Chief Product Center. That's which is, we're gonna dig into a bunch today. Chief product and design officer and co-founder at Boom Pop. So we're gonna talk a bunch about, uh, boom Pop today. Also selfishly about how it relates to restaurants, but can we talk about like how we met? Because I don't think we, I talk about Hampton much, but it's a pretty dope [00:02:00] program that I, unfortunately, well, I'm still part of, but you know, need to, to reinvigorate, but.
But what's your thoughts on, on, not just Hampton, the, you know, the community, but like the, the group and all that, because that's how we met to, and to wind everybody up, we're part of this group or you know, have been part of called Hampton, which is a group of, uh, CEOs and we have this a small group and then a much of that everybody meets, you know, once a month and then a large group of lots of CEOs that sort of interact in the Slack channel.
And um, it's pretty cool. But what's your, what's your thoughts on, um, on that sort of, I don't even know what you call that, what do you call that? Like, uh, founders community? Yeah. Founder community. What's your thoughts on it? How's and how, like how do you feel it's going
Blake Hudleson: overall? It's been amazing. I think I've been with Hampton for two and a half years.
I was one of the first members to join. I think if you think about kind of support groups, every type of person generally has some sort of support group. Founders kind of don't like, it's lonely being at the top. And I think [00:03:00] that the best part about being in fam in Hampton for me, has been. Just, uh, any question that I need answered, generally somebody in our group has experienced, and so I can go to them and say, Hey, I'm struggling with this thing.
And usually someone says, yeah, I experienced that last year. Here's what I would do. Or, here's what I did in the past, or Here's what I learned. So that, that's been amazing. Um, I wish I had more time to actively engage with the group. Now they're doing kind of more in-person activities, which is awesome.
When we started, it was purely virtual. Yeah. Um, and they're, they're really leaning into like monthly activities in each city, which is cool. But yeah, it's, it's been great. And, and you know, obviously we never would've met, so I'm extremely grateful that they connected us. And you know, I've, I, now I have lifelong friends because of it.
Josh Sharkey: It is crazy, right? Like, it would've been almost, it would be very unlikely that we would've met or become friends or interacted with the way that we did then if that didn't, if that community didn't exist. So just for that, I think it's pretty incredible. It's, it's a good forcing
Blake Hudleson: function, right? Because like, I don't know about you, but.
When you're a [00:04:00] founder, like you're just go, go, go all the time, you know, heads down work. If you're not working, you're, you lose family. And so making new friends, um, and extending your network is isn't as easy as, you know, you gain, you know, in your mid twenties or in college or something. And so it's been, it's been a great outlet just to meet other amazing people and, and, and make, make friends with them.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. And I mean, as you get older, just in generally speaking, I think it's harder to, to, to make friends, at least evergreen friends, and then Yeah. You know, there are just things that just hard to talk to and also about, you know? Totally. So anyways, I'm, I'm grateful, uh, for, for the community and, and obviously just stoked that, that you and I have become friends.
I think it'll be helpful to talk a little bit about your background. Because I'm gonna ask, I wanted to talk today, if it's cool with you, obviously we're gonna talk about boom, pop. I love it. Uh, obviously, you know, transparently like I invested, but also I just love, love It. And we're customers at, at Meez, but your background's pretty amazing because it's, [00:05:00] there's so much of design and branding and, and well architecture, all, all those kinds of things that play into what you do and how that sort of helps you build this incredible business.
Mm-hmm. And I, I wanted to talk to you about design thinking. We didn't really talk about that, but I think I may have put it in some notes or something.
Blake Hudleson: Yeah, yeah. We talk about it.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Just the approach to design thinking and branding, things like that. But can you share a little about your, at a high level, kind of your background professionally and then maybe even like personally as well, if you can.
'cause I, I know some, but not
Blake Hudleson: Yeah, totally. When I was growing up, all I wanted to be was an architect and so I, I went, I went through more schooling that I like to admit. Eight years total, kind of undergrad and grad school. And came out of school, worked as an architect for three years. I kind of climbed, climbed the, the corporate ladder pretty fast.
I ended up at one of the top firms really quickly in my career. Skidmore, in Merrill. They did like the new World Trade Center, the British kli, the tallest building in the world. It's like the place to go, you know? It's, you're working in architecture [00:06:00] and I wasn't happy. I was actually very unhappy at that time.
This is around kind of like the 2012 time in San Francisco. I was, I was looking around and all of my friends, they were kind of like building the next thing. They were, you know, early employees at Airbnb and Uber and, you know, all these, you know, companies that are, are, are really well known now. They weren't back then and they were kind of building the future.
And I was like, that's much more aligned with my ambitions. I think it's hard to be really ambitious in architecture because it takes a career to really be successful and, and folks who have done it for a long time feel like they're kind of holders of the fire. They don't, they don't necessarily want to give that up to some kind of wiz kid who wants to take the shortcut to get there.
And so I left architecture, which was a, which was a really big deal, and a lot of people were like, what are you doing? And I left it to go into this kind of up and coming field. We now call product design. Back then it was kind of UX design and it was the [00:07:00] best decision for me. It was able to, to move a lot faster.
Experimentation is really valued, not so much in architecture where everything is revolved around code and tight budgets. And so I just, I jumped in right away and I, I really started to thrive. And so I worked at a, a bunch of different design agencies that consulted for companies all over the world. And then I eventually ended up at a small r and d team at Google called Google Atap.
And I worked on this really amazing platform. It was one of the, at the time, the world's largest smart garment platform. The whole idea was to take this conductive thread that was invented within Google Atap. And embed it into garments. And our first, our first collaboration was with Levi's, and we took one of their old school trucker jackets, which I think has been around for 70 years.
And we embedded our conductive thread into the left cuff. And you could do things like swipe in, swipe out, double tap, long hold, and that would [00:08:00] connect your phone. And so you, you know, imagine you're going for a walk or on a bike ride and you wanna like accept a call without taking your phone out or play the music or turn up the volume.
The whole concept was connected, not distracted. And it was this response to how we have just become slaves to our phones. We're always looking at our phones. It's unhealthy for a lot of ways, but people still want to be connected to technology. They don't wanna completely disconnect. And so this was this kind of bridge between the two things.
So that was, that was amazing. As long as my dream job.
Josh Sharkey: Why is that not in, in our close today?
Blake Hudleson: Yeah. So how much time do we have?
Josh Sharkey: I mean, you can give the fast version if you want, but like, that seems, that seems brilliant. What, like, why, why didn't that be catch
Blake Hudleson: on? So the, the, the short answer is that I think last year Google shut down the entire Google AAP division, which was a bunch of their r and d.
It was kinda like all of their emerging technologies around consumer electronics and KAR was a part of that. So I hope that it's gonna come back [00:09:00] at, you know, at some point, who knows when. A lot of people don't realize this, but Kar was in academia for like a decade before it even started, you know, working on a kind of a commercial piece of it.
And we were going back and forth of like, do we launch this as a dedicated product or do we create more of a platform that other brands can build off of? What we ended up doing is we, we opted into the latter and so we, we partnered with Levi's, with, uh, YSL, with Adidas and a bunch of, you know, well-known companies that are experts at building their own apparel.
And then we just were the kind of the technology piece because we didn't claim to be fashion designers ourselves. So that, that was kind of like the whole premise is we just create a, a platform that other big brands can build off of and look like. Emerging technology adoption is just really hard. It can take decades to get off the ground, especially if it's not like embedded in your phone.
