Hello world

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective, a show by founders of small indie creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. Their aim is to hopefully provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we may get to come talk on the show. This is our first episode and my name is John Dark. I am a director at Every Interaction and with me I have Dan Ghent. Hello, Dan is from Lighthouse London. I am indeed.

00:31 I got that right. Not we are Lighthouse. We are Lighthouse.com. No, not we are Lighthouse. If you've got enough money, if you've got enough money, I'll call you what you want. It's fine.

00:41 Okay, so we used to work at the same company in previous life. I was a designer, Dan was a developer and since we've both taken different paths to get to where we are today, but at the same time we've ended up in a very similar place. We both have small independent creative digital agencies. We're similarly sized and completely by accident we moved into the same building on the same floor on the same day about a year ago, which has got a coincidence. Overall though, I feel that the industry that we're in has become more diversified. That industry being creative digital agencies, I think that the larger mega agency and full service model is starting to die off.

01:28 The juggernauts that used to dominate are becoming less than as relevant as the largest of clients, those with revenues north of say 10 billion, take these skills more and more in-house, removing from the market the only companies who can afford to pay the rates of such large companies.

01:44 In doing so, I think this opens up a lot of opportunities in the middle ground to smaller businesses. Small businesses that we've seen a surge in in recent years, each with their own story, their own specialisms. So I guess this is our audience. Anyone in the creative industry who is interested and possibly thinking about or have already started their own agency, and hopefully we can provide some useful advice to spur that market along, give it a bit of a boost and help out our fellow peers. Sure. At the same time I hope that we can learn something from each other and other people we make on the speak at the same time. I think we both had little idea about what to expect on our paths to get to this point. I think a fair amount of winging it was probably involved, it's safe to say, and we both took very different journeys and had different experiences that will shape what we offer today. I think it would be good to cover that ground, get a bit of background on us and understand how and why we started our own agencies, how we got to where we are today. Does that sound good? That sounds like a fantastic idea for a podcast. Someone should do that. We'll get on that. Wicked. Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about Lighthouse and what you guys do over there. Yeah, sure. We have just changed our minds about what we do and launched a new site that tries to describe more accurately what we do, I suppose. I think in a simplest form I'd call it web design and development. As you say, as things grow and get bigger, people start asking, well, you realize that that's the kind of what we do and then really you start thinking about why you do it and who you want to do it for. Currently, I'm saying digital design and product development, which pretty much sums up in simple language what we do whilst hitting a few industry buzzwords and generally sounding quite exciting. I am very excited. Yeah, absolutely.

04:13 But yeah, so that's our kind of, I suppose, yeah, design and development really and all in-house at the moment. Fantastic. I run every interaction with my business partner, Neil, and we do similar thing. We're more in the UX camp, I guess. So we are UX and design specialists. All of our team are UX people or design people or a bit of both. We don't have any developers in-house, but we do some development for some clients and we do that through some third-party partner agencies with whom we work with quite a few and they've all got their own specialisms to help us deliver different types of things. Ultimately, we've made a change recently as well to the way that we try to market ourselves and I guess this will come out in our conversations. We decided it makes more sense to specialise and try and make the best of the skill sets of the people we have in the company and leverage that to our advantage. And we work with a lot of startups and innovation teams inside existing businesses, which are like mini startups unto themselves. Yeah, that's exactly who I describe ourselves as working with. That for me feels like the sort of gold, doesn't it? It's like the stuff you do for startups work doing the same thing for people who've actually got money.

05:50 Yes, yeah. Some startups have money, but a lot of them and these innovation teams can do some pretty interesting things as well. Yeah. And yeah, we work with people in a similar sorts as you, which otherwise why I thought this would be interesting because we've both taken different approaches to how we've grown and structured our companies, got slightly different focuses, doing slightly different work, but to most people's eyes, incredibly similar. Yes. But we've gone about it in a very different way when you dig into it and look at how we got to where we are.

06:29 So that's why I thought this would be pretty interesting. Yep. Absolutely. So why don't we start off by just giving a little bit of background so people know why we know each other and how we got to where we are. So going back in the day. I think I remember our first conversation. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Yeah. I'll see if you remember it. I don't know. Well, it must have been pretty early on because end of my first week and Liz Jones, and she said, right, everyone's going to the pub at the end of the week, come along. And I definitely went to that and that would have been the first time I met everyone. And I think we sat in the Tudor rows. And I think we had an argument about flash. Great. Who was the advocate? Do you really want me to say that? You were? Oh, really?

07:37 This was this must have been a long time ago. It was. Oh, yeah, yeah, no, it was. And your, I remember distinctly your thing about it was the control you had over design, because obviously, at the time, browsers were awful. Well, not as well, browsers were just getting there, right? So they weren't as awful as the very beginning, but they were still pretty bad, which meant that basically you as designers would do all this amazing work. And you'd hand it over to the development teams. And we'd be like, yeah, great, but God, do it. That picture was not right, you know. And and because design and development was very much separate, then you had a lot of designers with with a kind of, you know, wanting that pixel perfection and wanting everything to be spot on. And you didn't have the ability to deliver that except you did if you use flash.

08:34 So I think you're you were basically you were basically saying more kind of like, why can't everything be like flash that you know, then all my stuff would look brilliant. And I was going, I don't know if I was going flash is rubbish. It might have been a bit early for that.

08:53 I'm probably bigging myself up a bit too much there. But I was kind of like, you know, it's not it's not the web. No. And yeah, I think I think you were right there.

09:05 That's why I brought it up. Absolutely. But yeah, back in the day, flash was a designer's salvation. Yeah. And that we would come up with some great ideas and constantly be told, nope, you can't do that. Yeah, especially accessibility reasons, which obviously flash was not very good at either. No.

09:26 The real bugbear was always the fonts. I do remember doing quite a few sites and having a flash cipher to swap out the fonts. Yes, of course. That was the way to do fonts, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. That was the way before web fonts. Yeah, that's how you use the images.

09:42 You have to do generate the images of every because it was usually just the H1s or something in a page. Yeah, yeah. You'd be allowed them. And you'd have to generate a GIF for every title in an entire website. I remember doing that for a several thousand page website once.

