Turning a side project into a business with Murat Mutlu from Marvel App

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small indie creative agencies giving our perspective and starting or running our own companies. The aim is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we get to come talk on the show.

00:13 This is our 12th episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director of Every Interaction and joining me today we have a very special guest, Marat Mclew from Marvel App. Hello Marat. Hi John.

00:24 How are you doing? Not too bad, thank you. Excellent. Long time no see. Yeah, definitely. It's good to finally catch up. How long ago was it that we met? So I came and did some guerrilla user testing on you to find out some of the faults you had in Marvel probably around nearly two years ago now.

00:40 Crikey, yeah. You've come a long way since then. Yeah, the app works now. Of course it didn't back then. We've all been hearing some great things in the design industry about it.

00:52 That's good. That's good at least. Can't wait to see what you're going to come up with next. So what we thought we'd talk about today is just sort of background and where you got to where you are because you used to be an agency man, didn't you?

01:04 Yeah, I used to be agency firm through. That was almost every job I had since I left uni. I left uni, got into experiential agency, then I went into a mobile agency, then I went into a digital agency and I kind of went up the chain through Junior Creative and then into a kind of design, Junior user experience and then full senior user experience.

01:28 Lovely. Nice. And in this role, you were a designer the whole time? Were you a developer, user experience person or a bit of everything? So when I first started out, there wasn't such thing as user experience. It was just called something else.

01:43 And at that time I was mostly doing just UI design. It was actually UI design and just trying to get flows right. Even then there wasn't wire framing and as time progressed and because it was the agency and marketing was a big part of it, a lot of my time was spent around coming up with concepts for campaigns, which was fun until clients told you no majority of the time.

02:10 So yeah, I mean, I didn't get too much into code. I did a lot of stuff in my spare time to pick it up. I read a lot of books and that sort of stuff, but mostly I was always in Photoshop.

02:23 Yeah, very similar story really. That's what happens when you are been doing this for a little while. Yeah, I mean, I like to leave the code to the smarter people because I just make a mess of things. I can put something together, but it just won't be great.

02:36 So I don't touch any code at Marvel unless it's like a WordPress theme or I need to put in like some inline styles to break stuff like I'll do that.

02:48 But I mean, I won't touch anything that goes into production. That's pretty enough. So along this journey of working in a house at these agencies, how did you come up with the idea for Marvel?

02:59 Were you seeing the challenges of what you were trying to achieve in that job and there just weren't the tools around to do it? Yeah, so I mean, I was always making stuff in my spare time with my co-founder now Brendan and Jonathan and we kept making just little things like just real throwaway landing pages or mini apps and things like that.

03:26 And it wasn't until I was at an agency and doing a bit of freelance work when I ran into this problem where every single time we would present my designs, the client would pick another agency to do the work.

03:40 And I was always kind of convinced that it wasn't my designs, which it could have been, but I was convinced it was the way we were presenting the work. I just didn't think that you should be presenting mobile app and tablet designs in a PowerPoint.

03:57 So I ended up starting to put my designs onto the photo roll of a device and presenting them just as a slideshow. And I found that every single time I did that, the clients were just like, you know, their minds were blown.

04:10 So we ended up winning more projects, getting better feedback. And I just liked the way my work looked when I showed it directly on the device.

04:21 But the process of doing it was a pain. You couldn't really give it to a client because there was no way to send it. You can't really tell a client, "Oh, so save these 50 images to the photo roll." That wouldn't work either.

04:33 So I just wanted a really simple way to put together interactive prototypes of my design. At that point, I kind of got in touch with Brendan. I said, "I've got this idea. Should we hack something together?" And we did.

04:47 And then that's kind of how Marvel started. Prototyping was kind of a new thing. And it wasn't until people started to actually see the benefit of it in the business, whether it was winning a pitch or it was making a client some money, then it started to get taken a bit more seriously and become part of a workflow.

05:13 But fast forward to now, there's no one that isn't prototyping. It's just become fundamentally a part of everyone's design workflow, which is great.

05:24 Yeah, I've experienced pretty similar things in my agency days. This is pre-app, pre-app store days. So it was a web work.