And so Google wasn't making money off of it right away. And you know, as the economy kind of [00:10:00] got tough the last few years, it was one of the ge generally r and d is one of the first thing that big companies cut. And so this was a part of that.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Going back to the architects for a second, I, I'm curious, you know.
You said that there's sort of this, this, uh, hierarchy and you have to, you have to be in it for a very long time. Is that just because of like socially, uh, or, or just the social contract of architecture? Like, could you, um, be brilliant and work your ass off and in two years be the greatest architect, you know, on the planet?
Or is it just a matter of you have to do it for a really long period of time and learn every, every possible, you know, technique and code things to be a good architect?
Blake Hudleson: I think, I think actually both can be true. I think there are examples of folks who have ascended, you know, to be really wellknown architects very fast in their career.
Um, look up Brk Engels, uh, his firm is big. Um, BRK ENGs group. He's, he's [00:11:00] kind of like the poster child for like, you know, starting his own firm right outta college and then becoming, you know, he's one of the best architects in the world now. That is very rare. Extremely rare one, because there is an element of expertise that you have to just gain by many, many years of practicing.
You know, there's like the technical piece. Um, and that that can be true in engineering and, you know, in the sciences and in a bunch of different, um, areas. So architectures is, is not an exception. I think what Ade did is he just surrounded himself with other, you know, super experienced people who really understood the technical piece and he was brilliant at storytelling and kind of concept design.
And so that's generally what I've seen, especially for younger folks, is they don't lean on necessarily the technical aspects as their, their zone of expertise. They come in as the ideas person. Uh, and Dr is also an amazing marketer and so he can, he can get clients, you know, sold on his vision and then assembled the, the team that he needs to actually execute on it.
But it's, it's very, very rare. [00:12:00] Most, most people spend 20, 30 years getting to a point where they can run their own firm.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. I, I think about it in the, in the chef world and there are examples of that, you know, someone that has not a ton of experience but innately understand something and become incredible chefs early on.
But primarily it takes a long time. You know, you have to really perfect techniques and spend a lot of time doing, you know, the, the same thing to really get a feel for it. There's definitely parallel there. Boom, pop, let's talk about it. Yeah. And then we're running into some design stuff. So, by the way, I, I love boom pop, so I will give my kind of version of what I think it is, but it sounds like it's actually evolving a bunch, and it sounds like also you, you're, you're putting a bunch more technology in it, so I'm, so, I'm super excited to hear more about that.
But for me, boom, pop, it basically like takes all of the work of creating, planning and organizing an event internally in your company and takes all that work off your plate and gives it to boom pop, and then you handle all that by way of [00:13:00] people and technology to make sure that you have this incredible experience.
Whether you're going to, uh, a resort or hotel or a restaurant or anything that you're doing on this, in this event to make sure that it's awesome. But maybe like for, uh, you could, if, if that's wrong or if you think it's differently, like explain it and then I'd love to, I I don't know if we actually talked about this.
I know there was a bit of a pivot, but like why you started Boom Pop. Yeah. And why you think it it needs to exist.
Blake Hudleson: Totally. Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, you, you nailed it. So, good job. I think kind of the, the one liner that I used to describe Boom Pop is it's a, a next gen platform to manage complex events and logistics of travel.
The, the origin story is back in 2020, uh, five years ago we started it, it was a few months into the pandemic, great time to start an events company, by the way. Um, we spent the first two and a half years building out one of the world's largest virtual events marketplaces. Which basically connected companies that wanted to do events virtually with [00:14:00] hosts who were amazing, you know, in, in, in some vertical, it was like celebrity chefs.
It was sommeliers, standup comedians, magicians, and said this, this amazing network of these folks who, um, would come in and kind of service these virtual events. And then we just, you know, we made it easy to, for, for both sides of the marketplace to transact. And so we did that during COVID. We, you know, we, we raised some money around it.
We, we were doing really well. You probably did some of these virtual events yourselves? Uh, uh, I'm guessing at me. That was me around back then.
Josh Sharkey: Uh, sort of, we, we launched like 2021 to the public and we were in 2020 we were building. So, yeah. Okay.
Blake Hudleson: And so as the pandemic was waning and the world was kind of starting to open up again, we started interviewing our customers and we, we asked them and said, Hey, are you planning to continue doing virtual events?
And a lot of them said, no. A lot of 'em said, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna stay fully remote as a team, but we wanna really get back together in person again. And by the way, at that time [00:15:00] we were doing the same thing ourselves. We, we've always been a fully remote team at Boom Pop, but we started getting together in person.
Every quarter. We'd fly everybody into, you know, into a fun destination. And for the whole week we'd work together intensely. We'd play together, we'd stay in the same, you know, hotel. We'd have meals together and we'd all leave that just with our cups full, just like energized. And then we'd all go back home, you know, to our, to our home cities.
And then we'd do it again and again. So every quarter that's gonna become our cadence and these in-person offsite. And what we realized in doing this was one, it was just, it was amazing. Everybody loved it, everyone was happy, everyone loved this kind of like hybrid work environment, but two is, it was a logistical nightmare.
And we kept asking ourselves like, why is there not an easier way to do this? And we, we got to a point where we just said, screw it. Like, let's just, let's just build this ourselves 'cause we're not seeing a solution out there. And so it was kind of a combination of hearing from customers that they didn't wanna do virtual events.
We could see the writing on the wall of [00:16:00] demand diminishing, and then seeing this other kind of new opportunity of mainly offsites from retreats that, that kind of existed pre COVID, but not to the level that it does today. And then realizing, oh, wow. In-person events is a massive industry. Like, do you know how much spend in the US uh, happens within, within corporate travel each year?
Josh Sharkey: I mean, in, in the billions, I'm sure. I don't know.
Blake Hudleson: It's over a trillion dollars. Whoa, really? It's over a trillion dollars.
Josh Sharkey: Wow. That's crazy. That's, you know, the, do you know how much, uh, revenue restaurants generate in the US Doubt about a trillion dollars.
Blake Hudleson: Whoa. Okay. That's awesome. Crazy.
Josh Sharkey: So it's, it's crazy that it's that, that it's the same.
Um, I would've, I would've expected restaurants have a lot more rather than, than, than, uh, than events. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Although I guess a lot of that event spend might go to restaurants and hotels.
Blake Hudleson: Yeah. So, so anyways, so about, again, it's about halfway through the history of the, about two and a half years ago, we ended up [00:17:00] doing a, a significant pivot away from virtual events into building this in-person, um, events platform and look like if you've had to plan an event for over 10 people, you know how hard it is.
It is absolute chaos. You, um, you're working across spreadsheets, um, notion docs, different calendar tools, communication tools. You just send invites out. There's like a tool for everything. And, you know, you could easily touch 15 or 20 disparate software tools to make an event happen. And so what we've done is we've stitched together all those things into one, basically a one-stop shop platform.
We, it can do everything for you. So sourcing vendors, um, signing contracts, collecting payments, booking transportation, building agendas, um, getting out of email so you can do messaging straight in our platform. You know, I think what's what's unique about Boom Pop is we have this one stop shop software platform where you can kinda do everything you're, uh, on your own.
But we also have a full service event planning agency, [00:18:00] which is really rare to have both of those things. So a, a lot of companies out there, it's kind of either or, it's like very specific software for event planning or an advanced agency that kind of just uses the off the shelf tools. And we're truly one of the only companies that has both.