09:56 Or you would implement this cipher technology, which if you had flash installed, rendered it using any typeface you wanted, but using flash. And took about two weeks to implement.

10:07 It's one of those ones where it was like someone would just send you a link and be like, oh, this is how you do this. How you get any font you want. And you'd be like, oh my God, this is just so confusing. It wasn't just like any font you want.js as things are now.

10:30 It was like you had to understand a lot to make that work if I remember correctly. It was also a bit janky because the flash was always the last thing to render in the page. The H1 would render in HTML first and then, oh no, actually, sometimes it would render first depending on if you implemented it. And then it would get blocked out by white space and then the flash would render back into the white space or the H1 just wouldn't be present until everything else in the page is loaded and then suddenly the H1 kicks in.

10:59 Yeah. And that was the other thing about it. Like you'd implement it and then everyone would be like, great, I've got the fonts. Can you stop it doing that? No, God, no. I mean, it's like, Blimey, this must have been circa 2003.

11:15 Yes. Just a, like web standards were there. That just happened. Like the first, when I came, it was like I never built anything or did I? I'd worked on, I was maintaining table-based layouts, but everything new we did was like web standards.

11:39 Yeah. The beginning of CSS. Yeah, basically. And was that Marchcom at the time you were working for? Yeah, I came into Marchcom as their webmaster.

11:50 Oh, I remember. I remember, yes. I remember that being on your email signature or something, or you telling me. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that conversation. Yeah. Which was kind of a strange title to give someone at a web agency.

12:04 Yeah. Because a webmaster is normally a person in a company who's in charge of the website, which I wasn't. I was just more a junior developer. But yeah, so I was in Marchcom, who were the like investor. They had a niche and my were they mining it.

12:23 People's annual reports, basically, it was their thing. It worked. It was, yeah. The only problem with it was annual reports always had to go out at like 7am because of the stock market and no one quite trusted automation then. So I'd often be sent into the office at some ridiculous hours, like upload a load of files.

12:46 It's all driven off the accessibility movement and you couldn't just stick PDFs online any longer. So you had to turn them all into HTML. Well, that was a whole project, right? And they very much annoyed a few accessibility experts by basically going, they, you know, they hired someone specifically to make things accessible and then made them turn like 2000 PDFs into HTML. And it was all just like tables of numbers. It was just, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

13:14 Absolutely. It was a good way to milk big corporations for money. Oh, good. Yeah. But they thought they had to do to save themselves getting sued. Completely. Yeah, absolutely. Accessibility. Let's have another one of them soon.

13:30 And I was in, at the time it was called JKD and we all moved into the same building. So we were all owned by Insepta, a holding company who bought uploader companies in the dot com crash.

13:45 At some point in that history, the whole thing sort of rebranded and got merged into 26 London. Yeah, we were 26 corporate. Yeah, so we, we never we never really, they never let us fully in at 26 corporate. I mean, we got the name teams are still kept separate. Yeah, because everyone was still and I think, you know, you might be going on to mention this that, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't a massive love in like everyone was not, you know, no one wanted to give up those investor relations reports. And I expect a lot of people wanting to get their hands on them to be to be building those. So it was yeah, we were just named 26 corporate. We actually merged in a smaller company as well then to, to head up 26 corporate, a couple of guys who'd done who run a two man agency, I think, doing the same thing. Yeah, 26 core, we were, you know, we were, I think we probably made lots of money, but we weren't as sexy as 26 normal. We didn't have the pink, we didn't have the pink color scheme, we had a dark blue one. Oh, is it blue? That's right. Yeah. Everyone got a little color. Now ours was an afterthought. We were the only one else got anything other than pink did though. Probably not. I was was blatantly just like, here's a new brand. Our clients are gonna hate that. All right, have blue. That's what I think probably happened there. So they all got rebranded. And then I think they tried doing some more merging didn't they had some other companies in the group, Arnold Interactive, and they sort of just smashed a load of companies together.

15:30 The other always goes well. And a few key people left in there. And it all sort of started to fall apart at the seams as happens and just sort of lacks real leadership. Yeah, from what I know of it today, I think that everyone just ended up leaving. And yeah, after a while, I guess everybody you know leaves after a certain amount of time passes. Yeah, I remember there being what we what we termed, do you remember there was a balcony at the back like on the on the second floor or the third floor? There was a balcony, like a big a big balcony where you know, you could fit sort of 20 people out there really. Yeah. That became the recruitment balcony. And basically, you just I just remember there being a period of about a month where at any one time there'd be two or three people out there on their phones clearly talking to recruiters. If anyone's if anyone's phone went off, they'd like grab it, look at the screen and then leg out the balcony to the point where I was considering installing a kind of like a counter, you know, sort of like the recruitment balcony. This many pounds salary negotiated this month or something, you know, I mean, like a tip that would tick up as people went out and secured themselves new roles, make it a feature. Yeah.

17:03 Absolutely. But yeah, no, it did. It did kind of I don't know which one of us left first. Was it me? No. Yes, it was me. Similar to I can't remember. It was very similar. But I do remember again, I think I was 2007. I remember you. I think you emailed me when I resigned. I remember that.

17:27 And I think I'll be saying damn you, you beat me to it. No, you were basically like, yeah, I'm thinking of doing that. Okay. I remember. But yeah, it's it. I've I sat down with my boss at the time and we were like, I don't know what it was. It's like, I don't know, like me at the time. I don't know why it was suddenly no good for me anymore. Because it's not like I don't think what I was doing, it was just the it was just the sort of atmosphere, wasn't it? Like it was still probably good for my career to stay like people who stayed there for another couple of years suddenly were like, had like the paths were cleared for them to become really senior. Yeah. Yeah, completely. So it was a mass exodus. Yeah, totally. So I don't know. But I just think it I think I just got fed up of the sort of the type of work and stuff. I think. Yeah. Likewise, I just needed more experience and new horizons needed to try new things. I've been there a long time. I've been there through the set of various incarnations of the company for five years.