05:34 I remember very vividly going into meetings and printing stuff out, putting it on Mount board, taking that into client meetings, trying to explain to people a journey going from point A to point B by simply pointing on a card and flipping it round to the next one.

05:52 It's really Mad Men style. Wow, I actually forgot about that until you mentioned it. But yeah, we used to do that as well. And we used to do it with WAP sites and mobile sites.

06:04 So some of them used to be 4,000, 5,000 pixels long. So you'd have this massive mounted print, and it just didn't make any sense at all.

06:14 And you try and show someone what a link from 3,000 pixels down goes to on another mounted board, which is the same length. And you're just pointing. It just made no sense at all.

06:27 I remember hacking something together with a friend, and we just made a simple HTML template where you could upload a single image as a background image into a browser. So it would allow scrolling, and the width didn't matter so much.

06:41 And you could define your own background color with inline CSS. Just clicking anywhere on that image just advanced you to the next frame. And so by putting the frames in a certain order, you could simulate an experience of sorts.

06:55 And as long as you knew the things you had to click on in what order to sort of make it look like what you were clicking on was advancing you to the next frame, it sort of made this experience. And it completely transformed the way that we were presenting and also the way that the clients were able to understand exactly what it is that we were trying to communicate to them.

07:14 And the feedback was so much better as a result. So those HTML and CSS clickable prototypes was what I was trying to get the dev team to do in the agency, but no one wants to do it.

07:24 There's no resource. You always say, "Oh, we're working on live projects," or "We're doing this, we're doing that." So that just ended up annoying me because I don't like to feel that I'm not empowered to be able to do what I want to do with my work.

07:39 So that's kind of another reason why Marvel came along, because I got fed up of asking other people to do this stuff. Yeah, fair enough. So it started off as a side project? Yep, started off as a side project, you know, a couple of evenings, or not a couple of evenings, but evenings and weekends for a few months just after work. And yeah, we got the first version out, which was enough to be able to attract an angel investor and also to get a little bit of traction.

08:05 I mean, we went from bedroom to angel funding so quickly that it was still very raw. The whole thing was just put together as quick as possible. So we ended up being live for about a month, a month and a half, and we actually had a public sign up.

08:19 And then, you know, from there, we got the angel funding and it just went full time on it. And did you get angel funding while it was still a side project, or had you totally committed by that point? No, it was still a side project. I was freelancing anyway.

08:33 It wasn't really a problem for me to start. I think the same for Brendan at the time as well. Yeah, it was a side project until it wasn't. You know, we just had to work out how to be a start-up, which is, I think, round about the time me and you met.

08:46 It wouldn't have been too long after that where we were just like, "What do we do now?" Someone was just giving us some money. Nice. And it was the three of you, Brendan and Jonathan, did you say?

08:57 Yeah, that's right. So I'm the designer. Brendan does kind of full stack, but very, very strong on back-end and infrastructure, and Jonathan does iOS development, and can also do back-end, but he built our iOS app and continues to work on that.

09:14 And at what point did you guys realise that, you know, it was something that was really worth focusing on here and go into it full-time? That's a good question. I think when we first started to get...

09:25 I think we got to a few hundred sign-ups, and we had a waiting list, which was massive as well. We had a few thousand people on a waiting list. And I kind of remember saying this to Brendan. I was like, "This is the first thing I think we've done as a side project that actually has a revenue model, whereas all the other things didn't.

09:41 I mean, they were just completely for fun." So at that point, it was starting to look more and more like it could be a business. And with the people kind of waiting on the waiting list and signing up, we started to get engagement numbers, and we started to feel like there was a little bit of traction.

09:57 And the funny thing is, at the time, a few hundred people just seemed like a few million people when you were just starting. Just to get one or two people signed up a day was amazing for us.

10:10 And it just really gave us the energy to keep going and just like figure, "Okay, you know, how can we turn this into ten people a day?" And we got really, really happy when it was ten people a day, and then it's like, "Okay, 20, 30, 40," and then you just keep going.

10:27 And then, yeah, it just kind of snowballed from there. But when we convinced a investor that this could be a business, then we really realized that there was a lot more potential to what we'd built than we had even thought about previously.

10:41 And that's the great thing with investors, and then you raise money, is that you start thinking bigger picture. And every funding stage or new employee that you get help expand your mind to the possibilities of the tech you built or the industry or tons of other stuff.