We have a, a full, uh, a full-time team of over 30 event planners. Again, most services, uh, companies will use contractors. We went all full-time because it's all, you know, it's the only way that we can like really manage quality and retention is so important for us. We need to make sure that everyone has a really, really amazing experience.
And I think what is most exciting to me about working in this space is that it's still really archaic, actually. Like a lot of this industry is run on phone calls back and forth, you know, emails. It hasn't been touched like a lot of industries that I think we're kind of used to. And some of the tools that I think you and I are used to using every day is like mind blowing, um, in the events industry, right?
One example, we, so we launched this a few months ago. You, you might have even used it for your recent event, is [00:19:00] on Boom pop. When guests are SVP and they confirm their attendance to an upcoming event and they opt into text messages, they automatically get a text from boom pop ai and it, it'll greet you by name, you'll say, Hey Josh, thanks so much for confirming your attendance.
You can text this number anytime with any questions that you have about the event. The AI will respond in real time. So you can ask things like, what's the weather gonna be at my event next week? Can you gimme a packing list? What should I pack? Uh, what are fun things to do in the area around my hotel during my downtime?
Should I take an Uber from the airport or is there gonna be a shuttle that's arranged? What time's Blake's flight landing? You know, it knows everything about the event. It's the first of its kind, uh, to our knowledge. I don't think anything like this exists in the world. And so we launched this and the reception's been amazing.
People are like this, you know, this is, this is the really cool thing. And so our intention is to continue building a bunch of these tools and really bring the events industry kind of like into the, into the 21st century like it deserves.
Josh Sharkey: So cool, man. And, and it makes [00:20:00] total sense, you know, all the information is there and why, you know, well you don't, you don't even need spreadsheets, you know, is query it.
I don't know if we actually played around with that. Um, I think Maria May have, but. Clearly, like, you know, you're, you're planning the entirety of the event, right? So there's, there's travel, right? And then there's a place you're gonna stay, there's a place you're gonna eat. There's all the things that you're, you're doing along the way.
Uh, and again, I'm kind of leading this because I want to sort of anchor this on, you have a lot of restaurants and, and hotel folks that listen to the show. I have to imagine you get a bunch of feedback on what's working, what's not working, and you know, whether that's from the guests or from the restaurants or from hotels.
Are there sort of common threads that you see that make an event incredible or things that are like that? Whenever you see it, you know that something's gonna go wrong. So
Blake Hudleson: we definitely don't have all the secrets, but we've, I think collectively over the last few years, we've planned like literally thousands of events as a company.
And so I think there's a few, a few things that I can think of that have just like, have [00:21:00] worked really well. I think one of the first things is like the importance of adding personal touches, uh, and really trying to make guests or attendees feel like VIPs. I think. People remember how they feel, uh, or how they felt at a given, uh, given event that, that that's the one thing that they remember.
And so it just starts with making sure that guests feel valued and seen when they're there. And there's a lot of ways to do that, right? It could be custom branded graphics when you arrive or on the menu and when it has your, your company brand name or logo or, or typography. It's like, oh, that's a nice little touch.
Even again, it sounds small, like curated music that matches the group or the vibe of the event. Um, welcome gifts waiting for people either in their hotel rooms or if it's, you know, at an event at a restaurant. You know, that's a, that's a really fun thing. I think any surprises go a long ways. I was at, uh, a boom pop offset a few months ago, and when I arrived in my hotel room, there was a plate of freshly baked cookies and a handwritten note [00:22:00] from the hotel director.
You know, it was, it was a, it was a small gesture, but it just, it felt incredibly personal. And I think everybody at the end of the day wants to feel like a VIP. That's actually a great guiding principle for hotels or, or any service provider is, is that's looking to kind of up their game. So that, that's like one, one grouping.
I think another one is just related to details, so like really, really sweat the small stuff if you as a service provider can signal that you care and, uh, about the details. It just elevates the entire experience. It's a hard thing to scale. I dunno if you've ever read the, the book, the Four Seasons, about the four, the founding of the Four Seasons Hotel, where they, he, he touches on the importance of this, which I love and mm-hmm.
I've read that a few times, but things like, you know, nailing dietary restrictions for guests before they arrive so it doesn't feel like a chore when people, you know, arrive on site ensuring there's blankets waiting. If it's chilly, you know, and you're in outdoor space. Ensuring guests, um, aren't left [00:23:00] guessing, like what to do next, uh, or where they should go.
This is especially important for kind of more complex programmed events. And then I think the last thing that I've seen that has worked really well is design you the five senses. And then this is really close to me just as the designer. Um, and this is where you can sort of get creative, but, uh, great hospitality sensory, right?
You know this, you've been in, in this industry for a long time and I think the most memorable events that I've been to have targeted the five senses really well. So we, we can go through it together. So sight, right? When you walk into a room, is the lighting warm and inviting? Is this space really well designed?
So you want to, you know, take photos of it and share it with your, your colleagues or your family. Um, taste is the, the, the food and and drink just like checked off of a a a a list or is it really thoughtfully curated to the, the group and the vibe, um, of the event smell? What does the room smell like when you, when you enter it?
I, I really have started to pay attention to [00:24:00] this. 'cause I think it's becoming more kind of widely used. I've noticed like a, especially a lot of hotels are creating their own custom sense that, uh, uh, evoke a sense of calm or luxury. And I was, I was in Singapore a couple years ago, and this is really common there.
I dunno if you've, you've been to Singapore, but like every hotel, every commercial space feels like they have their own scent, which I loved. And something that I think is kind of overlooked, um, oftentimes by spaces. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, sound. What, is there music? Is it the right volume? Uh, does it enhance the atmosphere or does it, does it make it hard to talk?
Right. Uh, touch or, or feel Right. Is the temperature, is the temperature great? If it's hot? Is there shady spots outside? If it's cold, you know, do you have, do you have blankets? Is there, is there other different zones for people who require different temperature degrees? Those are like, I think the big ones, uh, again, nothing or, or shattering, but things that I've seen that have worked really well.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. It's so, it's so [00:25:00] interesting the parallels. It, it, it reminds me a lot of, of that great, great cooking. You know, all, all the little details matter. You know, obviously you have to make the food delicious, but like, is it the right plate that you're using? Have you thought about the silverware that goes with it?
Have you thought about like, you know, what temperature these things should be at and have you ever read, uh, unreasonable Hospitality?
Blake Hudleson: Oh yes. So it's, it's actually required reading for everyone in our company.
Josh Sharkey: Oh, that's cool. That's yeah's. I, wow, I love to hear that. How do you think about, you know, providing hospitality with, you know, your platform, right?
You obviously have people, right? So you know that you're helping to facilitate that. We should talk about that as well, like, you know, how you're interfacing with restaurants and hotels to like understand what they're doing to create a special event. But like, how do you think about how. Digital hospitality, you know, like you have this, you know, technology that people are interfacing with.
You have this website, you have all these things that you know, that people are interacting with that are, that are digital. And I know you're a designer, so I'd love to hear like how you think about Yeah. The digital hospitality.
Blake Hudleson: Yeah. So we don't think about [00:26:00] hospitality, you know, just as a service. Uh, we, we think about at also as a product principle, and I think One North Star is creating exceptional experiences across every one of our touchpoint that we offer, right?
Um, whether you're interacting with the person on our team or you're just using our software platform, and as, as you alluded to, I'm glad you did. One of our major, I think probably the biggest influences has been the book Unreasonable Hospitality. So not only is it required reading, one of our last offsites, the whole theme of the offsite was around Unreasonable Hospitality.