18:43 That's on my left. And it's my first job since graduating. In fact, I graduated on Friday and started work there on a Monday. Really? Yeah. So I didn't have much of a break either. Wow. But yeah, 26 just carried on from what I'm aware of it. 26 became there's a Leeds division that got merged in from the CEO that came down from the group agency up there. Yes. Sort of rebranded under the umbrella, sort of rebranded to a generic 26 digital. I think it still exists. I think it may be even a top 50 agency today. It's owned by MSQ partners. Right. And the London wing of the agency, I think got absorbed into Lloyd Northover, which is part of the group as well. Okay. Yeah. That's a fitting place for it to be. Not surprising. Getting bought, merged, pushed around. Yeah. So you left 26 and went on to Barbican's, aren't you? No. Oh. I went to the V&A. That's right. I knew it was something institutionally artistic. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of, it was very kind of easy to get a new job.

20:17 I had about, I remember just putting your head above the trench as it were and just getting recruiters all over you about three or four interviews in a week and they all offered me jobs. The V&A was like, was actually sort of the least well paid all those. And I only got one interview there. They didn't, they weren't set up to give a second interview and they were just like going to make a decision after one. And I remember going for like, it was like the web, I think it was just the web developer role for the, like you had to give a little presentation or something. So I just basically did a presentation about how much better the V&A website could be. And they were like, you do know this is developer role, right? And I was sort of like, yes. And then obviously it was like a bit kind of full on with the sort of, I don't know, looking at the information architecture and stuff like that. I think they were like, make it load fast or something. But yeah, I went there and it was, I just wanted to do something that was like the opposite of the agency, you know, and like just, I think I was quite into the idea of just working on one thing and making it really good.

21:34 I remember, I remember saying to the guy that hired me when I demanded a second phone call to like ask some more questions because it was just like, I'm not taking another, I'm not taking a job without, I didn't even see any office or anything. So I was like, I rang him up, was like, is there a window in the office? It was like, yep, there's a window. I was like, okay. And then I was kind of like, are we gonna like actually change the V&A website? You know, sort of are we gonna actually make it better? And he was kind of like, yeah. But that wasn't true.

22:12 So yeah, it was, I was only there about seven months, eight months. Okay. It was a bit of a disaster. No, I mean, it was not quite a disaster. But you know, you don't want to that the pace of things that it's not the place to be for your second job. Right. Yeah. Jumping from an agency to one of the slow one, it was probably one of the slower paced client side jobs you could probably imagine. Yeah, you see, that's it. I didn't I had no experience of, well, actually, I had worked public sets before. But I was obviously at that time, very into the fact it was slow and no one cared when I turned up. But this time was like pretty motivated. And no one else was on the same wavelength. Well, people were but there's no, you're not, you're not getting anything done.

23:11 You know, I mean, there's no way of doing anything. Yeah, I left off for about seven months. I remember being like really upset at one point, I remember being like crying in the office to my girlfriend at the time, now my wife being like, you know, this is just being so just I was in like an office on my own, like the guy that hired me left about two months later. So it's just me as like head of the VNA technical for about four months. And then the opportunity came up like they were obviously hiring for that role. And so I was like, well, okay, this at least is something motivating.

23:48 You know, I mean, like I could be, you know, technical manager of the VNA website. The interview came and I just knew in the interview, I don't even want this. There's no way they're gonna think I want this. I don't know, they asked the questions and they're like, what's your management style?

24:09 And it's just like, this is awful. And the guy they annoyingly, well, not annoyingly, because I did the right thing in leaving, but the guy they actually hired, he was actually really good. He was just right. Like, and so I only only worked with him for about a month because I was on my notice. But I think he went on to actually be part of the redesign because he could actually, he's had enough skills to get things done. I wasn't quite good. Like the me of like five years later would have just got on with it. You know, I would have actually started, you know, would have got on the server and just started changing stuff. You know what I mean? I wasn't quite at that point.

24:51 So yeah, no, that didn't go well. But yeah, where did you go straight afterwards? I went straight into freelancing. So I, I too wanted to go, you know, a bit client side and try some other things. So I think initially I wanted to try some other agencies, but that didn't turn out to be what I did. I just wanted some more experience in general. And yeah, I liked the idea of being able to work on one thing in a more focused way, other than just a project.

25:23 So the first place I went was Word Tracker, which is a friend of Seb's. Yeah, well Seb, Seb I've referenced already as the boss back at, boss back at 26, who we kind of all decided to leave at the same time. Yeah, good guy. And yeah, he connected me up with friends of his, the Mindel brothers who ran this Word Tracker keywords research tool. Yeah, one of the biggest online at the time. So yeah, they're really nice guys all working in Ruby. They had like a proper agile development team on the go, which for 2007 was quite kind of new. Yeah. And yeah, so it was Ruby. Yeah, it was just nice to work in the middle of the team, working with a couple of people really closely day in, day out, thinking about how to make this next generation of their product.

26:25 And really focusing on the user experience, basically. Yeah. We were sort of rapid prototyping, I guess as well. So we were just, I was just designing things up and the next day they were built and we were testing some things out and it was, yeah, it was really good. Not the VNA there.

26:42 No, no, no, it was a really good experience. And it kind of got me hooked on the whole freelancing thing. And I thought, wow, this is great. And I must have worked there for quite a number of months, maybe six months or so. This is when I started doing some traveling. So I was, getting hooked on the idea of doing freelancing and then taking a lot of time off and visiting places in the world. And it got a lot of taste by doing three weeks in Costa Rica previously, and then did some freelancing, saved up enough money, and then started taking three months off a year, basically, and going to different parts of the world. Nice. And freelancing in between.

27:27 The next gig was another, was a tech startup after that. So I went to work at a place called My Deco, which was a new startup by the founders of LastMinute.com. So mostly run by Brent Hoberman.

27:41 So they had enormous backing. This was easier to do with startups back then. And also having a proven track record. Yeah, I worked on that for Blimey. It must have been nine months before it even launched. Right. And I left just as it was launching. And they had a huge team of people.

