Dave Hannum - Stop Building Features Just Because You Can

Dave Hannum has spent more than 30 years building products in the fitness industry. He led product and business development at Technogym before founding Functional Solutions, one of the early platforms for connected fitness and digital coaching.

For most of his career, building software meant working within engineering constraints. Today, those constraints are changing...

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Transcript

Marco: Where are you based, Dave?

Dave: Virginia Beach.

Marco: Nice.

Dave: So, yeah. I got up this morning, and I've got a sauna and a cold plunge out back in my backyard by my pool.

Jonas: Nice. Oh, my goodness. That sounds really great.

Dave: It's nice, except for when it's about 90 degrees. The sauna is not as fun then.

Marco: Do you have kids, Dave?

Dave: I've got two, but they're grown and gone.

Marco: How old are they?

Dave: Twenty-three and twenty-four.

Marco: Oh, that's cool. So they are in college right now.

Dave: Well, actually, they're out of college. My son's doing—basically, he's a mini-me—so he's in the fitness industry. He's already tried bodybuilding. The other day, he actually got ahold of me. He goes, "Hey, I want to build a fitness app." So I was like, "Okay."

Jonas: That nut didn't fall far from the tree.

Marco: That's awesome. Well, he has a really good mentor. I mean, building things and everything, it's a really good way to—no?

Dave: It is. It's funny because with Base44—Jonas knows my love of that initially, early on—I told Zach, my son, "Start there before you take the training wheels off and move up to Claude or something."

Marco: Does he like it?

Dave: Well, he loves it. His problem is a little like mine, where your mind starts going, and you start something here, and then you go over here and start something. And you're like, I'm going to build this, now I'm going to build that, and then I'm going to build this, instead of focusing in on what you're trying to do and finishing it.

Jonas: From your product perspective, how do you feel now using this vibe coding and you know Claude and everything?

Dave: Because at the very beginning, I remember when you are trying to build something, it's like you have to be very focused on one thing because the problem was the engineering.

Marco: Now that you have this vibe coding and Claude and everything, what's your take?

Dave: It's a good example with your son. Well, it is. Like I said, I think Base44 and Lovable are two products that, because they give you everything, the infrastructure, the database, you don't have to manage a lot of secret keys. I think it's just great to get going, but you see the limitations of those products very quickly. You know, if you're trying to bring anything to real production, they're just not there yet. And I think it'll be interesting to watch because I think you've got Claude and Codex on the one side trying to make everything so easy, like Lovable and Base44. And then you've got Base44 and Lovable trying to go the other way to make it more production ready. So it's fun to watch, but look, now that I'm fully into Claude, there's no going back. Once you understand it and you can, it's just managing all the stuff that you have to manage. You know, I've got in one project, I've got 23 different connections going, whether it's Supabase, you've got Doppler, you've got Vercel, you've got GitHub, you've got just all these things that you're going to Twilio and you keep adding things. And then you're trying to manage all the keys and you're like, oh crap. So I think that's where we need the most help, is trying to manage all these disparate tools that you're using, remembering which ones they are.

Jonas: Right.

Marco: Right.

Dave: And so it's like a structure.

Marco: It's like a different way of structuring everything, right?

Dave: To build a product because now it's tangible and you can do it very fast.

Marco: But then you have to structure the way you are doing everything, because if not, it's going to be like a while, it's going to be really difficult to understand all the things that you are building, right?

Dave: You can't jump right in. You know, I think the biggest thing I've learned is you need to spend a lot of time baking the idea of what you're trying to build.

Jonas: And then once you bake it, you need to sit there and go, okay, what's the infrastructure I really need to start with?

Dave: Because if you can, if you can nail that at the beginning and you've got a great foundation, then the sky's the limit.

Marco: I agree. And now the big question is the moat, right? What's your biggest moat?

Dave: It's going to be, it's not the coding. It's not anymore that part, even the algorithms. The algorithms now you can build it if you have a lot of, you know, science behind everything, you can put everything on Claude, and then you have a really good algorithm.

Jonas: So now what's the moat for you?

Dave: Look, coding is not the problem at all. Like you say, I think it's almost trying to determine what the user really wants. Because so many times, you know, in the old days, which was last year, we... Two months ago. Yeah, two months ago, we would sit there, you know, as product people, and you're building things and you've got a roadmap. It's like, I don't even know if roadmaps are that relevant anymore. Longer term roadmaps. I think because you can build things so fast, it's not like you're going to say, I'm going to have these five features this quarter. You could have 30 features this quarter. You know, but sometimes I think you get to the point where you can build a feature so fast that you're just building features to build features. And sometimes I think you have to slow down, stop, and really look at what the end users are doing. Because otherwise, you know, you had a bloated product before, but now think about it when you're cranking out 20 features a month.