And we had everybody read it. We did like working sessions where we like dissected it and we, we took principles from it and we said, how can we apply this, you know, to ourselves? Yes. And so I, I can't even underscore enough how much influence it's had on, on our company.
Josh Sharkey: Man, that's, that's so shout out to Will, that's so cool to hear like how this sort of, uh, you know, crossing boundaries of other industries with what he's, you know, with, with his book.
That's, that's, I love hearing that, man. It's [00:27:00] awesome.
Blake Hudleson: Yeah. Yeah. And so what one of the core beliefs that we really share with that book, um, is that products are emotional touch points. Um, and I think we have a, a decent amount of our customers that don't actually inter interact at all with our services team.
It's just they come in and they use our software. And so we have to think constantly about, um, how our software can actually embody some of those, those hospitality principles. So for example, one, one of our principles is never make customers start from scratch, and there's a few ways that we do this. One is we have a whole resources section where you can come in and you can download templates.
So you can download. These pre-made decks. So think of icebreaker decks or team kickoffs or budgeting templates to make it super easy for you, you know, doing or, or planning your next event. We have our, our guest website builder there, which is one of our most widely used features. Every event has a guest website that it's, it's this kind of imagine as like this beautiful microsite [00:28:00] where everybody views what the event is gonna be, and then they RCP there.
And we basically pre-build this for everybody, uh, for all of our customers. And we automatically pull in all the information that we have about the customer, where people are staying, FAQs, everything you need to know. And so when you're coming in as a, as a user, you're just polishing or editing, it's like, you know, getting you to the last 5% so you don't have to start from scratch.
Um, what else that, that's like, I, I'd say one, I think the, the second principle is um, make sure users always know what's next. I think, uh, there's a lot of. Apps and platforms out there where you kind of have to like stumble around to figure out what to do. You're kind of like, you're hunting and pecking and clicking on things randomly, like what does this do?
And, um, we really agonize over making sure that you know, where you came from, what you need to do at any given moment, and what you need to do next. And again, [00:29:00] most apps just fumble this and we just absolutely obsess with this. Um, just, it, it, it provides a, a, a lot of kind of like peace if you do this well from a UX perspective as a user.
Um, another one, again, from, from Unreasonable Hospitality that we grabbed is people can feel perfection. We just, we agonized over perfecting the user experience of our app. Um, to the extent where I, I've mandated that my team does weekly product critiques where they record a Loom video. It's like usually like four or five minute loom video of our team.
Um, like auditing our application in real time and saying, you know, here's, here's things that I think I can, that we can improve, and then we share it and we have kind of open discourse about whether we agree with it. If we do, then we implement it. And so we're the, the team is constantly kind of like looking inward and using our own product and dog floating our own product, which I think is, is super important.
Um, we also have four designers, which is pretty rare for a young, uh, yeah, a young startup. You know, [00:30:00] the, the, the typical ratio for a tech company is like eight to 10 engineers per designer. Our ratio is more like one to five. And you know, I think being a designer myself, I just made sure that attention to details is in the DNA of our company and everything that we do.
Um, and hopefully you feel that when you use our product. And then I think the last one that comes to mind, again, this is straight from unreasonable hospitality, so huge props to Will is. It might not work, is a terrible reason not to try. I dunno if you remember that from the book, but we just, we have a culture of constantly trying new things and testing new things and a lot of 'em don't work.
And that's okay. But if a few do end up working, they can be huge on locks for us as a business. And so I really push the team to, to just constantly be trying things and iterating. And you know, as long as we're learning from our failures and we do better next time in aggregate, we end up in a much better place than not, you know, not having a culture of trying things.
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Yeah. Yeah. I love that the, that design is such a, is such a big part of the, of the DNA of of your company. I remember when I, it was one of the first times I met you and, or one of our first conversations, it was with a group and you did a presentation on brand building. Do you remember that?
Blake Hudleson: Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. And there was obviously a bunch of design, uh, you know, layered into that as well.
But can we rehash that from a minute, actually, because I thought that was a pretty, it was one, it was an incredible, uh, uh, presentation. And I think we're pretty aligned on how we think about brand. Like for me, brand is how you make somebody feel. Mm-hmm. And you did a great job of like the zero to one of building a brand quickly.
Right. 'cause a lot of times it takes a long time to build brand because you have to build trust to build a brand. You have to build, you know, consistency and trust and, but how do you think about brand building, especially as it relates to everything you just talked about? Yeah. Of how thinking about the little things and, and how you make people feel.
Blake Hudleson: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, as you know, and as you alluded to. I've spent [00:33:00] my entire career working as a designer and, and working on brand. And so when we started boom pop from day one, you know, building a strong brand was like not an optional thing. Like we had to do it, you know, before we even had customers.
And one question that, that I, I get asked a lot is like, what does brand really matter for a company, especially like an early stage company, which is kind of like my zone of expertise. And my answer always is unequivocally, it matters way more than people think it does. I think the, the sort of conventional wisdom is to wait until you're more of an established company, you have a solid customer base, you have solid revenue to really start to invest in your brand.
But at Boom Pop we agonized early, early on again, before we had many customers at all over our brand. And so we, you know, uh, over our visual identity, over our voice and how we talk about ourselves over just our overall product experience. And when we started teaching companies early on, one thing that we'd, uh, we'd often hear is.
Hey, your company [00:34:00] looks really polished. You know what? I'll, I'll give it a shot. And I don't think we would've landed some of those customers if it wasn't for how polished our brand actually was very early. I think one thing to note though is, uh, a beautiful brand doesn't matter at all if you can't deliver a great product experience, right?
I think one thing I've been thinking about a decent amount recently is how a lot of people have become kind of numb to traditional advertising and marketing. And what really brand, uh, builds brand loyalty today is just delivering an amazing experience that makes people's lives generally better. And if we think about some of the, the breakout brand success stories of the last decade or so, I think about Airbnb, I think about Figma.
I think about, uh, HIMSS and hers. They didn't just, you know, have fancy advertising. They, they took something and they made the old way of doing something feel really clunky and outdated and, uh, and they focused on delivering the very best product experience. And then they built brand credibility [00:35:00] around that, which I love.
And, and one thing that I, I love to do, I play this little game with my team sometimes where I ask them, Hey, what does, what does X company sell? And I put sell in kind of like quotation marks. I don't know if we did this before, but if I, if I ask you, we, we can play it together. What do you think that Airbnb sells?
Josh Sharkey: Um, and experience?
Blake Hudleson: In some cases, yes. But if, if you like zoom out even more from that, I think they sell like local, right? They, they sell kinda like local authenticity. Well, we'll do a few. How about, um, how about Nike? What does Nike sell? Hmm. Confidence. Yeah. I was, I was gonna say belief. Mm-hmm. Uh, the belief that when you strap on these new shoes, you're gonna have the power to, to run faster and farther than you, you did without them.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Blake Hudleson: Um, what about, what about Patagonia clothing company? Patagonia, what do they sell? Adventure. Yeah. Uh, I was gonna say like [00:36:00] consciousness, like connection to the environment because they, they take so much of their revenue and they put it back into the environment and they attract a certain kind of group of people that really care about that thing.
And so that's kinda my point, is all these companies, they, that have really successful brands, they know how to create a movement right around what they sell. And it's, it's not just, you know, what they have on their price tag. It's something a lot more meaningful than that. Uh, and so every company can ask themselves this question and, and, and, you know, I've a bunch of founder friends that I talk to constantly about this.
