The Business of Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
All right, welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I talk to business leaders who are working in and with Laravel. My guests today are Patrick O'Meara, Co-founder and CTO, and Steven Quayle, co-founder and director of marketing and global business development at Maintainly. So guys, would you introduce yourselves and also tell us who are you individually and what is your business?

Steven Quayle:
Well, Pat, you go first.

Patrick O'Meara:
Me first, yeah, okay. So I'm Pat. I am, as Matt said, the CTO of Maintainly. So handle everything tech, everything that Steve doesn't want to do. Yeah, we've been around for, since 2008, I think the first line of code was written. And yeah, it's been a journey since then.

Steven Quayle:
And I'm Steve, I do everything that Pat doesn't wanna do. So yeah, that involves having many different hats. In terms of, do want me to give you Matt a little bit of background on the product?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I'd absolutely love to hear that. Just kind of like where did it come from and what's the background?

Steven Quayle:
Yeah, so Matt, Pat mentioned 2008. So we actually started developing it as a product specific to one customer. It was actually a partnership with a company called ADL in Australia and an Indian wind turbine manufacturer. And out of that, we started licensing the product off. So they were still using it. We rolled it out in Brazil and in China for them.

And then we started licensing the product off globally. I guess we spent Pat, right, a few years or probably many years where we were still doing agency work. And so,

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, I think we ran that down in 2014, right?

Steven Quayle:
Yeah, or maybe even later. So we were building the product out and basically, you know, I guess, paying for the build ourself off that agency work. So we got to a point where we're like, okay, there's a future in this product. And then we decided to gradually reduce that agency work. So was kind of trying to get rid of customers, if you will, maintain enough cashflow to kind of keep building it as we were increasing the licensing fees.

So I guess what is the product? So it's computerized maintenance management software is what it's traditionally known as CMMS. So that's basically managing the day-to-day maintenance operations for any organization, big or small, main components being preventative and reactive maintenance, which then leads into predictive maintenance, engineering analysis, like that, smart devices. So as I mentioned, we started in wind energy through that whole period and maybe even after we wound down the agency stuff, we spent a lot of time genericizing the product because we had that start in wind. It was kind of specifically targeted to those customers. And so through that process, we were able to start attracting

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
customers in different industries, manufacturing facilities, hospitality, hotels, vacation rentals, aged care, churches, gyms, schools, universities, municipalities. We're actually just in the process of onboarding our first airline, a small one, but a step in the right direction. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow. Still cool.

Steven Quayle:
So that's kind of what the product is. we've got a long roadmap that we're continuing to build out. And we've kind of got our target market that we're going after with a philosophy that we don't want to kind of traditionally in this industry, every kind of new player has ended up just being exactly the same as what's come in the past. And so we've got a keen eye on trying not to go down that direction.

And yeah, so we're trying to build out the product accordingly and with tools like Laravel helping along the way, helping us keep a lean team.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that. I know that you guys kind of did a very good job of describing it, but I still, I have visited your website enough times and seen CMMS enough times, and sometimes it's just hurt my little brain a little bit. So can you give me, yeah, that's not what I expected, right? So if I were,

Patrick O'Meara:
The C is computerized.

Matt Stauffer:
let's say like a university, that like, cause when I think of university for some reason, cause I attended university, I would always see like there's the maintenance shack and there's the six people who work there and they clock in, they clock out and there's the maintenance tools that they use and there's an assignments. So is it kind of maintaining that sort of thing? Like, you know, you check in, it tells you what you're assigned to. It tells you what your equipment you're using, how out of data is equipment, you know, is that the type of stuff we're talking about?

Steven Quayle:
Exactly. So it's basically any scenario where there's physical assets under management.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Steven Quayle:
And so they might want to extend the life of those assets as much as possible, because obviously when we replace those, they're a large capital outlay. We, yeah, just the way you see those maintenance workers tending to stuff, there's a grander purpose than just to keep it operating, eking out more life of assets in the long term.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. All right.

Steven Quayle:
Right. And so that might be that maintenance worker using our mobile app to scan a QR code on the asset to bring up the history of that asset so that they can learn from what was done in the past to shortcut the process to what actually is going to fix a problem or a trainee coming in and being able to learn from that audit trail of maintenance history to learn how to perform these functions.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
Yeah, this scenario can be or the situation can be relatively simple. Okay, so if it's at a university and fixing a chair or a door or an air conditioner, but it could be like we said we started in wind energy, it could be engineered using that data for analysis over across the entire fleet to try and keep that to eke up their uptime from, you know, 92 % to 94%.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's very cool. Okay.