10:55 So it's really interesting. And that's why we started off as a very niche tool, which was just purely for designers, and we just wanted to help people in design teams. And now we're broadening out into lots of other places, so it's kind of an exciting time.

11:09 Cool. Now, funding you mentioned is that when you got your first, what do you call it, a series, eh? So we've done three rounds so far. We did the angel round and we did two seed rounds, and the angel round was like 60K seed round was in total, I think it was about 1.8 million.

11:29 And then from that, we'll likely raise another round as well, which would be a series day. I guess it's those big injections of cash that just allows you to scale and bring new talent in.

11:40 Yeah, exactly. So that's the main part is that when something's working, you've just got to double down on that bit. You do that and then another opportunity comes up, and then either through the work you're doing or the people that you've hired, you're able to attract more talent.

11:54 Hopefully you've seen some of the stuff we've been putting out, and the good thing about all that, you know, it really resonates with people who want to hire. So whether it's a style guide or it's campus or it's something else, the kind of people that want to work on that stuff, they get really excited by it and they get in touch.

12:11 So we're in a very lucky position where we get a lot of inbound interest from potential hires and we're able to find really smart people. Nice. I mean, as a designer, as a fellow designer, we've been interested in side projects and doing our own products and stuff, but we've largely avoided it for getting paid to do client work and the agency model.

12:35 As a designer, have you found that working on a single product instead of the sort of agency model of working on lots of clients, has that changed you as a designer in any way? So I've had this debate before with someone.

12:47 They were like, you know, the great thing about agencies is you get a lot of different stuff coming through the door all the time and you're kept fresh, you get to work on new technologies, all that other stuff. But I never, I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I didn't enjoy it.

13:00 Hardly any of the projects I worked on. I mean, the fulfilling things of products, the things that last a long time and aren't just throw away or based on a campaign or based on some sort of marketing, you know, the great thing is I get to speak to users day in, day out and listen to what they're saying, improve the product, speak to customers, launch new parts of the product regularly.

13:24 So, you know, right now we started off with a prototyping part of the platform but, you know, there's collaboration now, there's explore, there's canvas, there's all these different things which are all mini products.

13:40 You know, they're part of one big platform but they're interesting and they're exciting to launch and you're not bound by anything either. So I'm not, we're not bound by client's budget.

13:51 We're not bound by their vision or what they want to do or what that stakeholder thinks is the right thing to do which always used to annoy me as well at agencies.

14:02 Like, you could have this incredible idea for the brand but if that stakeholder in an agency just doesn't get it, like they might not get Snapchat, they might not get Instagram because they don't use it.

14:14 So they won't sign off this amazing API integration between Instagram like and all these other things and to make this amazing web app. They won't sign off but here, the only thing that we're bound by is time, like, you know, we have to, we like to move fast and there are some projects which, you know, if it's going to take a year to do, we would think about it hard and that would be the reason to not do it.

14:42 But I mean, that's a great thing. We can explore new things, we can be innovative, we can take risks and, you know, we can have fun at the same time. So I've never really been too bothered working on the same thing and hopefully the guys here feel the same way, is that there's enough different parts of the products coming their way that hopefully no week or month is the same.

15:05 Nice, nothing's out of scope. No feature is too big to consider taking on. There are lots of different things to take into account but if it's like this thing would really change the platform, change the way our users work or, you know, amazing source of revenue or engagement, then we would definitely sit down and think about it.

15:25 You know, we move pretty fast as a team anyway, so we've got some insanely good designers and developers here. And there's nothing they couldn't do.

15:36 You know, you feel very confident that whatever direction you're going to go in, you've got a team to be able to execute it. And that's kind of, that's an amazing thing to have. How do you find those people?

15:46 How have you been getting these really great designers and developers? Okay, it's just a mixture of things. So some came through just applying for the job, some through just networking, some through just me following them on, you know, their work and reaching out to them.

16:05 And developers, let me try and think who came from where. So, I mean, most of them, I'd say the developers had come from applying for the job and we do a thing where we take people on a trial basis before joining.

16:23 So we want to make sure that everyone has some time with the team, some time with the products before coming on board. So we take out this part, which is the unknown part of that, when you join a new company, that from day one, you know exactly who you're going to work with, the culture of the team, the vibe, all this stuff.

