Software or hardware? Either. Either. I badly want to get into the EB space and I would love to develop, like, the ultimate Kind of that ideal vehicle of super fast charge time, good driving range, high tolerance for cold temperatures. Do you have an EV? We do, yeah, we have an Ioniq 5. That can be a whole other podcast, my friend.
[00:42:37] Andy Claremont: Let's talk about EVs. Yeah, I would love to do that. Otherwise, I'm kind of obsessed with intranets, which is a weird thing to say. But I would love, I
[00:42:47] Jack Vaughan: mean, given your initial story, it doesn't sound weird.
[00:42:50] Andy Claremont: Oh, that's, that's a fair point. The internal communities. I
[00:42:53] Jack Vaughan: would, I mean, it's definitely not the coolest thing you ever said.
[00:42:58] Andy Claremont: But it's, it's the thing, one of the things I think about the most, like how would I build, what would I build? Because I, I've seen what's out there. And it's pretty awful. So, I would like, I'd like to build something better.
[00:43:13] Jack Vaughan: So what's next for you, man?
[00:43:14] Andy Claremont: Glide events are gonna fire back up. Virtual events are gonna come back online.
[00:43:20] Andy Claremont: Do more of that. You know, a lot of education tied into that. Not just about product, but just, you know, the category. Lifting the category and talking more about the the innovation themes. So that, that'll be fun. And yeah, figuring out this whole ecosystem thing for Glide. And then on the side, I want, I do want to get to do more writing and have some ideas for just not at all Glide related or work related stuff that I want to do.
[00:43:47] Andy Claremont: Sounds good.
[00:43:49] Jack Vaughan: You want to talk about that or is that embryonic in the early stages?
[00:43:53] Andy Claremont: Where you don't want to say anything about it? No, no, no, it's cool. It's one of the things I I do miss about WordPress and some of the, like, the low code stuff I used to do is that it was very easy to just go and hack on something.
[00:44:09] Andy Claremont: And it was usually more complex, more technical, but there's just like, there's just a lot of room to play. And I want to get back to that at least in, in, to some level. So I'm, I'm back to looking at Software development frameworks back to looking at PHP, Node. Svelte has my attention lately. I'm actually just Signed up for a Canadian cloud hosting provider so I can go and hack on some projects.
[00:44:35] Andy Claremont: So, you know, being being a generalist Trying to play around in these different areas Awesome, great. It'll be fun.
[00:44:44] Jack Vaughan: Well, thanks for the chat. Appreciate it.
[00:44:46] Andy Claremont: Thank you for Inviting me. I'm keen to listen to some of Other conversations that you're having. Yeah,
[00:44:55] Jack Vaughan: who knows? I might have my mum on next week.
[00:44:57] Jack Vaughan: That'll be fun. Oh nice. I'm kidding Yeah, no, I'm really enjoying it as I said before we we jumped on like this podcast is something I started years and years ago and there's this thing. I don't know whether you've heard it It's like it's this principle which has kind of emerged If you get past the seventh episode of your podcast, you're likely to do it long term.
[00:45:17] Jack Vaughan: Mm hmm And it's very telling that I ended on the seventh episode about four years ago and then never picked it up again. I joined Glide, had a kid, like, was working on online courses, things like that. And now that we've had two kids, I mean, they're still very young, and, like, stuff at Glide is a little bit more chilled than it used to be.
[00:45:35] Jack Vaughan: There's a kind of space for this now and I just really want to just enjoy it. Just go on my nose with it. So I'm excited and, It was great to have you on in the early stages. Appreciate it. Of course, of
[00:45:43] Andy Claremont: course. Kind of related I, I didn't mention this, but the two programs that I applied to when I got, was going off to college, my first choice was radio production.
[00:45:53] Andy Claremont: Now, no, thank God I dodged that bullet, but, but I really enjoy audio as a format so much, so much more than video. In a lot of ways.
[00:46:06] Jack Vaughan: Yeah, I found it like, as somewhat of an introvert, and like, I can get overstimulated by large groups all chatting. I mean, I love video, that's what I do as a profession, but when I go into that audio realm and listen, either, you know, my whole background is music, or when I'm listening to a podcast, there's a different way that you connect with the message, or the content.
[00:46:28] Jack Vaughan: My mum's a voice therapist and voice teacher, and she's thought about voice her whole life. She always speaks very beautifully about the way that the soul comes through the voice, or the personality, or whatever you want to call it, and, It's not to say that if you have a voice that's having problems, that that's your soul.
[00:46:42] Jack Vaughan: It's just to say that there is something Undescribable sometimes about hearing and getting to know someone first through their voice And then seeing them. There's something magical about that. Or forgetting what they look like and just focusing on how they're saying it. That was one
[00:46:58] Andy Claremont: thing I really liked about the, That brief moment during the pandemic when Clubhouse was taking off and audio spaces because it, it, it reminded me of You know, being, being a teenager again and playing these video games and having your guild or your clan or whatever, and you're all on Ventrilo or TeamSpeak.
[00:47:17] Andy Claremont: Yeah. And, and like, that is how you know somebody. No idea what they look like, but you know their voice. And it becomes so distinct.
[00:47:24] Jack Vaughan: There's something quite pure about that as well.
[00:47:26] Andy Claremont: Yeah, yeah. And the fact that you can think that anywhere. Like we're all equals here or something. Yeah, yeah. And then, then for work too, like being able to do a voice call.
[00:47:34] Andy Claremont: Where you don't have to be camera on, you know, I think I find I can think more deeply when I'm just in the car voice only really no other distractions. I can just stare off into space and really process what's being said. Yeah, yeah,
[00:47:56] Jack Vaughan: sweet man. Well, I'm going to process this and and get it out there.
[00:48:00] Jack Vaughan: And thanks so much for this
[00:48:01] Andy Claremont: conversation. I appreciate it. Let me know when it's up. You know, pastor, pastor around. Yeah. Yeah. Alrighty. Alright,
[00:48:07] Jack Vaughan: buddy. Cool. Catch you soon.