Steven Quayle:
The scenarios differ a lot.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, that's super helpful. Just like that they'd be able to just the fact that you define it as an asset is really helpful for me. Because one of my friends, you know, owns a whole bunch of rental properties and he's always thinking about at what point is it worth replacing the dryer and what things do I do to each dryer every month to make sure they last a little bit longer. And so that I totally get it. Super great explanation there. I appreciate it. So obviously this is the Business of Laravel podcast. We talk business, we also talk Laravel. So can you guys kind of share with me like how is Laravel actually involved in the day-to-day operations of your business.

Patrick O'Meara:
So Laravel handles all the traffic on the backend. So we have a REST API of, I think it's about 400 endpoints.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Patrick O'Meara::
And then, so that serves the two client apps, which are a React web app and a React native mobile app. Yeah, it also does a few things around, know, PDF generation. It obviously runs all our jobs, our queue workers. And then we actually had work

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Patrick O'Meara:
quite big on testing as well. We have Laravel Dusk that will run in CI. And I think if that runs in one pipeline, it's like 45 minutes. It's just testing all of the important workflows. So yeah, it's the main part of the app, for sure. part of the product.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So, I mean, you guys have a, I don't know if I would say like mission critical in the same way someone would think about the defense department or the, you know, the, the banking or something like that, but there are probably entire, you know, groups at your organization, you know, at your clients organizations whose entire day in day in life relies on access to your tool. And without access to your tool, it's very difficult to do their job. So for them, it is mission critical.

Did you have any reticence choosing open source or choosing PHP or choosing Laravel specifically when you were going in, you were saying, oh we got to make sure we use Microsoft's tools because they're the big guys or like, what was the decision making process choosing not just Laravel, but also React and React Native and just the whole kind of tech stack as you all kind of went into it.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, great question. So um, I mean, I started coding action script too, right? That was my first, uh, know, flash flash was the big, the big thing. And then actions v three was object orientated and, uh, and that was a big change. You know, that was a big paradigm shift for me. Um, and then we had a. Like a contract together, um, ages ago, Steve, when was that? Um, what I was 19 and so, uh,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
You're old now, so was a long time ago. I can say that because I'm older.

Patrick O'Meara:
I'm just trying to 2004. Yeah, 2004.

Matt Stauffer:
You're not 19 no more.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, not anymore. That's right. And so PHP was just handed to us then, right? Like we were working with another developer and he was working PHP. So that got me into PHP. Now I ended up writing like my own framework kind of based on Active Record. And then this is, let me kind of think about the years here. I guess that around 2015, it just wasn't cutting it, you know, there was security holes everywhere. And so I was looking around then and we were loosely based on CodeIgniter. I was living in San Francisco in 2014 and like PHP was difficult to chat about in San Francisco in 2014, you know, everyone was talking about Ruby on Rails, and we all know that PHP kind of wasn't, wasn't keeping up with those, with those other technologies like those competing technologies. and then I found Laravel. And so I was at this point where I was like, you know, we were running a multi-tenancy app, but without, you know, just on stuff that I kind of strung together. And so then I looked at Laravel, and started moving pieces over to Laravel. So, you know, brought in Eloquent to kind of go over the top of our active record implementation and then just slowly, guess it was Laravel 5.2, I would say, is when it actually went into production. And then, you know, everything started going much quicker.

Whatever I could hand off to Laravel, did, know, Auth, know, brought in Fortifier when that was a thing. The queues obviously was a big thing. So, yeah, I guess moving to Laravel was great.

But yeah, in terms of like the reliability, that was never, doesn't ever issue in my mind, but it is an issue for, you know, IT teams of the clients. So there, if you know, you'd go into an IT, you'd have to have a meeting with the IT team, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
And they would say, you know, it's got to, sometimes we get some crazy stuff, like it's got to be on-prem, it's got to be this, that. and I would, back then I would pull back from saying it was written in PHP. Now, I'm like, yeah, it's written in Laravel. Like people, people know, you know, if they're, if they're in the tech world, it's a, they know that there's reliability and there's some stability around it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And, and Pat, I know you kind of talk about the tech luck, but you also mentioned that y'all had kind of started on a contract together. So Steve, do you have programming in your background?