28:00 Well, I say huge, but for a startup today, they must have had a team of 20 people in the UK working on it. And then a team of developers in Ukraine, I believe, and a team of 3D artists somewhere else, building all these models to work as part of their business model. Yeah, that was really interesting. And I was working mostly with the community manager. There's another designer on site who was my boss, essentially, and she was in charge of the overall design. And I was helping largely with the community angle, which is really interesting because there was some more sort of UX problems to solve there, I felt. Yeah, OK. Really getting it all ready to go live and working with the dev team to get it all built. Yeah, it was pretty interesting.

28:51 Yeah, wow. That's two very nice pieces of experience. Yeah, it was. And being a successful startup, you know, he because they sold last minute, as it happens with these things, when the companies get sold, a lot of the talent will get poached by the same people when they do the next startup. So a lot of the all the best people came from last minute and went onto this project.

29:16 Essentially, there's some really talented people working there. It was really good. And they all they all knew the drill because they've done it before. You know, little seasoned startup people, they've done all the stuff. They knew what they had to do. Yeah, they had a lot of funding behind them. And I learned a lot. It was really good and also made a lot of connections and friends. Yeah, as happens, those people have all gone off and done other things. A lot of them have gone to do startups of their own or gone and worked at other startups. And that was that was the inception of every interaction or before that my own company that I formed, which gave me connections and the knowing enough people doing enough things to get enough work in to get the gears rolling enough to justify starting an agency. Right. How did you move from from what you were doing to what you say the V&A was not the so I left there very quickly. I suppose the one thing the V&A did do that possibly started the thought process by agency was I sat across the table from a lot of agencies there who were pitching to do like every time they did a microsite for an exhibition, they pretty much put it out to tender. I remember. I remember tendering for one.

30:41 Did you? Okay. Well, it annoyed me greatly because I was just like, why is like, why can't I do this? I mean, why are we getting an agency to do this work? You've got me here. Yeah, what I did see was, you know, just kind of agency after agency come through the door. And I just thought these guys are well, I felt sorry for them because like, they just got taken advantage of by the V&A, you know, they're coming in with full spec work, like just to the hill, like you couldn't get in the door without basically having designed the microsite for free. And then they just chose the one they liked. Those are the days. Yeah, I mean, I didn't like that because I was like, this is not you know, this isn't fair. But also, I just looked at them all and I just thought, I can do what you guys are doing. It's not you've got a funky business card. But there were either a load of like, bluff, you know what I mean? It was just like you just some slick talking dude who just didn't know what he was talking about. Or the ones I really felt really sorry for is when you got the guys who actually, you know, clearly really wanted to do the V&A work. But it's like I just didn't realize that they're one of about five people we're sitting in front of and it's just not not worth the time they've done. A lot of the agencies doing that kind of web work that then were were graphic design agencies who have taken to web didn't really understand it as much as a digital agency probably should and may have looked nice, but definitely wasn't always that great to use. Oh, well, completely. And also the first my first job at the V&A was to like the V&A server was sending out a load of Viagra email, because they these these agencies would just do these microsites. And they were just, you know, they all had like little competition entry forms, which basically is like massive vulnerabilities. And, and essentially just like the first thing we had to do was go through the microsites finding like turning all them off and like finding all the ones that were compromised.

32:54 It's just it just was it just was ridiculous. And the solution to that the V&A was, well, next time they're pitching, ask them if it's going to be hacked. Yeah, even the concept microsites. I mean, yeah, alien today, doesn't it? That's good for SEO.

33:11 Completely, completely. Well, they had one for every exhibition. They had they had so many of them. And they're all the same, but they all had a photo competition. Everyone upload your photo, which they build every time like they get the agency to build that there was no, there was no reuse code. But anyway, so enough of the V&A. I left there and went completely the opposite end of the cultural spectrum to a company that did ringtone clubs. Yeah, like the Crazy Frog, not the correct, not the Crazy Frog, they wish they were the Crazy Frog, they weren't, but they they they wanted some crazy frog money, right. And that was that was a very similar vibe to 26 really in the right again, I was in in with a load of really talented people, like who were kind of best than me again, which that was the problem with V&A is like, there was no one there. Yeah, they probably were, but I never met them. And there was no one there that I shared my vision for it. And I say I'm better than all of them. No one to learn from? Yeah, completely. And I think when I left the V&A, the job interview process, I like had my first couple I had my first interview where basically the guy was like, Yeah, you're not good enough, because I didn't know like enough. I'd never I was never like classically trained, if you like in programming. So I never did like computer science or anything. So mine was all very learned on the job. So like, the guy sat me down and started asking me some like principles of programming, which I just never come across. So suddenly, I was like, Oh, God, you know, I actually need to learn all this stuff. I want to be a programmer.

34:50 But then this I went into this place is like the web developers was the perfect role. Most of them most of the people there were working on back end systems, the systems that sent out the text messages, build the poor unsuspecting people, manage the content and served it up when someone actually did download a ringtone, which is hardly ever because no one knew they were signed up.

35:10 And, and so I was like the guy who was going to like, be the transition between those guys and the website. So it's a really good role. So halfway between marketing and the developers, and pretty much exactly the same thing happened in a slightly different shape. They got bought by an American company called Playphone, who just I mean, God, you didn't imagine buying. I don't know how much the deal was. I think I think I heard figures of like, you know, 878 million being banded around.

35:45 Imagine buying a ringtone and wallpaper company, essentially at the same time the iPhones coming out. It was just like, it just did not go well for them. Oh, dear. And then on top of that, they went into like, they wanted to rebuild all the systems. So the only good thing the company really had was that it had this system that could handle billing 10,000 phones reliably, you know, like it was really like the coding was all really solid. Okay, so it had a pretty robust back end system.

36:19 But they wanted to rebuild all that the Americans wanted to rebuild it. And they went into like a 18 month development cycle and never came out of it. The American ones, the American companies still open, but the UK, the Europe bit that we were in just like got closed, essentially. So like I spent 10 million on it and then just closed it was ridiculous. But again, out of that, while I was there, I just alongside it was doing well, basically Lighthouse is all because so I too work with a business partner guy called Tom. And I mean, I've known Tom since school. And essentially he's like, he's quite unassuming, but he's really like, just gets he just does stuff. He wants to be a DJ or wanted to be a DJ when he was younger. And it's just like he didn't really like go on about it. But he just like became a DJ, you know, like was and he was DJing around the place and, and he just gets into stuff and does it. And I think a couple of times in our lives, because I've known him for that long, it's been like, Oh, you should do this with me. And I'd be like, Yeah, wicked, I can do that. And so, you know, we did it at school with like, we like wrote a fanzine together. And we like formed a band together. And we were like wedding DJs as well at one point in the thing. Because again, that was because like someone asked us we were DJing at a party. And someone went to me, Oh, I'm opening a club and running a night. You guys DJ at it. And I was just like, course, we'll DJ you know, we're amazing. Yeah, give me your number. So got that.