And I ask them that same question and say, Hey, what do you really sell? And, you know, for us at Boom Pop, I think we sell simplicity. You know, we, we make hosting complex events really simple just by providing a, you know, a single platform for, for travel and event planning. And so if you haven't done this yet for me, Josh, you should do it.
It's a really helpful exercise.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, it's interesting. I, I, um, I have like a slightly different perspective on brand, but it's maybe just [00:37:00] a, it might just be semantics, but I, I always think of brand as, how do I make you feel, which might be similar to how, like, what, what, what, what do we, what do we sell? And, you know, the, the product experience actually in my opinion, doesn't need to be good.
That is part of your brand, whether it is or not. So, for example, I mean, Temu is, you know, I mean, I've never actually bought anything from Temu, but I think it's, you know, like really cheap product from, you know, China's, but it's very clear the brand of Temu, what it means, you know, quick, cheap, you know, get it right away and get it at a much lower price than something else.
And that's the same thing for, you know, burger King versus, uh, Monetta Tavern in New York City, right? They're both selling, you know, burgers, right? And they're both selling, you know, very different, you know, um, feelings, right? Mm-hmm. So Monetta, taverns, like this feeling of old world, you know, sort of New York City and like the elegance of like an elevated, you know, pub And, and whereas Burger King is, you know, the feeling that you're getting is, um, convenience.
Like getting in, getting out, and [00:38:00] feeling like, yeah, I was able to get that in two minutes and it was really cheap. Mm-hmm. I feel like the ability to make somebody feel something is difficult and requires you to actually know upfront what you want them to feel, you know? Yeah. I think that's a, it's a problem I see often with why I always really think the cooking, right?
Like, food can be delicious, but not, not really sort of provide any real kind of, you know, um, concrete feeling if you don't have like, you know, your sort of belief behind it. Like what, what, what story are you trying to tell? And it's the same thing with, you know, any experience. Yeah.
Blake Hudleson: I think, I mean, I think in a way we're saying the same thing.
Yeah, yeah. Which is, which is the experience is the thing that is the, the strongest indicator brand today.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Blake Hudleson: Whether, you know, you go to a restaurant and you have the experience there, or it's the experience of using a specific product. And I think that this is the nature of where we are within the world.
You know, we're, we're in this, this world of social media touches everything. And, you know, people document their experiences and they put it on social media and that [00:39:00] becomes synonymous with the, the brand of whatever they're using. Whereas before that, it was kind of like what we, um, what we saw on TV on an advertised that, that was like the brand, but we didn't necessarily experience it ourselves.
And I think, I think it's, it's, it's shifted a lot into being experience focused for a lot of brands.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Blake Hudleson: What is design thinking? How much time do you have? Let's do it. Okay. So maybe. Let's define it first, and then I can kind of explain, you know, my perspective on it. If I give it the kind of the one-liner definition, I think it's just a type of problem solving that emphasizes creativity, empathy and iteration.
That's it. That said, I have like a, a sort of a love hate relationship with the term design thinking. To me it's just thinking. Mm-hmm. Because it's, it's how designers are trained to think. Uh, and you know, you, you start with a user, who are they? [00:40:00] Uh, what do they need? Then you generate, uh, as many ideas as possible until you land on a solution that really sinks.
Um, so I like, I want to throw that out there. I think, you know, buzzword or not, I'll, I'll give you kind of a peek into how we use this mindset at Boom Pop, which, which we, we definitely do. I think our approach is problems first, solution second. Problems first, solution second, which is really important. I think a lot of companies start with some like, kind of cool tool that they build and then they try to re uh, re-engineer or kind of reverse engineer a problem, um, that it can solve.
And at op we do the exact opposite. We just, we, we obsess of a truly understanding our, our customer's pain points. And then after we clearly define those, then we actually get into solutioning. We ourselves have kind of this like five step process that I think pretty closely follows what most people would consider the, the design thinking process.
The [00:41:00] first is empathize. So we, we interview our customers, we really understand, um, what their pain points are, what they're trying to accomplish when they're, you know, doing a certain task, especially in our product. And our, our goal is just to see the world through their eyes. And then, uh, the second step is the kind of definition phase where we take all of the findings from our interviews and our research from step one.
And we put those into kind of actionable problem statements. So one example or kind of related to boom pop could be like, planning usually requires juggling dozens of different tools. People want a single platform to handle everything. So actionable problem statement, right? Then we go to the third step, which is ideation.
We generate, uh, a ton of ideas without any judgment and, and we encourage wild ideas. Um, you know, I, I'm a huge fan of, uh, early on Airbnb did [00:42:00] this thing. They called the 12 star Experience brainstorm. Have you ever heard about this?
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. 11. But yes, it's, is it 11? I love it. Yeah. I love it. It's, it's,
Blake Hudleson: it's a lot of stars where they just, like, they try to take it to the max.
Like, what, what is the, what is the most ridiculous experience that we can do? And I, I absolutely love that. Yeah. And so that's the type of thinking that's kind of required at this stage. The, the goal is, is kind of like quantity. Like just get ideas out there and hopefully from quantity you start to get a few of those nuggets that you know you can take forward.
And then the next stage is, is prototyping. So for us, this is, this is kind of our superpower mainly. 'cause we have a, like a really solid design team, we have four designers and we can prototype really fast. So we, we build these great scrappy prototypes usually in Figma. And, and we test out these core ideas.
It's not polished at all, um, but it's enough to get quick feedback from our customers. And then the last step is basically pulling those prototypes and testing. Testing in, in front of our actual customers. So we learn from it and then we [00:43:00] refine and then repeat. And this is the kind of feedback cycle of doing that over and over again.
I think most of our design work from doing this design thinking, uh, process, it never shifts. It never sees a light of day. And I actually think that's a really positive thing. I think the, the best designers that I've worked with and the best design teams I've worked with throughout my career are just idea machines.
And most customers will never see those idea, they just kind of stay on the cutting room for, and I think that's actually, um, a really good metric for a successful design team is being able to just leave a lot of ideas behind and, and just select the best of the best to move forward with.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Do you have any tips or, or things that you guys do to sort of broaden the aperture of like, the types of ideas?
Sometimes obviously an idea is only as good as, as, as a way you can execute it. But that said, I do find that sometimes we have all these cognitive biases and it, and it forces us to get stuck in, uh, a couple different lanes where all, [00:44:00] all of our ideas start to revolve around kind of the same thing.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you, and you don't think outside the box. Are there, are there any sort of things that you do with your team to, to better think outside the box or, or, or find new, new directions of thought when you're, when you come up with ideas? I
Blake Hudleson: mean, there's a, a bunch of like exercises that I, I could share with you offline, which I'm happy to do.
But I think the best thing to do is bring in people with different viewpoints. And we do, we do this constantly, uh, within, within our team. I don't come from events and travel, by the way, and you, you knew this, right? I'm a newbie to this space, and so I've had to kind of simultaneously siren and surround myself with people who have done this a lot.
You know, our event planners, some of them have done this 20 years. And then I can also maintain my kind of beginner's mind, which I, I think is super important. I think some of the, the best companies in the world have been built by founders who didn't come from those spaces. Airbnb's a great example. Uber, DoorDash, right?
None of those founders came from those, those spaces. And so when we do brainstorming sessions, I'll grab somebody from every team, operations, [00:45:00] sales, engineering events, and, and we're all, we're all together. And now people are thinking way different. And that just naturally leads to, uh, kind of an organic set of pro of problem statements that emerge and then eventual solutions.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Are there times when you're, when you're bringing in, you know, the end user of not, not the, not the, the people in the events, but like restaurants or hotels or the other sort of activities and like bringing them into that, into that ideation
Blake Hudleson: every single week?