Marco: It's exactly what I was thinking.

Dave: Like the Frankenstein's we had before, imagine what's going to come out now. It's ridiculous. I mean, you know, and then I find, I think I build the perfect, you know, product that has the great foundation.

Jonas: I get these other ideas and you're like, can I add it to that foundation?

Dave: So I don't have to go through all that other stuff again. But Claude's getting pretty good at pushing back a lot. I think if you set up the project, right, and make your constraints the way you need them. And that's really, you know, I think in prompting and building product, the constraints in the guardrails are as important as what I want. Because it's easy to say what I want, but if you don't tell it what not to do, or I don't want it like this, I think that becomes a very important piece of the puzzle as you're building things out.

Marco: Yeah, the framework, right?

Dave: That's why it's really important, the prompt, because if you have a clear prompt, it's meaning that you have a really good idea or a really clear idea at least.

Jonas: Right.

Dave: So I think that's the most important thing for everything. It's like why you are building something and what problem you are solving. And I know that's something that everyone is telling you, but then when you start to build something, that's the biggest struggle, I think. It is. And I think I find myself, because I do a lot of stuff by myself, it's easier than bringing other people in and having them do things with it. I think that's a challenge for companies that have a lot of employees or developers or architects or product people trying to figure out where they really fit nowadays. Because, you know, in all honesty, I've been a product guy for 20 plus years in the fitness and I'm at the best time of my life because I don't need, you know, a lot of things around me anymore. It's just like, I know what to build. Now I can perfect what I think I need to build and, you know, just do it myself. If you get it, I mean, the architects now, I think, are very important to make sure the structure of everything you've got is right. I mean, you can, and they ask the right questions. You know, I know enough to be dangerous in a lot of areas, but I'm not an architect. I'm not a security guy. So you do need to know the questions to ask to make sure you're doing the right thing in those specific areas. But, you know, as far as just building features and functions and that's... They, you're a weapon. You're a big weapon. I do. I feel like I am a weapon right now because in the past, you know, I mean, when I started my one company, Functional Solutions in 2015, I used Indian developers at the time because that was, you know, what a lot of people did. That was during the time where you're drawing things out in PowerPoint to try to understand, here's what I want you to build.

Dave: And you had the language barrier, you know, and you had no clue what kind of code they were writing and what they were using. And it was just, you know, it was fun, but it was a nightmare because you didn't really have control. So, you know, the first company I built was that way. I didn't really have the control. Ended up building a great product and, you know, a great business. But I actually rebuilt that business over the weekend about two months ago. I mean, the whole thing better.

Marco: That's crazy.

Jonas: It's really crazy.

Marco: Yeah.

Dave: Wish I could have had that. Wish I could get that money back.

Marco: I agree with you.

Dave: It's like a really crazy times.

Marco: Is that the company Functional Solutions that you built?

Jonas: You talked about previously?

Marco: Yeah.

Dave: Functional Solutions. Yeah, that was... Functional Solutions. So back in, I was at Technogym 20 years up until about 2015. I was in charge of their technology in the US. So that was a... It was a fun ride. And around 2011 or 12 CrossFit was becoming very big. Functional fitness was becoming very big. And I was into that and I was watching it here in the US. And I was trying to tell the Italians at Technogym that they need to really take a look at this because they sold very expensive equipment, you know, treadmills and all that. And CrossFit is anti-machines. So I was trying to explain to them, you guys really need to understand that the movement is going towards functional, you know, picking things up, dropping things, things along those lines. And at that time when you're doing a lot of CrossFit type movement patterns, you needed visual guidance. Because, you know, you could get on a chest press, it's really easy. You're just pushing. But, you know, kettlebell swing, all these different types of movements. It's like you need some sort of visual cue to understand, at least at the beginning, what you're supposed to be doing. So at that time I started thinking about how do we get video up on TVs so the class that's all doing the same thing can really understand what they're supposed to do. And that was right around the time early F45 and Orangetheory were also starting to come out. And they had very rudimentary, they were trying to do the same thing. So we were all trying to do it. And actually I didn't beat F45, but I beat Orangetheory because I remember trying to sell my product and technology into Orangetheory. And I almost had it. That would have been a good one. But so I came out, you know, I basically came out. I can see the shiny eyes later.