16:43 Like it's just taken off the table so you could just relax and get into it straight away. So that's one part. And that's kind of why for a small team in this space, I think we've done really well. And you said you're 17 today.

16:55 So how does that team make up break down? It's two people in support. And I would say the designer, designer, developer thing is a bit blurred because everyone in the design team can develop.

17:11 So we've got one, two, three board designers who can all code. And then we have two JavaScript developers and, I'm going to get all these numbers wrong now, and about five backend engineers and another two JavaScript developers.

17:35 That's interesting. I didn't realize there'd be so much JavaScript. There's a lot of JavaScript going on. I'm going to quickly have a look at something which has an org chart.

17:47 Oh wow, okay. So we have three co-founders, four backend engineers, five frontend engineers, one iOS engineer, and two people in support, and then two people on canvas.

18:03 And I've taken out the word designer out of all of those because all of those guys are all doing development. So pretty much you've got like a hybrid of design and development going on, which is really good for us actually.

18:16 I think it's really good for most startups, I think. It seems to be the product way. I mean, I still think that doesn't work so brilliantly in a lot of agency environments, but I think if you're working on a product in house, I think it's the way to go.

18:30 Yeah, I think it's amazing. I think it's just amazing how switched on younger designers and developers are now. They're so into it, loads of different things.

18:41 And if you're a startup and you want to move fast, then it really does take out a huge amount of friction between getting design and development done. I don't think there are some agencies who split UX and development and UX and UI design, all that other stuff.

18:57 And I think that's fine. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I don't necessarily think a designer needs to be able to code. But if you don't have the luxury of a whole team on UX, a whole team on UI, a whole team on development, then people who can do both, credible.

19:16 Yeah, I completely agree with that. And back to your earlier point about agency life and leaving that behind, I completely agree that working on products is the way forward.

19:31 And I think that's partly why every interaction has doubled down on products and steered away from marketing, advertising stuff, and perhaps to an extent even websites.

19:42 And working on products just gives you this extra sense of achievement as a designer and it can take you so far. And what I'd really like to know is you haven't been there with your agency work that you have done.

19:57 It was always in the ad world and not necessarily in an agency doing product stuff for clients. But is there an element of agency life that you think you might miss?

20:10 Not really. No, not really. I did enjoy the social, but I enjoy the social here as well. Clients used to send more free stuff than we get when you used to get someone like Sky or Budweiser, you'd just get a crate of beer or some cupcakes or something.

20:33 Oh man, I've got to get into marketing. We don't get any free stuff. Yeah, in marketing, trust me, there's so much free stuff getting sent all the time. No, there's not really much I miss.

20:45 We like to do things that we weren't able to do when we were working at the place we worked at. I think that's the benefit to anyone starting their own company really, whatever they're doing, right?

20:57 Exactly. It's like you want to do things better than what you experience because you want to make a really great place to work for everybody you employ. Yeah, as you get bigger, I think it becomes even more important.

21:09 So we still make sure we're paying attention to that sort of stuff, even through these busy times. So do you get to dabble in design still today or are you totally wrapped up in running the company?

21:23 I do a little bit, but it's just really... There's so much to do, right? It's really infrequent, yeah. The rest of the team now, they've taken up most of the product design and I'm the over-the-shoulder art director type now.

21:37 I'm just like, "Move it left, move it right." Or you put a button there. Make the Lego bigger. Yeah, that's it. That's me now. But no, the guys here are fully capable of doing everything.

21:50 They've made the product what it is today. You saw the product when we first met, it looked nothing like it does now. It's come on leaps and bounds, yeah.

22:02 Yeah, so it wasn't me that made that happen, it was the team. Just have complete trust in those guys to execute anything that we're planning to do in the future of prototyping design.

22:15 That's pretty good. I'd like to do a bit more, but it's just not possible. It's just really hard. I do enjoy it still. It's definitely a really nice outlet of your creativity and stuff.

22:27 There's also another reason why I like it so much is because it's something you know. Because you can just jump into it and you're like, "I know this. I can do this." Well, rather than putting yourself in a situation you don't like managing Salesforce.