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Blake Hudleson: How does that work? So we do at least two customer interviews per week, and right now we're heavily, heavily focused on our own vendors, mainly because we're building out this, this new part of a platform called Partner Hug.
Which is basically a, a whole portal for our vendors to log in and kind of manage their own businesses. And so I have my, my product team kind of reach out and schedule calls, like usually like 45 minute calls, at least with customers. And it, it could be like our end users on the company [00:46:00] side, on, on the, kind of like the demand side or on the supply side, which is our vendors.
But just getting into a habit of saying, we're gonna spend at least two hours every week talking to, to, to one of our, um, one of our stakeholders. It's, it's so critical and it just, it becomes second nature once you start doing it and you get into the, the rhythm of it, then when you stop doing it, you're like, whoa, this feels weird.
Who are we talking to this week?
Josh Sharkey: You know? Yeah. But who's the, like, the role that you're talking to at, at like restaurants, like who's the person that that usually, um,
Blake Hudleson: it'll, it'll be like, it'll be whoever's, you know? Well, it, it depends. Sometimes, you know, sometimes it'll be like the, the manager on the floor that's kind of like doing everything.
Sometimes it'll be like the founder of the restaurant. A little bit higher level depends on what kind of perspective we want. It, it depends on honestly like what problem we're trying to solve. And it, it has changed, um, over time, early on, especially when we were building the partner hub, we sought out like more kind of like high level folks.
So like the [00:47:00] global sales director, you know, at high or rapport, you know. Yeah. We, we brought in and they kind of gave us the landscape of what's gonna be most useful for them, for their, their sort of like their, their broader view. And then once, once we had that understood, then we went to individual property managers at hotels and we started interviewing them and we said, all right, now we're gonna start bottom up and make sure that those things come together in a way that makes sense.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. I, I haven't played with it a lot, but you have this new AI tool for, for boom pop, but can we maybe talk for a minute about like how you're using AI yourself? I know, I know obviously you have this knowledge base for boom pop of all the, you know, everything that's happening in your event, you know, the customer can query it.
But how are you using AI today? Like for yourself or for your, for just productivity and things.
Blake Hudleson: We're, we're super excited about the positive impact that AI has has had already and is gonna continue having, especially in the, the events in travel industry. I think there's almost too many ways to use it these days, and I think that's what kind of keeps people away.
They're like, oh, I don't even know where to start. Uh, and so just given the, the limited bandwidth our engineering teams to have [00:48:00] has to build these tools, we had to be really thoughtful about where we spend our time, uh, on building AI tools. One thing I'm 100% sure of is that companies that don't actively try to utilize AI in some way are gonna get absolutely steamrolled by those who do.
That said, um, there's a few ways that I can mention kind of like specifics in, in our product of, of tools that we've built around AI that made, has made the life sort of better and easier for end and like guests who are, are, are attending the events. And then the actual kind of event organizers and event planners themselves because they're very, they're, they're very different use cases.
The first one is what I mentioned at the top of the hour, which is our little AI text Messenger concierge. Again, it's like, it's just via text. There's no login required, there's no app to download. And so taking away the friction and just having AI at your fingertips has been game changing, not just for the guests themselves, but even the event organizers and the event planners.
So for example, at our last offsite, I texted our, [00:49:00] our AI concierge, and I said, Hey, we're running late to dinner. Please text all 100 guests and tell 'em to arrive at the restaurant at six 15, not 6:00 PM. And the AI just like got into gear and texted everybody in five seconds, seconds. Like, do you know how long it would've taken me without that tool?
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah.
Blake Hudleson: So that's one of our most widely used features. Now there's kind of more narrow use cases, which I still really love, um, which we're, we're building, uh, a bunch over our, kind of like every touch point across a customer journey. One is, uh, for surveys. So we send a ton. Our con our clients send a ton of surveys out every week.
It could be collecting guest preferences, could be like post event surveys, could be trying to understand what people wanna do during an event. And as you can imagine, especially for the larger events, when those responses come in, it's, there's, you know, you could easily have over a hundred responses, uh, for a single survey.
And so what we've built is basically like Google forms on [00:50:00] steroids, like powered by ai. And we use our AI to bring in, distill out all of those individual responses and then put together a, a, a concise summary so that you can just read through it, you know, in a minute and, and understand kind of like what to do next.
And you don't have to sort through every single line item of responses that have, have come in. There's AI contract parsing that we're doing now, which is really cool. Oh yeah, we send, yeah, I bet we, we send so many contracts out. On a weekly basis, prob probably now it's probably hundreds. And a single contract can be 15 pages, 20 pages of complex legalese.
And so what we do is we, or, or AI looks at the, the contract, it parses out the most important things. You know, pricing, dates, attrition, it can redline, you know, things that the customer, the end customer should watch out for. And it just makes it easier so you don't have to like, send it to a lawyer to sign it.
You can just, uh, or, or AI does it for you in, uh, at more of like the top of the funnel, we use [00:51:00] AI to suggest recommended vendors. So when, um, a customer is looking for a, a different, you know, different vendors to work with, could be a restaurant, could be a hotel, could be an event space. We have, uh, just like we call it AI picks, boom, pop AI picks, and it looks at your preferences as a user, what it knows so far about the event, you know, budget, um, time constraints, vibe of the event, and it starts to push up to the top of the search results.
Then there's, it recommends, and then it actually writes in real time, uh, a sentence or two about why it's recommending this specific vendor. So that's really cool. And then I think the last one, and honestly probably the, the kind of, the, the biggest one, 'cause this is foundational to everything that we do, is this tool that we call internally the magic tool.
Still, still, we're a working title and you'll probably, you'll probably get to experience this, Josh, if you get to do another offset with this soon. And basically what it is, it's, it's a, it's a realtime chat. You [00:52:00] come into our app and you just give it a high level prompt so you can say, Hey, boom, pop, ai. I want to do a fun event for my team of 25 people.
We're gonna celebrate a product release that we're doing. Um, I I, we wanna go somewhere warm in January, February next year. Our budget is around a hundred K activity. Should be a mix of working and fun. So kinda like 50 50, what do you have for me? And so you submit that just in kind of like a plain text prompt, just like you would with chat GPT and our AI gets to work and, you know, you've probably, most people have probably tried to do this in some way with like your CLO or one of the big oms.
And it's technically possible, like it'll give you some results. But ours are a lot more visual. So it's like beautiful results that come from this. And our AI crunches millions of data points. So it looks at seasonality, it looks at weather, it looks at dizziness of a certain city. It looks at, um, you know, if there's a big [00:53:00] conference that's happening, um, in a given city.
And it will then provide recommendations based on all of those inputs. And then essentially, like once you, once you like a few of the vendors, it'll build an itinerary for you in real time and then help kind of usher the process forward and actually executing on the event. So it just, you know, the traditional way would be going into kind of like a traditional gooey and the hunting and pecking the different filters.
Um, and then, you know, getting, kind of manually searching. And this is just like semantic search. So you just put in, you know, a question or a prompt and it really gets to work and starts to put together these, these beautiful visual proposals for you.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. That's cool man. I'm So to check it out, are you personally using AI a lot for yourself every day?