Dave: I was like going, "Mm-hmm." Just missed it by that much. But, you know, I was basically the technology, the only technology outside of an Orangetheory or an F45 at that time. So it was fun. And that was back in the day with compression. You know, you're sitting there saying, "I'm going to push six to eight things up on a TV." And, you know, these could be 50 meg videos. You know, so times eight and trying to stream and get up there and loop and do stuff. So that was back in the day that we actually had to create animated GIF files to compress them down. Of course, that compressed the look of them down too. So there was just a lot of trickery we had to do back in the day. And, you know, now, like I said, over the weekend, I rebuilt the whole product. Which one do you... I have so many questions for you because you have been in the product and also in the fitness space. But from that perspective, do you remember your first, you know, big feature that you built that said, "Hey, this one was incredibly good for this company." Yeah, actually, it's really relevant today almost as much. It was SMS delivery. So back with Functional Solutions, one of the things, you know, everybody loved this stuff up on the TV. But the other thing that we did was everything was really web-based. Every workout was a unique URL. So we got into early days at Twilio too. We got into using Twilio to send out morning workouts as a link to all the users. So the clubs that we had that had the stuff in the studios, they'd have their members user sign up for the morning text. And then the workout would go out every morning to the people and it would play on their phone. So it was like that was using SMS in more of a proactive way.

Dave: Back in the day, I think was forward thinking because now, I don't even know in the next year or two what's going to become of mobile apps. You know, you really start thinking about it when people can build their own mobile app.

Jonas: Right.

Marco: It's like, what's the app store going to do?

Dave: Now, you know, they if I'm saying this, they're already thinking about it. But it's like when anybody can build a mobile app to do something, I can build exactly what I want because anything that anybody builds, typically, you know, it's anywhere from 70% of what you really want. And it's missing 30% of stuff that you don't. So it's like, I'll just build it myself because then I can get everything I want.

Jonas: So then it's like, what all these mobile app companies do?

Dave: You know, I think a lot of it, the data and the logic becomes what you can potentially sell.

Marco: Yeah.

Dave: And you know, I mean, take it with Rook.

Jonas: It's like, it's a pain in the butt to sit there and say, I want to connect my Garmin, or I want to connect my WHOOP just straight with Garmin because I still, I've never been able to get Garmin to approve me as a vendor, you know?

Dave: So it's kind of like, you got to go through those processes. And then you got to set up and then you got to manage it. And it's like, I think, you know, Rook's in a great spot to be able to sit there and say, hey, let us handle the connections with everything. And then as a user, I can build an app and then use Rook to just connect right away. And all of a sudden, boom, I've got all my wearables. So I don't have to worry about that part.

Marco: Right. Let me do one step back also on those days, because we were talking about early 2000s, right?

Jonas: So when you were building the first product, what was your train of thoughts around that specific feature?

Dave: How did you take that one and make it reality in terms of, oh, that's a vision. This feature will be amazing. I was like, you take everything from, I don't know if you had investors before or maybe through clients or from your team.

Marco: How was that thought?

Dave: I think the hardest thing in the past was listening to the users.

Jonas: Interesting.

Dave: Because you get caught up in listening to sales. Saying, I got this big client and this big client needs this. And then you see dollar signs because if you can get that big client and you can build that. And then back in the day, it could take two months, six months to build something. So you get distracted and you go spend all this time to build something. And then you didn't get the deal or you get the deal, but nobody else wants what you built because it was just for that customer. So I think that was the big struggle back in the day was just trying to prioritize. And it goes back to the roadmap statement, saying, I've got all these things to build. We know it's going to take two to eight weeks to build one thing.

Marco: How do I build 15 things and satisfy the customers that I've got currently?

Dave: So I think a challenge always is not listening to your current customers and paying attention more to your
future customers because you don't have them yet. So I think that's discipline that you need to always abide by.

Jonas: Right.

Dave: But even though it was really difficult because those days or even now, it's like maybe you have one client and he wants, they want specific customizations. But then you know that not everyone wants that customization. But nowadays also with Claude and everything, maybe you can build it very fast. If some revenue come with that, and then you can try to put those features in other clients, it's really difficult also. It is. It goes back to the comment about feature bloat. You had it in the past. I mean, think of something like Salesforce. It's been out forever. Salesforce is a nightmare to try to sit there and set up as a smaller company and configure because it's just got so many things. You don't even know where to go with it. I think that's a challenge for companies that have been out there forever because they built themselves on legacy stacks and stuff for so long. It's harder, I think, to bring Claude, Codex, things like that into the mix, because everything's not wired up for it versus if you can build something from scratch today.

Marco: Yeah.

Dave: You've set it up. I mean, there are certain things I'm starting to do now. When you look at user journeys and how people are using your product, I think, and Claude said this or Anthropic said this, that 80 or 90% of their releases are just being built by Claude because Claude's understanding what things are happening and where it needs to build.

Jonas: I think that's a very interesting idea as you look at continued features, additions is what are your current customers doing with your product right now?

Marco: Do you really know how they enter, where they're going, what they're doing?

Jonas: Because I think you can glean a lot of information to say, "Okay, I thought they'd be coming in over here and doing these things, yet they're coming in over here and they're going down these paths." So why am I not shoring up that side of the business versus this side of the business?