22:42 For example, that's the kind of thing you're like, "Oh, God. I don't want to log into that again." But you've got to start learning and picking up these things and not going back to what you know.

22:53 Because that's a skill you already have. I think I've probably practiced a lot of design and I did get myself to a point where I was decent enough to be able to design a product like this.

23:06 But now it's just like it's time to learn some new stuff and I'll do that. Yeah, I think a similar story here as well. I think once you start to hire some really talented people, you realise you can get better results by managing them and directing them to produce fantastic work rather than you trying and not getting the same results.

23:26 Oh, totally. I'm not even anywhere close to these guys or how good they are. So, yeah, there's no point in me just sticking my aura and just messing stuff up.

23:37 So, I'll leave it to them. I'll do the other stuff. Which is more beneficial to the company anyway rather than me being in Photoshop for like half a day. There's no benefit to the company anymore because I'm not going to do a better job than anyone else here.

23:48 So, how do you guys come up with new product ideas and directions to start focusing on? So, it's a mixture of things. Sometimes it's speaking to users.

23:58 Best way? Yeah, but they might spark an idea. It's not that necessarily they have the next multi-million dollar idea for you. When you speak to enough users, there'll be enough pieces to put together to work on what people really need.

24:16 And Canvas was a mixture of that. It was a mixture of speaking to users and realizing that, okay, you have all these designers that use marble, but there's also a lot of people who can't design that use marble.

24:28 And we're not doing anything to help those people. And we should be. We took the approach, okay, let's simplify prototyping. Let's make it really fun and playful and easy and take out a bunch of complexity.

24:39 Can we do the same with a design tool? Is that possible? We don't need to put the kitchen sink in. We just need to help people who aren't doing anything at all because they don't have the tools.

24:50 So we took that approach and Canvas came up. And then what happens is once you start getting to Canvas, it's amazing because you're just like, oh my God, this is what about this?

25:00 This is an incredible opportunity. No one's even doing this. Let's just go down this road and keep evangelizing the product and stuff you haven't even built yet. And it starts turning into a whole big picture, which is awesome.

25:14 So yeah, that's how Canvas came about. But most of the time it's speaking to users or realizing flaws in the products, in the flows, and just knowing what to improve and what to leave or what to remove actually.

25:29 In the last version of Marvel, when we launched version 2, we just removed a ton of features because they were either becoming too complicated to work around when you're trying to improve UX.

25:42 You know when you've just got this awkward feature there and you're like, I hate this feature. Does anyone even use it? Sometimes the better solution is just to strip things away. Yeah, exactly.

25:52 So we had a few features like that. You define yourself just like redesign it. You're trying to simplify something, but then you had this really awkward flow which had to include this feature, which was just that you knew that probably like a small portion of people use or not many people understood.

26:07 So it was just easier to get rid of it. And our vision is very simple. We want to make sure that design, prototyping, collaboration is very, very easy to use.

26:17 So to keep in line with that, rather than keep adding, adding, adding, sometimes you just need to strip stuff out and that's what we did. Nice. I mean, I don't know a lot about Canvas yet and it'd be good to hear you talk about that in a minute if you can.

26:32 But let me just tell you what I'm missing in my workflow at the moment. And you can tell me how close Canvas comes to that. Okay. So we're looking for some tools at the moment. So we do a lot of wireframing, a lot of prototyping before we start getting into design, quickly sketching stuff down.

26:46 We always start on paper, sketching stuff out as a team, whiteboards. And then when we need to start moving onto the screen, the first thing we do is we start doing some wireframing. And as yet, I have yet to find a better application for doing this fast and in a way that doesn't look overly designed, which I think wireframes shouldn't be.

27:06 We use Balsamic because it's super, super fast and it's really good to throw stuff together. But it's overly simple in some ways in that... Okay.

27:17 So we're doing multiple canvases as a bit clunky. Getting stuff out of Balsamic is really clunky. And you can sort of prototype in it, but it spits out an interactive PDF, which is a bit messy. So we end up exporting a load of PNGs and then we upload them into Envision, and then we connect everything up as we would our final designs and make interactive prototypes that way.

27:35 Now, we do the same thing with Sketch as well, but I find that the tools in Sketch, they're just a bit too good for wireframing. You know, they're design tools. You can do a fully formed layout in them.

