Rich and Paul, founders of a new software startup called Aboard, discuss the importance of creating something that is simple and resonates with people. And the challenge of accepting that not all ideas will be successful, that the important thing is to put our ego aside and have the humility and discipline to continue working on our ideas until they are simple.

Rich, how are you?

The word that comes to mind, which is a word that's made

up of two words, is bittersweet.

Aw.

I mean, it's nice.

It has the sweet part.

There's a sweet part.

There's no doubt there's a sweet part.

All right, so what's, what's got you feeling bittersweet.

You and I have a startup together.

We don't just have this podcast.

It's called a board.

That's right.

And a board is this big, beautiful, sprawling,

sophisticated software platform.

And by platform it means there's all kinds of things you can do with it.

We've built 10 square miles of.

Software

A board does a little bit of everything.

It's a yes, it's got chat and data and all this stuff because we

wanted to sort of make it easier for people to get their work done.

But we're like, you know what will resonate is let's

bring in more of the web.

Let's make it, and let's make it really easy to bookmark stuff

and bring it into this thing.

Because people are always saving things.

All the time.

And we made one use case in the demo and it was, Hey, you're

looking at Zappos buying a shoe.

We thought we were changing the world and we were gonna tell everyone

how to work better and be smarter.

And it turns out when you show people how easy it could be to bookmark a shoe,

including very powerful people, their eyes light up and they get excited.

Yeah.

And that's the sweet part.

People said the magic words to us.

I can think of 10 ways to use it.

When can I have it?

I really want it.

And

so they, when someone tells you, that's really cool, good luck, or, that's neat.

I can see how that's worth it for.

Other

people

are always nice

when they give you a personal, when they, when you see

people connect personally to it and immediately in like inject it into

their lives, you know, you're onto

something.

It's completely different as an experience than the other one where

they're like, thanks for your time.

It's powerful.

And we, we think we've we're onto something there.

That's the sweet part,

but the bitter part.

What's the bitter part?

I built miles and miles of beautiful landscape,

beautiful software, got

lots of money.

cares.

Nobody

Nobody wants to hear about it.

This is, you know, I have tweets that have gone viral.

Somebody sent me an email, they're like, somebody just quoted one

of your tweets to me today.

That's pretty

It's pretty cool.

Except it was actually copied by some influencer onto their Instagram.

Of course.

Yeah.

Anyway, what I'm

I can't help but ask.

Oh, it was a, it's a, it's a, this little line I wrote,

which is, um, a parody of a song.

It's when the moon hits your knees and you mispronounced trees, Sycamore,

Ooh,

millions of

an incredibly airtight little

It was just, it was just on and it, it completely got stolen and you know,

just like, it's just absolutely, it's part

source.

It

part of the culture now.

Right.

. It's a little confusing sometimes to have built a career explaining

technology sensitively and thoughtfully.

Yeah.

And, uh, spent an unbelievable amount of time learning things so

I can write about and convey them and then realize that mispronouncing

trees might be my human legacy.

it, it might be.

But that is where you meet people.

You meet people with a good line, a good joke, something that

they can put in their pocket.

Now.

That doesn't mean they won't give you the rest of the, they might give you some

time on the other side of that cuz like, ah, you're the guy who put the shoe in

the bookmark or you're the Sycamore guy.

Yeah.

Accepting this is hard.

I think we do it because we're technologists and

we love the idea of creating.

I'm going to throw out a catchphrase.

Maybe this is the title of the podcast.

You're the editor, you decide a possibility engine.

Well, okay, so this I, this is the meat of it and this is the

advisor's part, which is that there are all these moments in the history of

editorial work over the last 15 years where editors sit their teams down and

say, we have a pretty popular blog, but it's not as popular as it should be.

I need more viral hits.

Right.

Who can you get me viral hits?

Yeah.

And, uh, that, why doesn't that work?

It

because that's not, that's not coming from the core of the thing.

Certain things are only emergent.

Gotta do 'em every day.

And then you get a sense of the form.

And then it's funny as someone who can occasionally do things that

get spread pretty far and wide.

Yeah.

You know, you know, you're not, it's not a hundred percent accuracy, but

every now, like I still write for Wired.

I know which columns are gonna kind of quote, hit and pick

up speed on social media.

But there's something else that I think that that.

That you do that is not, is less common, which is you do not sit down.