Marco: Do you think that when you go a little bit more deep on that one, because we are talking about between past and future and present, and future and present is almost the same thing, but when we are talking about failure or features that fail, do you think it's going to change?

Dave: Because those days, 20 years ago, five years ago, it takes a lot of time to build something and then
something fails. But it's like you are building not only an MVP, you are building a robust feature. Nowadays, it's a little bit different. So failure or learnings are becoming more interesting right now.

Marco: How do you see this transition between years ago and now?

Dave: You can turn on a dime. I mean, it's almost to the point where I almost did it the other day when I was on talking with somebody and I knew they were looking for something. So as they were looking for something, I was trying to kind of build it out real fast to be able to say, here it is. So I think taking that to the failure side, I think if you go down the wrong path, which is really easy to do today, because you can do it so fast, I think you can turn around on a dime and correct your failure a lot faster. So I just think it's like almost all the rules that we had years ago are thrown out. And you've got to sit there and make new rules. Which is crazy. Yeah, it is. But it's discipline. I think you really discipline now is more important than ever, because in the past, you had time, everybody had to get involved, you had designers over here doing stuff, you had product people trying to do this. And then I'm like, okay, now we're going to build a prototype. And that takes weeks and stuff. And you never even got to the coding part until months in, you know, and then that took time. It's like now, you can stack all that up in a day or two. I mean, I didn't give you a prototype here in an hour and let you play around with it and then give feedback. So it's kind of like the rules are just figured out. We need to find the new rules. And I think it's one of the biggest struggles right now in the whole industry, also with investors, because they are trying to identify the new rules.

Jonas: Right.

Marco: So it's everyone is like, do I invest right now in this company?

Dave: Maybe no, because OpenAI it's already doing something similar. Or maybe other companies, you know, it's like now ideas are becoming more but same time again, the rules are changing for everyone. You know, they are interesting point on investors, because in the past, when you had an idea or a prototype or whatever, you know, you'd go to investors and you tell them about it, and they'd either like it or not. And if they liked it, then they're like, okay, we need a million dollars because we need to have this many developers. And we're going to do this, this and this. And it's like, you think about it now, it's like, in reality, I can build a product very quickly. So I don't need developers. So I still need money maybe to do whether it's marketing, business development, getting out finding customers, but you can almost get to the end point a lot faster.

Jonas: And, you know, do you need as much money?

Dave: Once again, the rules are thrown out, because if you're an investor, I think that's the real challenge is what am I really investing in because somebody else can build the same thing.

Marco: So it's like, you touched on something interesting, because often we're talking obviously on the product perspective most of the time, but in the end, and I said it in a meeting internal on our end the other day, a product does not make a business, right?

Dave: Like there's so many more things to it. Like, and building product right now has become so easy to a certain degree, but building a business is still not easy.

Jonas: Like where's the disconnect then?

Marco: Why is product easy, but business not with the new changes that we've seen?

Jonas: Or is business easier than before?

Dave: Maybe as well. I don't know.

Marco: What's it take?

Dave: I think we silo things too much. You know, it's like when you really look at a business as it scales and you've got a marketing department, you've got a sales department, business development department, technology, you know, all these things. And in most businesses, I don't think they talk very well together. And they're disparate. You got your technology over here, this building stuff, but you got sales over here selling stuff, selling to customers. And I think that was an interesting, I thought about this morning in the sauna was if you think about, and this is where I think the separate systems, it's going to be interesting to watch because I would prefer in today's world to have built the CR everything. Because if you can do that, you've got insight into your sales and what's in your pipeline and the type of customers that's in the pipeline. And over here, you might be building something for features and functions for a totally different type of customer that's not in your pipeline. So if you know, Jonas, you're out there every day, it's like you're dealing with a lot of insurance. That's the moat you're in. It's like all of a sudden you hit one, you nail the next one. It's like going, okay, great, we're doing this.

Jonas: Are you building for that over here?

Dave: You know, it's like that's your pipeline. That's where your business is coming from. And then you throw the same thing on the tech support side. It's like if you controlled end to end all parts of the business, the technology stacks that you need to run the business. It's like that becomes really interesting because then one part feeds the other part, certain things keep breaking over here. It's like if the whole system knows it, I got my different agents.

Marco: I got my sales agent over here talking to my technology agent over here going, "Hey, are you building the right thing because this is the customers I've got that I'm going after?" And then over here on the customer support side, customers are always calling in because they can't figure something out.