38:00 And then the guy texted me the next day and was like, it's not actually a club. I'm getting married. We DJ at my wedding. And I was like, No. And then Tom was like, Why did you say no to that guy? Like, you can charge like, you know, 500 quid for DJ at a wedding. And I was like, All right, can we DJ at a wedding? You know me. So Tom's always been like, and he just started doing free, he was working Imperial College and doing a lot of freelance work, because they come and ask him for like, you know, like random academic little groups would get their funding, you know, go and go and study, you know, what mosquitoes do when you put them in a hot room or something. And they and part of that funding would be like, and of course, you've got to make a website about it.

38:47 So they'd like come to Tom and be like, you make the website for Imperial, make us a website like this. And he was just like, Well, that's not my job. But I'll do it on the weekend if you want, and give me some money. So he started doing that. And you know, and he just built up his own little freelance thing, I think he just used to spend it all on clothes or something.

39:05 He also started what he never went to uni. So he was like ahead in his career, like he got into, you know, websites, back end of the 90s, you know, before, before I was even programming, really, he's just always done that. And so then when it came to the freelance stuff, you know, eventually he got a gig that was like had some programming. And so he said, Oh, yeah, come and do it. So yeah, just like got me involved like that. And you know, we just found from doing a couple of projects, we were like, well, this really works. You know, let's I don't know what our plans were really, just to keep making some money at the weekends, really. But then some of them were like quite big. And then I think it just became we just got to a point where I was at play phone and was like, this is going crap. I remember I was buying a house and that was the thing had to buy a house had to have the job to do that. Then that was the that was the turning point, right, I've lied to the mortgage people now. I've told them I've shown them three months paychecks or whatever. Now it's time to not have a paycheck anymore. And we got we got a we must have got a contract or something. Right. Tom started just before me, like he started saying October, and then the new year came around. And I was like, and he I remember him being like, a bit, you know, a little bit worried. Are we getting enough work in and you know, you're about to start as well. And I was just like, you're not you're not starting it. And I'm not I don't get to you know, I mean, I'm coming as well. We'll be fine. Yeah, then I just I quit at play phone and was like, okay, let's, you know, we have a little office. It's like, let's go for it. That's great.

40:52 And it seemed like the perfect partnership, right? Because obviously, you're very development focused. Tom was a lot more design focused, but obviously he has some development skills as well.

41:03 Oh, yeah, no, he could see so he had to so he, again, he just wanted to be because of what you wanted to be able to do. He learned front end, one of our sites, we re we are we upgraded it, but there was this sort of a dance music discography. So like, it's called roller beats.

41:23 You ever seen that? I haven't know. It's actually pretty cool. It's like discogs. I'm gonna do the do the elevator pitch now. It's like discogs, but for dance music. So you have to help me out with what discogs is. So discogs is like a listing of every single released record. Oh, right. So like, it's a discography as the abbreviation. Yeah, gotcha. So it's really big for selling records, because it's like, it's like the it's the opposite way round of eBay. So on eBay, you obviously, you put a record up and that listing exists while that records for sale. On discogs, you've got a page for every single record and every single version of that record that's ever been made.

42:08 And if you've got one for sale, just put it on that page. It's like there's always a page. It's just there's not always one for sale. Okay, but Tom did this with with dance music. The difference being that there's a lot of dance music that doesn't have an official release, but it's still a significant record, you know, it's like white labels. You know, there's loads of stuff DJs just make that is not, you know, doesn't have a label number on it, which discogs requires. Okay, so there's a soap anyway, whatever, that's that's what it is. So yeah, Tom was making that so he was programming away on that, you know, he was doing PHP, you know, database stuff and everything.

42:48 It's just he it wasn't like natural to him. And I think he's, you know, he spent a long time on it to get not much done sometimes. So it was like once once he could, he pushed stuff off on me.

43:01 And I was doing front end as well. So yeah, I mean, it was like a perfect blend of skills, really, you know, I was sort of server through to front end. And he was kind of a little bit of programming through to, you know, design. So like everything, everything you could possibly need for a website. Yeah, there you go. The perfect team. Well, certainly everything you needed for a website about that. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, with me, I did a couple more freelancing gigs, always for long periods of times, a couple more startups, usually for, you know, at least six, three to six months and traveling, freelancing, traveling, I settled in an agency called Collective London for a little bit, where I started freelance and sort of ended up becoming the head of UX there.

43:55 And they were working on new Honda website, Honda UK website. Okay. So we were working on getting that live and I stuck around for the duration of that project, helped with that live team there did a really nice job. This is still back in the day when there was still a bit of flash going on. So had lots of full backs for people who didn't have it. The HTML version. Yeah, absolutely. But they had lots of 3D, lots of video, lots of 3D spinning stuff with the cars and the cars sort of exploded and form themselves back together. And at the time, the only real way you could do that again, sounds mind blowing. Yeah, it was very whizzy. And they had some 3D guys in house. So it was, yeah, it was it was one of some really talented people founded by a group of people who did my course at university and knew my Exeter design at JKD as well. And yeah, lots of incestuousness going on with contacts. Greg Doon. Do you remember Greg Doon? I remember Greg Doon, yes.

45:02 Yes. The Kiwi who used to work as... Yeah, of course. At JKD in '26. He became managing director there. Okay. And yeah, he brought me in to help run the UX side of things and work with the design team there and the developers who were partly in house, collective, partly client side. It's good to work with the client side stuff as well. They had a really talented dev team headed up by a guy.