And I've seen you work through your articles on a monthly basis.

You don't sit down and say, how do I get a big bang out of this one?

You can't.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't

turn the wheel.

They're not all hits.

They're not

not all hits.

hits.

I mean, think of, pick up any artist's albums, right?

And, and if you're lucky, you have one hit per album.

If you're a superstar.

If I may obs, if I may, uh, observe you Paul Ford and talk about

you, you are one of the few people I know whose superpower you happen to

be a great writer, but your superpower is what you're missing, which is ego,

which is where the bitter comes from.

I want everybody to love all my ideas unconditionally,

Oh,

and all the software I built

Trust me, rich, I work with you.

Yeah, I know you.

not easy to toil away in the woodshed and build a thing,

wheel it out to the neighbors and they just kind of shrug and say, that's

sort of neat, and they walk away.

I've been working on the thing for such a long time.

I've.

I've been doing software for a very long time.

It is, it's much easier for me today.

I used to get angry.

I used to get upset at people for not buying into my vision of how

the world is supposed to work.

Now I'm very happy.

This suite has completely overwhelmed the bitter, to be

I think so.

You wait for this moment.

So, so there's a great, there was a poet named Don Marquee who, who did a

series of poems about a cockroach and a cat named Archie and Mahi Abel, but

also wrote other kinds of poems as well.

His line about poetry was that publishing a book of verse is like

dropping a feather into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo, right?

Like there's just, and he was a hit.

He had hits.

He was successful.

Yeah.

You.

The fantasy of the hit, the fantasy of things locking in is so pervasive,

and the reality is that 99% of the most successful people you see, you

don't see the, you don't see the 99.5% of it that is meaningless.

Grind

and failure.

failure.

Going into a meeting and knowing of 20 minutes into a three hour meeting

that this is gonna go badly is rough and you have to power through that and.

and

I think we're diverging from what the, the real message here is, which is how

like, put the ego aside, speak simply and empathetically to what's gonna

connect for people no matter what it is.

We're talking about software, but the best, the best, best marketers,

best communicators, really keep shaving it down and sanding it down.

Less words simpler.

You've told me this in the last few weeks as we think about marketing aboard.

One idea at a time.

is,

which can sound arrogant and

condescending, but it's

not.

It's not.

It's actually, um, and it's, it's, I gotta be frank, it's difficult

because I, what I worry about is that all sorts of ethical, cultural,

emotional aspects of the things we.

We'll just get swept under the rug because people will see it in a

certain way and that's all they will

understand.

appropriate it

And that will be success.

It will be

be success.

Our job will be if people do appropriate this and say, this is mine now.

Yeah.

Our job is to support them.

Now that doesn't mean that we have to give them exactly what they want.

Giving people exactly what they want is how you get Facebook.

Okay.

So like

You can bring them closer, hear them, and still have an opinion

about the direction of your platform.

For sure.

What I want to build our tools.

I don't want to create perfect human happiness.

I want to create really good tools that

luck with that.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Exactly.

What I think we're saying is that, look, you're gonna work you, you're gonna

have this set of goals, and they're probably gonna be pretty aspirational

and pretty abstract, and then you're gonna crank along for a while.

Then you might see something that locks in with people and And it's

probably gonna feel really reductive.

It's gonna feel too small.

But that's your starting point.

That's your act.

You actually have to look at all the other stuff you did and

say, that was just prologue.

And now we finally got to the first.

Absolutely.

And that takes discipline and humility.

I don't love it cuz now I have, uh, another couple of years of work to do.

I've seen consultants, I've seen product managers, engineers, designers.

I have seen every kind of person blow themselves up

on

the deck where they need to convey every aspect and ambiguity in their discipline.

Let's go back to what you said earlier.

If people aren't buying in, you're not gonna force them to buy in.

Put aside power dynamics.

There are people who, who are like, boss, that's a great idea.

Put that aside.

That's nonsense, right?

If people aren't buying in, you're not gonna convince 'em to buy in.

And when you, when you're sampling, A dozen people, they're probably signaling

to you how a thousand are gonna react.

So just take it in.

It is what it is.

You're not gonna convince them they're wrong.

Customers, users, however you want to characterize the other side of the, the,

the screen, frankly, uh, they're right.

They're just right.

Let's be clear.

We haven't launched this software yet, but the story we've been telling

for the last few years, people have been saying, oh, it's workflow.