Dave: Well, then you didn't build something right. So I think that's the challenge I think in business today is how do I really look at all aspects of the business and make sure that we're building what the business really needs. You saw smiling. Go ahead, Margot. No, very quickly. First of all, I need a sauna. Because I need don't do that time. You live in Florida, you have the sauna every day. You just go outside. But then when you get in the cold plunge, you get in the cold plunge after it, that's when it really gets fun because then you can get your... This morning as we jump all over the place, my heart rate went up to 160 in the sauna. So that's when I know that I'm about done. I can't take this anymore. And then I get right in the cold plunge and it went down to about 82. And then the funny thing is my Garmin, because I always put it on because Garmin does not have sauna mode yet, WHOOP does, but I put it on other just so it tracks it. And the funny thing is it's treating it as a very intense workout. So I always have to make sure in my system that I say, no, this was sauna. It wasn't a 10 minute hit workout. No, this was Claude and this was Claude without tokens.

Marco: Right?

Dave: Like 160 or like building and then like token limit hit. And on that note, the funniest when they had Fable came out the other day and we all got to use it for like two days. And then all of a sudden they were like, they took it away. You're like, damn, that was pretty fun for two days.

Jonas: Yeah.

Dave: 160 heart rate down to 80.

Marco: Exactly.

Dave: And so, but you saw us smiling because the other day we had an internal conversation as well around like the typical company structure. So we also did the zoom out from like the product perspective and said, okay, we can build product fast. Engineering is getting more and more like it's speed right now, but we still work as more of a not siloed, but like, you know, as you said, Biz dev marketing sales, customer success, product engineering, QA data, and we were like, okay, obviously the concept of squats is not new, but it felt like this moment of, okay, we might have to reintroduce a lot more the working of like squats, cross departmental, kind of little teams working together and even almost creating the mindset in the whole team. Everyone today is a product person. Everyone today is an engineer. Everyone today is a data scientist and everyone today is a sales and marketing guy. Everyone needs to know how is this translating into business, not just into product. That's a massive challenge from a company culture to kind of shift now gears towards how do I get now the traditional engineer that you had who was used to build in a dark room.

Marco: You know, I'm exaggerating, but like the stereotype, right?

Dave: Which you're right. Product and engineering and coding, how do you get this person now to think a lot more product, a lot more business, a lot more marketing, go to market, customer success even, and that's product like growth. All these things have been there before, but it's just even more extreme right now. It really is.

Marco: And it's figuring out how to your point, it's almost like, how do you rethink the structure of a day?

Dave: Because a lot of the hard work and things like that, you just, like right now, I mean, three months ago, I had to keep hitting the button to say, yes, yes, yes, yes. But now, cloud will go for hours and just do stuff. So now all of a sudden, I don't have to sit there and babysit that. So now you shift focus and say, okay, now I'm going to put the marketing hat on.

Marco: But to your point, it's like how do you get your marketing people more involved in other aspects of the business because they can? How do you create that agent, whatever cross-functional teamwork?

Dave: I mean, it's almost like football. It's like your special teams needs to be in the room with the offense and the
defense to understand what the heck's happening in those rooms more so because half, I think that's a great point on product. It's like product people have obviously good input into product, but salespeople, they're the ones talking to the customer. Marketing people support people, the ones hearing from the customer on the other side.

Jonas: So it's like, they should definitely have input into, why'd you build it that way again?

Dave: They keep calling me up because they don't understand what you're doing. I remember Dave, the old days and old days, I'm talking about again, some months ago. Two months ago.

Marco: Yeah, exactly.

Dave: When you were building a startup, and a startup was at the very beginning with only generalists, and then eventually you get more people who are more focused on one thing.

Marco: Do you think that maybe we need to re-change that and maybe we need more generalists?

Dave: And then we don't need people that work only one thing so we can have the complete circle, but you're taking that because you have been again, building products during the last 20 years. I think people that have one skill set, you're in trouble. I think you need to be more well-rounded in this world because once again, coders aren't really coding anymore if the company's doing it right. They said it the other day that if you think about motherboards and all your compiled code that nobody ever thinks about, it's like this computer is just working right now. We don't think about how it's working, it just works. And code is going to become that way where you don't even think about code anymore. It's just like you say something, it gets built, and it's just there. So then it's all these other things.

Jonas: How am I taking the information that I'm getting back from the environment, from people, from users, from the market?

Marco: What are other competitors doing to try to differentiate?

Dave: I think you've got to expand your thoughts so much. So I think I wouldn't want to be very good at one thing. At this point in time, I like being very good at many things. Here's another segue for my Fire and Ice business longevity recovery. I've had five years. I've always had the classic marketing agencies for it. You spend a bunch of money a month to have them manage a website, do your SEO and all the other things. And the other thing I did was like I sat there, I'm like, this is stupid. You take SEO and it's like they were trying to continue to keep the business.

Jonas: But it was like, what are you guys doing?

Dave: It's like right now the website's in a great place. You got a lot of visitors, things are just working.

Marco: What are you doing?

Dave: Because if you're searching for us here in our local area, we come up top every time. If you need cryotherapy, we're there. If we need IV, we're there. It's always there.

Jonas: So it's like, what are you helping me with?