45:32 There's one guy, Matt Harden, who worked there, who's really good. I'm working really closely with them. It was nice. And I kind of got the agency bug again. After that, did a few more little startup jobs, but Neil, who's the guy I founded every interaction with, had already been doing his own sort of one man agency thing on the side. He had lots of freelance gigs. We met him at '26 at JKD because he was a regular freelancer coming into that agency where we both were. And he had another agency with whom he freelanced regularly and a series of his own smaller clients. And he was one of the guys you'd go to to get good design stuff done. He threw a job my way once. He said, look, because he was too busy to take it on. Someone approached him for something and he goes, Oh, I know a guy in my project. John, he's a freelancer. He can come in and help you. And this happened a few times. And I think I sent some work his way. And then it ended up that we were both busy and ended up just started. We both get more and more offers and we kept turning them down.

46:41 And they were like, man, why are we turning all this work down? Yeah. Let's do something about it. Let's team up, join forces and let's just work on this stuff together. We both had our companies already set up. So that side was ready to roll. Started renting some office space with my friends who I went to university with and lived with in the early days in London, who had started their own graphic design firm, multi adapter. They just got their new office and I came in and entered a desk off them. Neil would come in a couple of days a week and work with me and then do a couple of days from home. And we got a few breaks and a few decent sized projects. We'd still work on a few things independently, but the larger projects we would bring in together, work on together and sort of work out the billing between us afterwards. And this just seemed to work quite well. It just sort of rolled on from one thing to the next. We seem to be doing some pretty good work. Our skills complemented each other pretty well. We're pretty similar in that we're both designers and people were coming to us specifically for design and UX before it was UX at the time. All the clients we worked with already had the sort of development angle pretty well covered. They really quite often had their own dev teams in place. They were just missing this particular skill set. Right. And so always came to us and we always had to work with their dev teams. When they didn't, we always knew someone who could help get it built. And that was usually just on the front end side of things because pretty much all of our clients at the time had the back end pretty well covered. Right. A lot of the clients became more startup based, more product based, less websites, more products.

48:30 We still worked with some of the old contacts and did some agency work under white labeling for agencies and doing websites for their clients effectively. And it just sort of grew and grew really. Yeah. We made it official in 2011 and founded Every Interaction after taking about 12 months to pick a name. And we decided that 12 months before that, yeah, this is a thing. We need to make this official. Yeah. We need a name. A hell of a lot of procrastinating went on. I can tell you, God, there are some awful options and we've got the domains. Yeah. And founded the company.

49:09 And yeah, from then on out, we've been doing our own thing. It was just the two of us to begin with. Even before then, we had sort of permanent around. So we'd have people who'd come in and freelance with us for long periods of time. Initially, always started off with being, you know, coming for a week or two to help us out in this project. And, you know, things just got busy and they ended up sticking around for three, six months. We had like an intern come over from Switzerland who was just going to come over for a fortnight. I think he stayed with us for six months.

49:39 Right. Yeah. A friend of mine, Nicole, he was a freelancer. He came and I think he was going to be a minivie with us for two or three weeks and he stayed for at least six months. That's quite, yeah. Yeah. We just ended up working with quite a few people regularly. So we had a bit more resource around and kind of got used to that as well. Yeah. Moved offices quite a few times and then just started hiring people. Basically, we got to the point where, right, we need some more permanent help around. freelancers are good. We still had a permanent who'd been with us for a couple of years at that point. But then we just, we needed more people.

50:14 Needed to, started to make sense to think about full-time employees. Still make financial sense as well because we needed this full-time resource. And yeah, just started growing the team out, hired some designers and yeah, we're five people today and looking to hire. Yeah. So we, so what's interesting there, I think is how quickly you were using freelancers because I think that for us, for me, I couldn't get the project value. Yeah. I don't think we could get, well, maybe we could. We didn't have the, we didn't guts or whatever you need to say big numbers to people. You know, I think we were too cheap to use freelancers at the beginning.

51:01 Right. Did you just make it, did you just say, I have to use freelancers, therefore I have to charge this? Not necessarily. No. I mean, I got to our rate because of what I was charging as a freelancer and I wanted to at least make that back. And I was charging quite a lot at the time because I was relatively senior by that point and didn't want to take kind of income. Yeah.

51:24 But the earliest freelancers we brought in were probably quite specialist. So we did some work for Monocle magazine, for example, and we needed to do some illustration and animation to help bring alive some campaign stuff they were doing. They weren't direct skill sets that we had between us. We could do some basics, but we weren't experts by any means. So we got some friends to chip in, do some freelancing for us and get some of the things that we couldn't do. So we just sort of directed it and steered the whole thing whilst they were doing a lot of the work. And those things needed to be integrated into wider design that we were doing ourselves. Right. I think probably it was a big advantage that you had been freelancing yourself as your own new wage.

52:14 Yeah. Because I think that's what we, yeah, we were freelance before, you know, we did evenings and we did weekends, but it was, well, started off as beer money, really. And I don't think we never had until we started, we were never pricing ourselves to make our wage. You know what I mean? We were kind of just, we had our wage and this was extra. So when we started Lighthouse, we didn't have a sense of what we were worth, I suppose. So I think that definitely, that meant that growing at the beginning was quite slow because we would be taking jobs that probably, that didn't pay what they should have. But I think, I mean, I think the interesting thing with both our things as well is, and I don't know if this is why you did it, but one of the reasons I want to start an agency was because every agency I saw wasn't run by someone that did the work, you know, wasn't run by a, and I was just like, well, how can that be? You know, how can you have someone at the top of this thing is so important to me? I mean, now I know that you don't need it. And obviously, I should have looked around there and see, you know, but I just felt like this work is so interesting to me and so important to me. I don't understand how you can, like, run a company doing it and not understand it and not have done it. I think that's a matter of scale. I think if you were a 30 person company, you wouldn't be doing the work, you would be managing it and running it.

53:45 And you wouldn't need to know how to? Well, you would. I think it's important to, this is, this is, I think, important thing to your point is the agencies from yesteryear, the one that we used to work for, like 26, yeah, they were run, they were run by business people. Yeah, they were sales people. They were marketers. It was their job to sell in the agency's services at client meetings.