27:46 And as a designer, it's really hard to hold yourself back. And to me, wireframes just shouldn't look that good because you end up doing the design job in wireframe form and then limiting yourself when you get to the creative UI design part of the process later.

28:06 And to me, that's just not what wireframing is about. If you get hung up on the details too soon, you start to lose the objectivity around the problems you're trying to solve in wireframe form, which is just meant to be fast and sketch-like.

28:19 And we only do it digitally because of the additional benefits you get from using digital tools, such as easy duplication of canvases, moving elements around, being able to drop in libraries of controls and contents.

28:32 And yeah, Sketch to me is just a little bit too good for that stuff. And we've tried Adobe XD. We've tried everything under the sun. You can possibly think of every single prototyping and wireframing tool out there.

28:45 We've tried them all. And from our perspective, what we're working with today, we just can't better it yet. And so for the most part, we tend to stick with Balsamic, with our current workflow.

28:57 It's a little bit messy. And what I want, the dream, it doesn't exist yet, and maybe Canvas is going in this direction. There's some super fast prototyping app with a whole library of UI elements so I can chuck in and move around the scale.

29:11 It'll work sort of like Sketch, whether you can put a load of canvases and draw loads of stuff and connected flows, and then switch into prototyping mode and just say, "Right, when I click this button, it goes to this screen.

29:22 And when I click this, it goes here. And this is an anchor link, and it goes to here. And this is a dropdown. And when I click this, I want it to open and there be these options in. And I want these fields to a user can click on and they can actually type stuff.

29:34 And it isn't doing anything, but it's simulating a process that you can then go and test and present back to the client and do user tests on and gather feedback. Okay. How close is Canvas to that?

29:46 So that's the part of Canvas we've told everyone about. That's not even the bits we haven't told anyone about. Okay. So Canvas will do that by default. That's just the basic need for it, what it needs to do.

29:58 But there's loads of stuff it's going to do beyond that, which is amazing. It's going to be so good. I can't tell you about those things, but your basic need will be covered by Canvas and it will do it a lot better than what you're using now.

30:12 Excellent. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. Yeah. And we'll provide you several million more assets than the ones you probably have in Balsamic.

30:24 So, yeah, so basically, yeah, that's going to be covered. Fantastic. So it's all going to be in a browser? Is that the plan? Could be. Who knows? Who knows?

30:34 I did see a little sneaky thing on Twitter the other day with an iPad and a pencil. That looks very promising. Oh, yeah. I mean, so the iOS one, that's been in there. So that's on the way.

30:45 So I had this dream of getting rid of my work computer because I basically don't touch Photoshop anymore either. I'm just managing people and mostly emailing and writing documents and doing some prototyping and testing things.

30:57 And yeah, I got this dream of just working on an iPad Pro and that being my machine, but still having the ability to sort of dabble and play with some prototypes and sketch some stuff down and share it with the team.

31:08 Yeah, wouldn't that be nice? I mean, it's different shows for different folks, right? There's a lot of people who contact us and just say, "I only use the iPad or the iPad Pro to work. I don't want to jump into Marvel Web." You know, with a product like this, you can't really tell how many different people use it in different ways. Like we hear certain things.

31:27 So we've got like kids using it in schools. We've got people in marketing teams using it. You've got designers. Then you've got just entrepreneurs. You've got people out in the field testing.

31:39 There's always loads of different ways we hear about people making a prototype or making a design or turning sketches into prototypes, which is all really interesting. Yeah, we want to make sure that whatever we do can help people do whatever they want without borrowing them to a certain platform.

31:56 And the great thing is the team have built Marvel in a way, which is going to make it so easy to move across multiple platforms. We spent the last four, five months re-architecting stuff, and we were already pretty fast, but what we wanted to do is just make sure that we continue to be fast and get even faster at shipping features.

32:15 So the next round of Marvel updates will just allow us to ton of stuff. And being cross-platform and being multiple use cases is one of them. And we want to start introducing new product ranges and stuff to the platform, like Canvas, so every device can utilize what we've done.

32:34 Sounds exciting. I can't wait to play with it. Yeah, it would get... I'll send you a version. Cool. Anything else you can tease or want to share with everybody? What's the latest thing you released? I saw this Style Guide thing the other day.