Marco: You've done a great job getting me to this point, but it's like, why do I need to continue?

Dave: So then I sat there and I took, me and Claude kind of hung out for a minute. And I told it, here's the website that I've currently got that's in WordPress. And here's my Google Analytics and SEO and all that stuff. I took all that and I threw it at Claude and said, what if we built from the ground up the website with SEO built into it so it could self-manage itself versus having WordPress over here, then adding 30 tools to WordPress to manage analytics and do all this other stuff. And 20 minutes later, Claude came back and it basically rebuilt the website, looking at the current website and said, that's a great play. Here's how we'll do this. So then I took the call and called the marketing agency up and I'm like, sorry guys, I'm going to go down this path. But it's like, that's where I think you really get back to rethinking the whole business and all the tools as somebody that likes to sell tools out there. That's the question for everybody.

Jonas: If I can rebuild a website in 30 minutes, why do you need WordPress?

Marco: Right.

Jonas: Why do you need these other tools when you can cater to what you're trying to do yourself?

Dave: Yeah, I mean, it's too many things because also at the same time we have the big companies. The other day I was with one of the biggest banks in the US. They feel that they are really on top of everything. They are on top of the technology and they are doing amazing things, which I agree they are doing amazing things.

Marco: But then I asked, hey, are you using AI?

Dave: And immediately they said, well, I mean, we just recently get a copilot from Microsoft and I was, okay. So at the same time we can take, because I know it's really regulated also the banks. So they cannot take that risk. We are taking risks because we know how to handle it and also because it's not so regulated. But at the same time, it's difficult right now because we are living in two different worlds with the big enterprises. Talking about insurance companies, talking about health industry, talking about bank systems are really old and they are not going to move really fast. But at the same time, we have these bunch of companies, small companies and medium companies that are really trying to build fast for them sometimes. Yeah, you're right. It is building it for them. And I think your regulation comments, so true. I talked to somebody I know very well the other day that's going into a very regulated business that uses Microsoft and copilot and all that. And he's watching all the stuff I do with Claude and automating things and this and that. And he just can't walk into that company and do that because he's got to fall into, no, we can only use Microsoft. We can only do these things. I want to be a small company. I don't want to be a big company right now. Because it's like being a small company, you can act like a big company. Being a big company, you really can't act like a small company. And that's going to be a very big challenge for these very large customers.

Jonas: But I think it goes back to our original thought process with where is the value in today's world?

Dave: It's like if I'm building something and I need payment, I'm not going to rebuild Stripe. I'm going to use a Stripe because they've nailed everything down that pipeline. And I think that's where Rook's in a very good spot. It's like, hey, if I need to connect to devices and there's new device, I mean, we're back into a device world, which is I love because we think back 2010 to 15 when devices were having a heyday, wearables were in their early years and everybody was coming out with a new one. And then all of a sudden you had a dry period where it all fell back to Apple and a couple of them. Now we're back to the day of everybody's coming out with a new device. But it's kind of like, I think you're set up very well from that perspective because if I'm building something and I need to connect to wearables, I'm just going to connect to Rook. It's easy. And really regulate it with all these, it feels like it should be easier to just grab those boxes and stack them in. But I think that's the other side of that too is flawed in the structure it can put you in because it's kind of an expert in everything. If you prompt, it goes back to what we said at the beginning of this conversation. If you're properly setting up your environment, you know where you're trying to go, you know the security and regulations that you need, and you can box in your project from the beginning, then I think you're in a really good spot. And that's why I'd prefer to build something from scratch nowadays than I would take something that's been built in the past because you have full control over what you're trying to do.

Marco: But that's also really important, right?

Dave: Because you have the knowledge. If we are talking about someone who is very new, let's say your son.

Marco: Just for example, right?

Dave: So at the very beginning, you don't have all the knowledge. So build something from the scratch without the knowledge. It's really difficult. But yeah, you are a really good advisor for him and it's for free also. But it's like that communication between you and your son, it's really important. But if you don't have nothing and you want to start building something and you don't have the grounds, it's really difficult to build. No, it is. And I think that's why it's a magical time for the next few years because you've got to feel at some point in time, all the things that people with knowledge have will become something that Claude then packages. I mean, it was my wife, she owns an insurance brokerage. And she has to deal in the regulated world of all these different insurance companies. And she's always watching me do stuff and automate it. Like I was letting Claude manage QuickBooks for the other business the other day. And it was just doing stuff. I didn't have to balance anything anymore. And she's going to go and help me. And I have, I've tried to sit there and look at her business and it's just like she's got 30 different insurance agency or brokerages that she's going after nationwide, Allstate, all these different things. And every one of them is built on top of legacy stuff.

Marco: And you're like, "Good God, how do you try to manage getting information and data out of it?" Because if you could get the data, then you could do magical things with it.