54:10 Yeah. And then they didn't seemingly from where we were then in the trenches do much more, but they didn't actually have the knowledge of how to design and build a website. And the new generation of independent agencies that are coming today are founded by people like us who did the work because we've been through it. That's the point that the people who ran the businesses at the time were, you know, probably in their forties and they haven't had a chance to have a career designing and building websites because they didn't exist. Yeah. As they were coming up through their careers to get to the management positions that they're in, they couldn't have done those tasks because they weren't in existence. Now, in recent years, we're at a point where new agencies are forming are by people who have cut their teeth doing what we do. And so they have better knowledge, more expertise in everything that they're doing. And I think this is part of the reason why we're seeing more independent agencies starting to specialize and get away from the full service generalist model and be more specialist because people have had careers in this and they know what they're good at. And they've gone off and built agencies based on their specialisms that they've had in their careers and use that as a springboard to start their own agencies. That's true. The problem though, which I suppose is one of the reasons why this is interesting to talk about, there's also the problem that those people don't know how to run a business as well. Well, that's that's why we're here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, and for me, that's, you know, I think I think it's quite powerful. Like if you get the if you get to where you are by the quality of your work, because that's all you know how to do, you're then if you can then not go under because of some ridiculous like cash flow issue or something because generally that's what you know, that's the sort of thing that will take you out. If you manage to like survive those random tax bills that you haven't yet learned to understand, and get yourself into a position where you can actually have a bit of space to like look around, and then start learning the business side of it, you're in such a strong position because everything's so authentic and the work behind you is so good.

56:25 I look at the work we get now. And I'm like, thank God we were rubbish at business almost, because if we'd been good at business, we wouldn't have done those jobs. Or we would have done them, we would have spent half as long on them, because that's how much money the person had. And there wouldn't be any good. And then the next person wouldn't have seen work that made them go wow, these people are good, they would have seen profitable rubbish work, you know what I mean?

56:51 And it's kind of, I'm not saying that that's a clever way to do it. But I think certainly I'm kind of glad I wasn't brave enough to like upset a client by going I need more money.

57:08 Because what came out the end was, and not as profitable, and sometimes not profitable work depends how you classify profit when you're paying yourself. But great piece of work that then that's what the agency got built on. Yeah, I agree. And it builds a reputation and a level of trust with the clients within your working. And internally, it's the demands you then put on the next projects, isn't it? You know, I mean, now, now we have people working for us, they know they're here because of what they've seen. And they want to do work of that quality. And now, and and now the pushback is on me and and Tom to find the right work at the right value.

57:53 Absolutely. That's the challenge. I don't like it. Well, that's what we'll talk about. I think we can learn a lot from each other and help other people as well by talking about this stuff. No, absolutely. Good. So when when did you found lighthouse? So six years ago, in March, is when we started it. Okay, so Tom came first, and you joined second. Yeah, after you got your mortgage. Yep, absolutely. After got a mortgage.

58:21 And then we did way too long in a shared office in in Clapham North. Oh, I remember. Yeah, we were there for about three or four years. As I said, it just took us ages to get going. And I think what took us age to get serious about how we wanted to grow it. I think we just thought we just got into doing the work and we were busy. So we thought, you know, we didn't really worry about it. Then my wife got pregnant. And that was a point of being like, okay, we need to be in a better place in a year's time than we are now. Or I'm gonna have to go and earn what I can earn on the open market, which is a lot more than we're earning. And that was a great little boost for us. And that probably took us towards hiring our first person, which I think is another boost, you know, and I just think, you know, you the way we got to being where we are now and charging the right money for and picking the right jobs is because we we kind of forced that pressure with our lives forced that pressure on it. And if that pressure come earlier, we'd probably be bigger now and you know, or not necessarily bigger, but we'd be further down the line maybe. That's fine. Yeah, that's that's, again, you know, that's that's how it happens. And you get like, we did, we just definitely spent a lot of time before we had to learn the business side of things. And that's the that's the focus now is to is to kind of get good at the business side of things really. So what was the turning point when it suddenly became real? It's probably the the the the pregnancy, to be honest. Okay, it's a dramatic. Yeah, certainly point. But by that question, do you mean when we were when we decided that we're definitely doing lighthouse? Yeah, when you decided this is what we're doing, we are doubling down on this, this is going to be our future. Okay, that would have been that that would have been earlier. That would have been that was basically when when we went into it. I think we thought that, you know, we were we were sort of blindly confident that it was all going to work.

60:38 Yeah, takes one good piece of work, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I would ever pull the trigger on doing it with the work with I think the actual project that made us go for it was like a sort of foreground project or something like that. I mean, just something where you're like, oh my god, maybe slightly bigger than what we've been doing. Now it'd be like, oh, no, you know, that's not, that's not enough. But we what did happen was in the time that Tom had been full time, you know, he'd actually done some work with with with Seb, again, another another mentor him. But he'd done some work with his with his company. And it just we just realized, you know, that if you need work, and you can do a good job, you're probably going to find work.

61:27 Yeah, absolutely. You just got to know a few people who need some connections. You do absolutely in that. And you need to be good at what you do. And that's the winning formula, I think. I mean, for us, I think similar thing quite early on, it was just this is this is the right thing to do after we had a couple of regular clients who would continuously come back for more.

61:47 Sort of clients with products who are continuously evolving them. And clients who are doing more campaigning based stuff. And it was regular enough to think, yeah, these people keep coming back, we can start to rely on this income. And then probably finally, when we got a break, got a decent sized project that was paying enough to warrant bringing in a bit of help. That's to me when it felt like this, this is really worth investing everything I've got into. Yeah, took a bit of convincing to get that client. The usual way at the time was to get a brief go in and have a sort of workshop. And then instead of doing a big proposal and trying to spec it out, just go, give us three days, give us four days, whatever we thought we needed as a trial, we'll go away, we'll put down our initial thoughts on this and come back with something. If you like what you see, let's talk further. If you don't, just pay us and you don't have to see us again. Right. And I did that quite a few times and quite a few projects. And every time, you know, we came back, we really put some effort in, put some really good quality thinking into what we do, blew them away with all the ideas every time. And they were like, man, these guys know what they're doing. And instantly signed us on and just got a reasonable amount of consistent work. That's yeah, that's the winning formula. I mean, yeah, I think we've always been, we either win work or we don't. But you know, it used to just be you came along and you were kind of either like, wow, Tom and Dan are great and really enjoy talking to them. And I want to do the project with them.