Steven Quayle:
I don't, I've always been on the business side as much as Pat's tried to push me to learn more and help him out. And then I'm like, well, you need to learn all the accounting as well and the marketing and sales. So sorry, your question.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, no, it's fine. What is it like for you kind of operating a software business as a founder of a software business, but not being involved in the software day to day? it something that you enjoy about that so you don't have to deal with it? Is there something scary about so much depending on something where, you know, I think you're a smart enough guy that you could you could poke some buttons, but I know that you probably don't feel to point where you could kind of like take over the tech yourself. Like what is your experience been like being not the the technical lead of a co-founder team.

Steven Quayle:
It's not something I've really, thought of or been concerned with. And I don't, I don't need to go too, too far into who I am or what, what I am, I guess, but, it's about building stuff. Right? And so you're building a business or you're building an app or like, that's just the building, the building process. but Pat and I have worked together for so long. And I, I actually mentioned this to someone who's, who's, just, we're onboarding it at the moment.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
Last week or the week before is that we've kind of been working together for so long that a lot of stuff we just don't even need to discuss anymore.

Matt Stauffer:
That's cool.

Steven Quayle:
You know, like yesterday, we worked together in the office, having a long discussion. It was kind of like, well, what else do we have to discuss? Because everything we're talking about, we already know that the other one's kind of on the same page. So gradually over time, it's like a funnel. We've kind of got less to talk about because we've become quite predictable.

Matt Stauffer:
Kind of covered it.

Steven Quayle:
through each other in terms of, this is what you would have been expecting. I know this is what you would have been expecting. And so bringing that back to answer your question, we've worked together for so long that there's the trust involved and then that predictability. So we're able to concentrate on our part of the business knowing that the other one we're going to get backing. Yeah. So does that answer your question? Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that.

Yes, that's a fantastic answer. Yeah. I mean, when I started my business, my business partner was a former programmer, but he was like, I'm tired of keeping up with it. And so he really dove in that direction. It allowed me to just focus on coding because I was really tired of getting clients, you know? And so I, I, found a lot of beauty in it. But I know that, you know, people may have different experiences. So was curious about yours, but that's absolutely a great answer there. So as you guys have continued, I mean, one of the things you talked about is your you know, your challenge has been, you know, stepping away from this is a solar, you know, specific thing, a wind specific thing, sorry. And the narrow constraints you're in and trying to kind of genericize it so it's accessible to other people. Has there been a temptation or have you even gone too far in that direction at any point where you're like, now we don't have a niche or is it, has it been pretty clear how to step away from that initial practical kind of constraint and know where to stop in terms of making it more generic.

Steven Quayle:
It's definitely risky because you do tend to find that there's products that we compete with that have really driven up one vertical and become really successful in that and got a name for that. And there was a period of time where that was kind of us because in terms of the renewable energy we had at one point in Australia and New Zealand, we had about 45 % of all installed wind assets using the system in some capacity. So it was a huge part of that kind of market. So the problem was, as a small company, is that at that point, wind energy was really kind of, they're just trying to get wind turbines in the ground, like as quick as possible. It was a race.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Steven Quayle:
but inevitably, they're really large enterprise customers that are involved there. So they're looking for quick solutions to implement, so we could provide that. The risk is that at some point, they move toward the corporate solution. And so that's an IBM or that's a SAP, and that's what we, that was predictable, and that's kind of what we've experienced as well. And so we kind of recognized that some time ago that we had to kind of move.

And so then do we pick out some other markets and kind of go after them and in a way we kind of have because as you're developing features you kind of have to look and say all right, what are we going to develop next and some features are particularly suitable to a certain to a certain market and others other than not so you mentioned your friend that has rental rental units or holiday units and whatnot and this specific features that might be suitable to them. And so you've got to make those choices as you go.

I guess in terms of genericizing, the point is that we've kind of tried to develop the product in a way that many different users can adapt it to their use case. And that's kind of conscious design and development decisions as we implement features and how we implement them

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's cool.

Steven Quayle:
so that we're not excluding anyone, we're not limiting ourselves to any particular market. Will it be, you know, super successful long term? We're still answering that question.