Yeah. What do you, every day, what do you, what, what are you doing with it? I'm, I'm, I'm always so curious how everybody's using it. I, I, I'm like a obsessed,
Blake Hudleson: honestly, the, the $20 I spend on, on Channel GPT Pro goes a long way. It's like the best $20 that I spend monthly. I just, I [00:54:00] use it as a thought partner mostly, honestly.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah,
Blake Hudleson: it's helping me brainstorm ideas. It's, um, I, I feed in a lot of, a lot of our legal contracts into it actually. And I use that kind of like, as a, as a first pass before I send it off to our very extensive lawyers.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah. I've started consolidating a lot of the, so I use GPT, uh, you know, for, for, for a bunch of stuff.
But I, I use a tool called Lindy and then another, a couple other cps, and then, uh, another sort of like vibe coding tool. But what I, lately, I've started to consolidate everything into one knowledge base and, um, and I have all these automations built. So basically every meeting that I have, every note I take all of the documentation from my company and also personally, like literally everything is fed into this knowledge base.
And then I, then I have a bunch of categorization as well, and then I connected it to Twilio to a text. Mm-hmm. And so I have one text that I can, one text like number that I can. [00:55:00] If I wanna remind myself about a task, if I want to remind myself about an important date, or if I wanna make a note, if I want add more context, uh, or information just for the, for this sort of brain to know, or if I just want advice, right?
Um, I just can literally just ask anything I, I plug in like Michael Macy's coaching and all kinds of other like, you know, books like, um, you know, uh, innovator's Dilemma, and, uh, every book you can think of, you know, I'm just like feeding all this thing into this knowledge base. So it's got like my personal information and up to date every meeting I have, every like, note I take.
Uh, and then all this sort of external, um, I mean, I'm sure a lot of this knowledge is also available that I can query on the internet, but then I'll, I'll like, literally feed in transcripts of books and things. It just keeps getting better at helping me, um, not just with it like with, with advice, but it indexes everything.
So every I, the part of the prompt is remember everything that I ask you and add it to the context of what you know about me. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's amazing over time what it's able to to help with. [00:56:00] Yeah. Uh, now, now I'm working on a therapist, so I was like, why am I using a, like what another therapist? I could just Right.
Literally plug in all of the, you know, all, uh, of the, uh, different sort of approaches, whether it's cognitive behavior or things like that, and into this one sort of, you know, agent and then start to ask her questions and it, I plug in all my personal information, the same thing you would tell a therapist.
And it's pretty amazing, man. Like, the things that you can, it's incredible that you can do.
Blake Hudleson: You build, you're an agent.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Well, there's a few of 'em now. Um, I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure out how to get one. So there's one, one thing that does everything, but it actually, it turns out it doesn't necessarily need to be that you can have different agents for different things.
You know, I have like one that's just, uh, for like the real estate stuff. Just like in like it, it'll take every invoice and index it and add it to a, to a file. And every, like, every time we spend time on something, what I love about about. As you start to like incorporate AI into anything that you're doing, and by the way, I think anybody, doesn't matter what you do, um, what your job is, everybody can be using [00:57:00] it.
The the thing I think is cool is, is that it's so iterative, like mm-hmm. Every day something happens with like, you know what, I'm gonna update this product, I'm gonna change this a little bit. And then over time, you know, fast forward like 6, 7, 8, 9 months, you're like, oh my God, this thing is, you know, it does, and it just takes that much time for it to, to, to continually learn and the models start to improve.
Right. So like, um, you know, there's so many different models like gbt ISS good for some things, and then Gemini 2.5 is good. Yeah. Claude just released Sonet four, which is pretty sick. Yeah. And, um, and as they get better, this thing gets better too. And it's just wild. Sometimes I, like, I get overwhelmed just thinking about like, all the other things they could do.
You know,
Blake Hudleson: how, how proactive is Vero Egypt? That's one thing that I've always been really curious about. I think like the most ideal case is that it, it, it knows everything about you. It's just this kind of like this ambient agent. It can just ping you, um, kind of proactively, Hey Josh, like, notice you didn't get your steps in today.
You should go for a run. Or Yeah, hey, you, you have less to the airport yet there's traffic. You need to, you need to get in the car now. You know, [00:58:00] like, is is that, is it nudging you?
Josh Sharkey: Hold on, I'm making a note about that because that's a good one. One second. That tracking, um, watch, that's great. Um, it is proactive.
So I, I program a bunch of stuff that, that, that sort of leaving for the house. I love that. I'm gonna add that in. Um, I've built a bunch of integrations to things like my oring and things like that, but the thing that I find most helpful right now in terms of productivity is, so all my meeting notes get every video, you know, they get recorded as a video and also trans.
If it's, if it's a, if it's a video meeting. If not, I can record it on my phone as well. But all my meeting notes get transcribed along with the video. And then it indexes every action item, every decision, uh, every, you know, struggle or, or conflict. And it indexes those. And then at the end of every week, it emails me with a recap, uh, or actually it's on Monday.
So for the next, you know, for the next week, like, Hey, here's the things that you need to follow up on. And it will follow up on some of them. Like, Hey, I sent a slack to this person, or I texted this person. Um, here's the things that we still haven't decided. And it will sort of send me this recap every, every [00:59:00] week.
And it, it also reminds me, um, of any important dates. So like, Hey, Blake's birthday is on Thursday. Do you want to send a text or something? The productivity is really only as good as, as the prompts that I've been giving, but I bet Yeah, I bet that could, that could get a lot better. I didn't think about that.
I, I really like that Right now it's just like a, um, some sort of like weekly cadence of things that it reminds me of, and then some actions it will take, you know, like sending messages and things like that. But I could probably do a lot more.
Blake Hudleson: I, I need to get this playbook. This I, I will, I would pay money for, for the Josh Josh playbook on this.
This is amazing.
Josh Sharkey: I'll show you. Yeah. Well, I, I think I said to the team I was gonna do like a, a like an overview. The, you know, for me, like the thing that I love the most is it's sort of like what you're doing with Boom pop, where you can ask all these questions. Mm-hmm. I think what I implore everyone to do right, is start creating a knowledge base that an AI can call.
Mm-hmm. And make it as specific to you as possible. So for boom, pop, right, it's, here's everything about your event. You can ask questions. I don't know if everybody realizes how much you can [01:00:00] actually use that for yourself with an ai, right? Mm-hmm. And you think about like, every note you take, every thought you have, right?
So like, when I have a thought, even if it's just like I'm upset about something or I am, you know, I wanna remember something or something made me feel a certain way, I, I tell my ai Yeah. And it, and, and it's set up. So like the, basically the way I set it up is it's a. It's an API call to to, to the SMS of this, you know, this Twilio, right?
So basically I'm texting this thing and then based on the context of the text, it understands, oh, this is you wanting me to just remind you of a task. I'm gonna add it to your task board and then I'll follow up. Or this is you, or like letting me know there's another like, hey, remind me that like it's Blake's birthday next week, right?
Or, or just add this to the, to the, to the index of that. Uh, this is you just adding more context. This is you asking me advice and each time, whatever I text it will then either follow up with me or it will, or it will just index all that information. And over time, you know, this thing just knows so much about you personally that I don't know about you, but I forget so many things.
Yeah. And you know, there's so [01:01:00] much context that you have to have to make the right decisions. And I'm a big believer in, in like, you know, how much context do you have is directly correlated to like how good of a decision you can make or what kind of decision you can make. And like a light bulb hit for me like a month ago, I was like, oh my god.