Dave: But it's the same thing. She can't just throw one of the client's data into Claude and say, "Do this." There's regulations against that. So it's kind of like, you're right. You've got to understand so many things to be able to properly use the magical tools that sit in front of us today.

Marco: Dave, do you think that acquisitions is going to change?

Dave: Because you took a really good point and you can recreate, you can help things, but now acquisitions, because every single time a new acquisition came, it's like you have to take the as you said, legacy things and things that maybe don't work really well.

Marco: So what's your take on that?

Jonas: Or maybe we are going to build small products for big companies?

Dave: I don't know. Look, I think legacy companies are in an interesting spot because of that. It's like, if you're an older company, I think you really need to figure out how to get up on today's stacks really quickly.

Marco: Otherwise, if I'm trying to acquire or look at companies that I'm interested in, one of the first things I look at is what stack are they, how they build it?

Jonas: What's it built on?

Marco: How much are they using AI to run their processes in their business?

Dave: Because perfect point, you buy a company and if they're old school and they're not using AI at all or improperly, you've got all of a sudden take all that legacy employee base and figure out how to rework it.

Jonas: And we all know that certain developers and older school people are very reluctant because they think they're still under the mentality that, "No, that's going to take my job versus how do I use it to make my job incredibly safe?" It's wild, wild west again.

Dave: I could foresee, if you look at companies like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and how many brands by now are actually sitting beneath them, I could see something like this happening because as you're saying, big companies are somehow locked in in some of the processes and things they can and can't do, but they still own a lot of the moat. They do.

Marco: Which is what we said, right?

Dave: They have certain data no one else has. They have extreme high reach. Reach and distribution is a killer right now still in as a moat obviously. What they don't have is right now this rapid fire iteration, the rapid fire learning, and this they have to buy in. They will always have to buy the small companies that can then provide that type of speed and acceleration, the rapid learning. So to stay relevant as a big company probably, that's my thesis here. I do believe big companies will need to acquire more of the small companies to substitute what they can't do right now based on something that they at the same time sitting on, which makes them so big because they are in a regulated space and that gives them a certain moat, but at the same time it limits them. So that's the resource you need to buy. I do. That's a good point. I think it's the question about the acquisition. I think the smaller companies right now are in a lot better place to be acquired because of that. To your point, if you can bring in a certain level of expertise and you self-manage everything yourself, it's kind of like as a big company, you're like, "Wow, look at the amount of work getting done by one or two people over there because they've built the stack properly from the ground up and everything.

Jonas: One thing talks to another and it's like that's a good acquisition." So it's not like that's a how is everything connected properly that makes that the acquisition I want?

Dave: So that means that now they are going to acquire people instead of the... And it's interesting you say that because everybody's fearful that people are going to get replaced by all the technology out there, whereas I think it's the people that understand how to use the technology in a proper way are the ones that are really going to... Mark Cuban said it the other day, he was like, "He wanted to be a teenager again." Because in today's world, if you think about, I just had the lawn guy come here and looking out at plumbers and everything else that are driving around in the street, it's like those are the businesses that have no clue how to use AI. And as a young kid, if you could figure out how to help the contractor down the road that's just taking checks and writing invoices and he's looking in the front seat of his truck and he's got 30 invoices laying on in his front dashboard. It's like that guy's still as old school as you get. He comes home, he tries to figure out when I'm going to take all these invoices and put them in the system. And if you could quickly just build a system for him where he could go just take a picture of the invoice, then AI takes over the rest and puts it right into QuickBooks and balances his checkbook and sends out things that when he needs... It's like, you can automate that whole flow in no time. So I think it's a fun time to be knowledgeable, not even young. I think it's just a fun time to understand how all these pieces fit together and things are moving so fast, but it's almost like the 80-20 rule or sometimes the 90-10 rule. There's 10% of the people that are really going to understand how to do it. And then there's 90 that will never figure out how to do it. So you can still sell to a lot of different people.

Dave: So probably we need to change the name of this podcast because the name of this podcast is "This feature will save us" or "This people will save us" or something like that. Because that's a new... It's people. It really is. People understand how other people work and live and do things.

Marco: And then you figure out how to take the technology that sits in front of us today to say, "How can I streamline that part of my life or that part of my business?" It's the essence.

Dave: It's understanding people again. And that's what's still very human, which is great because that's the little details that still make the difference also in a good product, a great product, a good business, a great business, something that actually takes off. It's the last, I don't know, 5-10% that make that difference in good to great or... It really is. Successful or not successful. I mean, I was thinking about it the other day. It's like one of the things on a couple of questions that you had out there that irritate me.

Jonas: And it's like AI trainer, how many people are building AI trainers nowadays?