Well, I need these five things nor to organize my teams.

And, and, and it's five different things every

time we talk to a different

And it turns out that what they really wanted

was a place to put their shoes.

their shoes.

It's fundamental.

It's basic.

Yeah.

But there was no way nobody would ask us for.

No, no, no.

You gotta kind of keep banging away.

That's right.

. That's

what

I'm saying, like it can be really hard because the advice here

sounds like, oh, go f Essentially, you're not gonna get the viral hit.

You're not gonna get people to lock in unless you do all

the grind and get it through.

Yeah.

And then you're gonna say, Hey, I think this might work.

And then when their eyes light up, double down.

And it's the, the actual truism is that people can handle exactly one idea at a

Absolutely.

And if it's the wrong one, don't dig in.

It's not gonna help you.

They've done, they're done, they've moved on

And then you're gonna have a couple weeks where you need

to, like, you can come back with another idea a couple weeks from now.

Oh yeah.

I mean, you see this theme over and over again.

Great filmmakers leave a lot on the cutting room floor.

Did you watch, um, apocalypse Now, Redux.

have not seen.

What is that?

it's the special edit.

It's the director's cut of Apocalypse Now by Francis for

two hours

It's like another, like hour and a half longer and it

has like two whole sub narratives

of Marlon Brando rambling in the

like they go to, they go to this French colonial

house up the river and they, I

I think I need to see this.

That's one of my favorite

I'm gonna tell you something.

You don't need to see it You don't

just a bunch of

Oh, and everybody, you know, the, the film critics

were like, well, this, this just restores a vision of Copa, and so

It's academic.

That's

nonsense.

just, you know what you want to see.

You wanna see Robert Duvall and the helicopters will fly to the Val's place.

Like, like, okay.

Yes.

If I want to, you know, truly invest myself in this Vietnam narrative.

Sure.

Okay.

I need to see what was in Coppola's brain.

You see this theme over and over?

It's actually fascinating.

Uh, I'm, I'm a huge fan of the band.

Low.

Yeah, sure.

And a mutual friend of ours, which, but bugs, the shit outta me was

hanging out in the studio while they were recording their new album, and he was

telling me how about how Alan Sparhawk would walk up to the, the mixing board

Sure.

and.

Turn off track after track to see if it mattered.

And if you listen to Lowe's music, it's very spare,

Right.

kind of open and airy.

And he's like, he's a genius.

I'm like, he's a genius.

He's just deleting stuff.

But

that's genius.

Great, great directors.

Cut it down to the bone.

Great musicians cut it down.

So

Simplify

Milo is kind of a musicians band too, and the musicians are like,

okay, he does that one thing

And they, they

don't think he's doing it.

And to your point about like you can't aim for the hits, he's not doing it thinking,

okay, I'm gonna really pull this one.

He's genuinely having an interaction with a thing to simplify it to its essence.

That's

I think we can say with tremendous confidence that

Low is not aiming for hits.

we're done.

I think

think they've, they've turned the

let me, let me, here's a top five low song.

It goes like this,

no.

Careful.

One of my favorite bands in the world.

a great sound.

It's a great sound.

It's a great sound, but it is never gonna be on like Hot 1 0 5 drive time,

I always thought they were very cinematic.

I, I'm surprised they're not in more movies and shows and

fair.

Like the scene where you know someone is walking home after a terrible,

It's windy

romantic nightmare.

And as low starts to play, I'm sure it'll happen.

Keep it simple.

Keep it tldr For this is the audience Ford Advisors

Yeah, but it's not as simple as keeping it simple.

Embrace rejection.

Try again.

going until you see the simplicity.

Okay.

See, I thought I had the good title.

You have the better title.

Keep it simple and keep going.

Yeah, that's you.

You're, you can't start simple.

You can't,

It's hard.

We we're convinced we are discovering a new continent.

all the time.

It's, it oscillates.

We should, I mean, what are our states?

Narcissism, failure, despair.

Occasionally we just relax and go out to lunch.

look, my discovered a continent reaction.

Ooh, coconuts,

Looks like a website.

Yeah.

All right, friends.

Well, if you need any advice, get in touch.

hello@zdiford.com or check us out on Z at Zdi Ford on Twitter.

Yes.

Uh, give us five stars if you feel so inclined.

Uh, have a great week.

I hope so.