There's so much stuff I have in files or in places that like mm-hmm. I, I need to just feed into this thing and then like, it, it's gonna, it's gonna help me remember, like, I won't remember that thing that I did last month. And, uh, that sort of proactiveness does come up where like, you know, it will, it will, like, often what I'll do is like, hey, based on the last two, two weeks of meetings I've had, what are two really important things that I'm not doing right now?
Mm-hmm. Um, and it will give me more like 10 and I'm like blown away. So often of like the things that it remembers, obviously I know why it remembers it. Like, you know, you and this person discussed changing the design of this and you said that if you didn't do this by this time, da, da da. And it will remind me, I'm like, oh my God.
Yeah. Why didn't I follow up on that? Yeah. Or, you know, there was a conflict that you had [01:02:00] in this meeting and I haven't seen any follow up, you know, is that, did you and that person reconcile? If not, I recommend, you know. The more you feed that in, the more over time, again, it's all about how you prompt it, right?
You can prompt it like, Hey, make sure that you, um, consider any conflicts that you, that arise in meetings. And actually, this is part of the prompt that I have, like conflicts that arrive in meetings that I'm having. And if you identify, you know, patterns over time, recommend solutions of how I can interact better with my team.
So in every meeting that I have, part of the prompt is of course, like identify any action items and who owns them, what decisions were made, you know, key topics, things like that. And then also identify any, I have to pull up the, the prompt. Remember all the, the, the ways in which I describe this. But basically the, what I tell the a ai is like, tell me how I did, like mm-hmm.
How did I, how did I respond to conversations? Did I, you know, was I listening well enough? Was I providing the right kind of feedback where they, and it gives me sort of [01:03:00] feedback in each meeting of like the sentiment of the meeting. And over time, obviously that like, it, it gets indexed. You know how
Blake Hudleson: to take this to
Josh Sharkey: the next level.
Blake Hudleson: We were in, uh, auto camp in Cape Cod a couple weeks ago for our, our EP offsite, which is awesome. Uh, are you probably familiar with auto camp? No. Awesome. Oh, you're not? Okay. Auto camp is, I guess it's like a hotel. I dunno if they, it's uh, it's basically Airstream trailers, like hundreds of, of Airstream trailers in, in a cool, cool place that usually has some kind of like, um, rural vibe to it.
It could be Yosemite, it could be the Russian River, it could be Cape Cod to kind of pick out these, these amazing locations. And then they have a, a central lodge where you go and you can buy food and you kind of go back to your, your little airstream or you go and adventure during the day. Anyways, we were there, it was an amazing week, and our interim, CFO Young has this necklace that he wears, which is basically a device that's always recording records, every conversation in his day and at the end of it.
Oh really? [01:04:00] Yeah. There's, there's a bunch of companies that do this now. Um, at the end of the day, he gets this digest of, you know, what decisions were made during meetings. What are important follow-ups, you know, he, he, he is, he's a self-described, like, terrible note taker. And so this is, this is a really helpful thing for him.
It's, it's like, in a way it's a little dystopian, but honestly, I, I think this is gonna be norm, you know, 10 years from now, I think everyone is gonna have this thing, you know, the, the singularity is, is definitely near, but if you had something like this, then it would just know everything, uh, yeah, every interaction you have during the day.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. I love that. I mean, it really is, I think I've had this conversation too many times now, but it's just wild. Every week almost. I'm just more blown away with like, how little we've even scratched the surface of, of what can be done. Here It is. You know, the more that I see 'em, the more I'm like, yeah, this is, things have changed and they're not going back.
And this is definitely a different world we live in, but for now it's pretty fucking exciting. Like the things that, that, you know, you can build anything. [01:05:00] Totally. And what's what I love. Is that we're getting to this place where the impediment to, uh, innovation is how, um, how willing you are to think about net new ideas mm-hmm.
Things to build. And any given day you could, you, you could build anything you want. You just need to have the, you know, well, you know, the idea and the willingness to actually go and go and do it. And it's pretty easy. And again, the more you use these things, obviously, the better you get. Yeah. Um, so I'm stoked, man.
I just, you know, just even just personally, like for, for things, you know, I use a lot of my personal life as well. Mm-hmm. It's, um, I mean, I feel like we're just getting to the, we're, we're literally just at like, you know, mile one of the marathon. It's day one, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's next for a boom pop?
Like what's, what's like on the horizon for you guys?
Blake Hudleson: Yeah, so it's not public yet, but I think by the time this airs it, it will be, we, we just raised a, a round of funding, which I know you, you know, about. We raised just over 15 million. Of [01:06:00] fresh funding, um, which is really exciting from some amazing investors.
Wing vc, Thayer Ventures, atomic Acme, a bunch of well-known executives and operators at, at some of the world stop companies and beyond the capital, which is really exciting. I think we wanted to bring investors who could, who know this industry really well, who could open doors for us, who could open their network, who can help us see around corners.
So that's what I'm really excited about, is just to have more great talent and thinkers on our, on our side, in our corner. And, you know, in terms of what's next and what we're gonna do with that funding. We're, we're doubling down on our, our self-served software platform just to make it really easy for anybody to come in and, and, you know, uh, not have to go through a human to do things.
We'll always have a full service team, but their, their role be, will become more specialized over time as our software does more. And then also we're having a lot more interest from larger enterprise customers who wanna use [01:07:00] our platform. And so we just need to build out a lot more functionality for those larger companies, better security, you know, all, all the stuff an enterprise customer kinda requires.
But I think, you know, our long-term goal is to really plant our, our flag as the most innovative company in the events and travel space. And I think what we've built so far is really exciting. But just like we were talking about with ai, this is, this is day one for us. Um, we're just getting started, you know, long term.
We want boom pop to be the go-to platform for planning and executing any type of event. Uh, we've started and have been very focused on kinda the B2B use case, which I think is right. But, you know, our, our sites are, are much broader than that. And, you know, if it any event kind of requires logistics, coordination, herding cats, we wanna be the first call.
Josh Sharkey: I love that. I love that. And, and I can, obviously, I can attest to, it's, it's, it, it makes things so easy. Again, I'm selfishly restaurant focused. Yeah. How, how can, and I know, [01:08:00] you know, we've done a bunch of events where we planned like pretty incredible meals actually. How, how can restaurants and, and another event spaces, um, work with boom pop?
Like what, yeah, what's like the process?
Blake Hudleson: Super easy. Go to our website, boom pop.com, in the top right corner, I think there is a, a link to connect with us, um, like a partnerships link, and you can just put in your contact information and our team will reach out. But yeah, we, we are always, by the way, looking for amazing new partners, restaurants, activity providers, hotels, uh, so yeah, would love to connect with any and all folks who are interested in working with us and taking in more kind of group event, uh, business.
Josh Sharkey: Sweet. Well, Blake, this was, this was awesome. I'm glad we got to catch up. I, we don't, we don't get to catch up that much, so we get to do it on a, on a podcast. I know. Thank
Blake Hudleson: you for having me. This was fun. Yeah,
Josh Sharkey: I appreciate it man. And uh, hopefully the next time we'll actually do it, you know, face to face in, uh, let's do it.
Yeah, let's do it, California. Alright brother. Thanks for tuning into the Me podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the Song Art Mirror [01:09:00] by an old friend, hip hop artist, fresh Daily. For show notes and more, visit get mes.com/podcast. That's getmeez.com/podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you can share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcast.
Keep innovating, don't settle. Make today a little bit better than yesterday. And remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next time.