Dave: That irritates me very badly. It's like because you still need people. Now, as a trainer myself and somebody that loves HYROX in doing that, it's like I use AI a lot to help it create planning and programming for me. And the more information you can feed it, the better. But humans know humans. And it's like I can look at people and understand things that AI is never going to understand. So I think people, trainers, anybody needs to figure out how to utilize AI to better serve that side of it. But I just don't think we're going to have this AI takes over and replaces everything. I think we just got to figure out how to live with it.

Marco: That's awesome.

Jonas: So normally we start with rapid fire questions.

Dave: But it was really, it was really good. We just got really into the conversation. We did. We did. So we're going to close it out with rapid fire questions this time. All right. Let's do that.

Marco: We do have to roast you for a little bit, at least.

Dave: Some of them might be very obvious after the conversation already. I have a guess already, but we will still make the question. So let me kick it off with CrossFit or HYROX. HYROX.

Jonas: Base44 or Lovable?

Dave: I still got to go with my old favorite, Base44.

Jonas: Anthropic or OpenAI?

Dave: Anthropic. I used to be the biggest OpenAI guy. I did ChatGPT for everything. And then all of a sudden, I haven't used chat in three months. Feature, you wish every app would lead. Man, there's a lot of them. I'll go back to the AI coach. I just think it's so overused and useless in a lot of ways. I was between social media feed and the social feeds that are trying to be social, but far away from a Strava Instagram or Facebook. No, the feed's a good one and another one. And this isn't in a bad way for wearables, but it seems like every app now has wearables in it. And it's kind of like there are very few companies that have figured out how to use wearable data properly. I'll say it that way. I mean, even you look at Garmin and WHOOP. Garmin and WHOOP are supposedly the kings of it, but every day I look at my stuff and they're not really telling me anything that I don't already know. So that's another one. Two change gears.

Jonas: Mountain or beach?

Dave: Beach.

Jonas: Coffee or tea?

Dave: Coffee. No espresso.

Jonas: Beer or soda?

Dave: Cold beer is good. Soda's too much sugar.

Marco: Cold plunge or sauna?

Dave: Obviously, they normally go together. Ooh. Cold plunge. Cold plunge wakes you up. Best design customer app outside fitness.

Jonas: You heard an app called Recime?

Dave: No. Recime. R-E-C-I-M-E. I like cooking, making different recipes. And this app called Recime is one that when you're scrolling Instagram or TikTok or whatever and you find a recipe that you like, all you do is you go down to the share button and you share it to Recime. And it scrapes everything in the Instagram feed and puts it into a true recipe type where it's all the ingredients, the how to instruction on the cook and everything. So it converts that into, I use it every single day. It's the one of the few apps that I open up every day besides SMS and email and stuff like that. So I actually took that same thought and I've got an app that I'm finishing up called FitLocker. And it's the same thing because every day I scroll and I find a great HYROX workout or a different workout. And I always just take a picture of it. But when you throw a picture in your photos of 20,000 photos, you can never find that workout. So I'm doing the same thing for workouts where you just go in there and share the workout and it pulls it in. Now every exercise is like an ingredient and the duration and the intensity is like your time and your temperature. So it's like the same thing. Then you can go back into your locker and you can pull up all these things that you've just saved for the future. So Recime is my favorite app, I guess it's food. So it's not necessarily outside. It's close. Yeah, you got to check it out. It's pretty cool. They ought to pay me for that plug.

Jonas: And then maybe last question, favorite fitness product, wellness product for you currently?

Dave: I've always loved Ladder. I knew the original founder of Ladder and I've watched him grow. And I'm a sucker for building workout players because I've built them for 20 years. And I still feel today they probably have the best workout player in the market. Because I think Peloton, remember the old ads that you had with Apple and Microsoft, where it was like the Apple making fun of Microsoft. Ladder did a really good one with that compared to Peloton. Peloton basically copied verbatim what Ladder had done. So Ladder just made fun of it to say so.

Marco: That's awesome.

Dave: It's like the big rivals, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, etc. They did some ads, etc. as well, which is great. Look, I can tell Ladder too is very good at using AI in their development because their features they come out with now are incredible. It's five a week. So another plug. We're coming to another plug. You get a lot of commission here on this podcast.

Jonas: Exactly.

Dave: All your plug.

Jonas: We're coming to a closing.

Marco: Thanks so much.

Jonas: Any parting words, any last words, anything you want to draw attention to with the different projects and business you're involved in, just the LinkedIn where people can find you and hit you up. If any cool chat about Claude was interesting, they want to pick your brain. No, that hit me up.

Dave: I just love talking to people that figure out different ways to use. Every day I talk to somebody that's doing something very unique with Claude or one of them and how they're automating certain aspects of their life. So I think it just gets back to talking to people and understanding what they can gain and learn. Learn something new every day. That's what I say.

Marco: Love it.