63:37 Whenever we had to like put down proposals or anything, it was like, well, you haven't understood us. Like, you know what I mean? Like, if you want to read, like read what I've written on a bit of paper rather than sit in a room with me, then someone else is going to get this. But you know, I think that was again, you can only get so far like that. But definitely I think getting that proof involved is that you hit on a you hit on a winner there pretty early. Yeah. Do you still do that? Occasionally, if people are hard to convince, we haven't done it in a very long time out of it.

64:14 But we will sometimes sometimes people have like a micro project of sorts up front, a small focus bit of work they want to do. And they'll instigate the process for saying, you know, this is what we want to do. It's a sort of a test. There's lots more ahead. If things go well, but we need to make sure we're working with the right people. And the best way to do that is to work with them. Yeah.

64:40 And see what they do. And it works pretty well. It's sort of paid pitching with one person in the pitch. Yeah, completely. It's essentially what it is. You're pitching to keep the business. And it worked for a while. And it certainly helped us get quite a few early projects through the door.

64:56 Yeah, these days, not so much. I think the body of work we've done to date speaks for itself more today than it did at the time. I guess we didn't have as much to talk about. And we certainly didn't have a website that was much good at the time. You know, we still were doing PDFs that we were sending off to everybody to say this is the stuff we've done in the past, and then taking people through it on sort of meet first contact meetings. Sure. Before the days of having a half decent website to explain these things. Yeah, things change. And I think it'll be good to talk around those processes, winning new business and how we go about it today is certainly a topic I'd like to cover in more detail in the future. Oh, yeah. But yeah, so today, you're four people. Yep.

65:41 Looking to hire. I saw you posting that the other day. Yeah, we're looking to hire kind of developers really. So there's like, there's a junior role and a mid-weight role. Are they full stack developers? Yeah, well, I don't I mean, what is that these days? That's kind of like, I don't it sounds like I can't afford them. They sound expensive. It's basically just kind of see, you know, there's there's two roles there. And it's just seeing who's out there at that level. Right. So we're about finding the right people with the yeah, with talents and potential. Yeah, I think we're kind of spending spending a bit of time and trying not to get worried as people get snapped up who you were talking to. And that's just going to happen. And yeah, you know, I think like we've already talked some good people. And and like, but we've just we've just got to take it at a pace at the moment that allows us to be comfortable with it. Yeah, because it's because I think this is quite a big one. It feels like it's extending it out beyond the little tight knit group. Because you've been for people for quite a number of years now. Yeah, a couple of years for people and just you know, there's and the fact that two of those people are schoolmates, and the other two are were friends as well before, I don't want lighthouse just be like groups of friends. Because that's just not scalable. You have to start training some of your friends. Yeah. Totally. Totally. It's just finding the right person. But I mean, we can talk about hiring and, and I mean, yeah, my heads are over the place for the moment. So once I've got to the end of this process, I should tell all about the the pain. Fair enough. We're hiring to we're looking for a junior user experience focused designer, and someone much more senior as well to run one of our major projects and be involved in other things. Cool. We've got a big client who we've been spending a lot of time and effort with being led by Neil at the moment. And as a director, we need him in the business a bit more to focus on other things. Yeah. And this is this has grown to a point where it's too much taking too much of his time away from the business. So we need a relatively senior responsible person to effectively run the project for us. Cool. Yeah, so sort of, I guess that's a part project manager, part user experience, possibly part designer, not necessary, because we can use the rest of the team if the person doesn't have those skills. They sound expensive as well. Yeah, that's going to be pricey. That one's gonna hurt. But it's well worth it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. No, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm happy to be in the place where bigger wages do still, still make me nervous. But I know how it's going to go. You know what I mean? Like, you invest in these people, then the work you the more you can get more work done. And, you know, as long as you've got a framework by which to make sure everything's still going to make money is okay. Yeah, I've got a policy of paying people well, paying them what they deserve. We generally pay what we believe to be above market rates for people, just because it's what I think to be the right thing and also to generate some loyalty and yeah, make people happy. Do you go on skills or experience when you when you pay both? Maybe this is another podcast. I think it is a podcast unto itself. Yeah, a bit of both. We'll go down to that into more detail another time. Kept you on the phone for long enough. Okay, so we're can people find out more about you and lighthouse then on the nets? We are lighthouse.com or at we are lighthouse on the tweets. We're also on Facebook. We're so linked in. We're also on Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello, man. Fine. Okay. We do our own podcast. It's very good. How do people find this podcast? It's on our site. Great. Oh, it's on iTunes as well. But I like the new website as well. It's very good. Oh, it isn't launched. It's launched. Yeah, it is. Fantastic. Great. I saw the beta and I loved it. Superbly, it had it had a couple of PHP errors, like because when we put it on to the we put it on to a server that didn't like something, you know, I mean, just a live production thing that didn't have the right thing installed or some such. I understand what I'm doing. And quite superbly, a guy who we've got a job interview next week, spotted it like about half an hour after he went live. And like email me like explaining it and explaining how he's debugged it and telling me what was wrong with it. Wow. That's brilliant. Well, that's, I like it. Yeah, that's a nice foot in the door. I like it. Good. So check out down at we are lighthouse and every interaction we are every interaction.com every interact on Twitter, because every interaction 16 characters and Twitter only does 15 character names. Damn it. Just one character too many. So every interact and we're pretty much that on everything social. So yeah, find us there. And this podcast is hopefully going to be available on iTunes eventually. Once I get it submitted. In the meantime, it is available at perspective.fm. Whoa. Yes. So any, any comments or feedback, head to that site and send it through there. Like to hear your thoughts. And we're going to try and do this fortnightly is the plan. And we're going to cover all sorts of topics. So if there's anything you'd like to hear, let us know. Otherwise, we've got a big list of things that we're quite keen to cover and we'll see you all next time. Cool. Bye. Bye everyone.