32:47 What's that about? So that is down to a couple of people in the front-end team. So it started from a while back.

32:57 So maybe early on in Marvel, realized that a lot of designs I would hand over to Oleg, who'd done most of the front-end of Marvel when we first started, where every PSD was different.

33:12 If I'm making a grey, I don't go back and get an old grey. I just move the colour picker to a grey that kind of looks like the grey I picked before, which meant that in Marvel, prior to version one of Marvel, we had 30 different greys and the fonts were all these different colours.

33:35 So I wanted to get a Style Guide sorted out. And then when we acquired Plexi, which is what turned into Canvas, Colum joined the team and Colum had some amazing ideas about how to create a Style Guide and he brought those ideas into the business.

33:50 We took them on because they were amazing. The Style Guide is what came out from that. So Colum's spent a bunch of time sorting that out. You have an Oleg who contributed to it.

34:01 And now it's this awesome single source of truth, which we're going to open source and it makes development here really easy. So the back-end team no longer have to take graphics from us.

34:11 They don't need any of that. They just jump into the Style Guide and grab stuff. So it's really streamlined our process. So it's mostly sort of, it's like CSS Style Guide for a project basically.

34:25 Yeah, but it's done in a particular way, which Colum is the best person to speak to about this. But it's basically done in a way which is going to allow us to not only just have it on the web as well, but we're going to use the same Style Guide for iOS and kind of build a JSON for it.

34:45 So we'll have it cross platform. So anything we're building can use the same Style Guide. So it won't just be CSS, it won't just be, it'll work on Objective-C, it'll work on Android.

34:56 It's a big play in that area. And that post is going crazy. So there's loads of activity around it, loads of people asking how it was done. And that's the kind of stuff we do, right? We've got loads of smart people and want to make sure they're great ideas are exposed on the blog or in some other way.

35:12 And there's more of that to come actually. There's a lot more going on in the engineering team that we want to tell people about, not just because it does obviously look good for us, but also it helps anyone else. And whether we open source it or do whatever, like we want to make sure we contribute back to the community.

35:26 That's really good. Yeah, yeah. I mean, on the Style Guide front, we do similar things and we're just doing things in Photoshop these days. It's good to, when you're just thinking about an interface for the web, it's good to have some common elements.

35:40 We'll create a palette of all the colors that we're allowed to use or that we developed as part of the design system that we've evolved. And then it's a permanent PSB element in every PSD that we've got.

35:52 So it's like a shared global element. And if you change it in one place, it'll be updated everywhere. So you're always using your eyedropper on the same place and getting the same value rather than trying to grab out of some text or a one pixel line or something.

36:05 Exactly. So we were doing a bit of that. And then you have a set up of PSDs like that. Yeah. And now that we've got it in CSS, it's like everyone could benefit from it.

36:16 Yeah. On bigger projects, we do like a Photoshop first one walk up, like a style sheet that gets built into CSS. And then that's basically the toolkit for the developers to use.

36:27 And all the styles are just written in one place. There's one of everything in one long page, basically. And it's super helpful in making sure you keep consistent with the content that you're using.

36:39 And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. And then you can add a little bit of that to the site. So yeah, just watch out for that. Jump on to the blog, which is at blog.marvelapp.com or Twitter, which is @marvelapp. Cool. And if you want to go find out more about Marvel itself, if you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend entering marvelapp.com into your browser and signing up to have a go with Marvel itself. It is a fantastic tool, and everyone there should be really proud of what they've achieved. It sounds like it's going to be a massive year in 2016. Hopefully. Hopefully. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye. It's good that I keep up to date. And every now and then I click on stuff. But yeah, I don't get involved in the comments and design news as much as you do. Yeah, it's a time stamp, but it's nice to keep in mind what's going on. It is, yeah. Cool. Excellent. So thanks for listening, everybody. If you'd like to follow the show, we're at _perspectiffm on Twitter. Perspectif.fm on the web. Any questions, comments, or feedback, please leave them on the website there. If you are listening to us do iTunes, please go in and give us a rating. That really helps people discover us. And we'll see you next time. Thanks for coming on, Murat. No problem. Thanks for inviting me. All right. Cheers, then.