Matt Stauffer:
Fingers crossed. So Pat, I kind of had that same question from you from a technical perspective because often, you know, one of the conversations we have with clients and potential clients is they're figuring this kind of challenge out is how much do we customize the app for each customer? And the temptation is always to go, you know, fully on-prem. You got a different instance of it for each client. And now you have, you know, you're maintaining 150 different copies of your app, you know, and the...

We're always telling them kind of rein it back in. So have there been any kind of unique technical challenges for you as you've been trying to kind of customize for each client without just turning it into this kind of monstrous mess of configuration switches?

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, well, I think we got to 15 clients, you know, 15 different databases. And I was like, this is too much, you know? So that was when we moved it to a single database, Multitenancy app. Yeah, but technical challenges, they're always going to be there. The one we've recently worked on is around the automations.

So we have time-based and metric-based automations. so that might be, you know, this particular thing has to happen every week or this has to happen every 50,000 kilometers or whatever it is. Or it might be from a census, you know, so if the temperature of this thing or the vibration exceeds a certain metric, it's got to trigger a task. So that's been something fun to work on, you know, recently.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
But there was a moment there, and Steve, you could probably slip in for this one, but we were kind of setting the internal systems for the wind industry because they were kind of coming to us for that. And so we were learning on the fly off the clients that we'd already built for. So yeah, that was kind of the human element of it as well as the technical part of it as well.

So you know, putting the internal processes in and just getting people using the app and using the materials, you know, the inventory kind of system. So like, I remember going out to one of the sites and we were taking photos of all the parts and we were putting a barcoding system in. And we recently redid that, right? So what we needed to do was have globally unique identifier for the materials but have it so it wasn't it wasn't too long so people could remember it right so so we ended up having a 10 character only alpha only alpha alpha characters but we took out "o" because we didn't want to get confused with zero right

And so I'm thinking about this for ages, right? We say, all right, well, we need, we need QR codes for materials. And so the things that I didn't want to do, I didn't want people on the mobile app having to swap to different keyboards to put in numbers. So I just wanted to keep it all, alpha characters, but I didn't want to use, I didn't want to have, I went there, right? So we have a 25 character.

Matt Stauffer:
That's clever. Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
set but like you can do a lot with that character set you only have to put in two letters and you have pinpointed a material of like I think it's like 625 right 15 25 power 2s 625 and then if you go a third character then you're you're up to like 15 000 something right I remember explaining all this to Steve and he's looking at me like I'm a madman and I'm like this is like

Matt Stauffer:
limit, yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
This is really important at the moment, right? Like we don't want people switching keyboards, but we need to have unique identifiers, like globally unique identifiers that, you know, we can't give someone a, know, a UUID and expect them to remember it. So anyway, so they only have to remember like the first two or three characters and they've kind of pinpointed it out of quite a few. So yeah, there's some, there's some fun ones in there, but they, they always kind of come back to the user. You know, what's going to make it better for the user, what's going to

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
make it more user friendly.

Steven Quayle:
I think relating that back to our industry, because something like that is really a complete re-education for our customers. Because you can imagine the type of customers that we have on the maintenance side. It's not really a business side. They're maintenance workers that have used these systems that have a standard numbering system their whole career, wire than at 12345.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
That's how I remember it. That's how I want to know it and then trying to re-educate them to to changes like that that are going to increase their ability to use the app and improve their whole experience because you're saying okay well all you have to remember is two letters from that part and you'll cut through a database of thousands of parts that you want to select from.

And I guess that's our approach is trying as best as we can to implement some of those new things and not have too much re-education of our customers and kind of not be as I was saying before, just replicating what's come in the past with other CMMS and just being like, that's the way it's always been done. So we're just going to keep on doing it that way. We'll just be the new one of that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So that leads me to kind of an interesting aspect of the conversation, which is people always have an idea for an app they want to build for some industry people that don't care about. Well, I met a Realtor and Realtors need a tool that does this. And my first thing is like, do you want to spend all day talking to Realtors and learning about Realtors and going to Realtor conferences and interviewing Realtors and going along for a ride along with Realtor? Because otherwise you're not going to be able to understand what their constraints and their concerns are.

Matt Stauffer:
For you guys, what was it like, kind of what was the in? You said you were building it for this client, so that was kind of your initial in, but is there a point at which you all had to really immerse yourself in the world of maintenance in order to do a better job of understanding and empathizing with the customers, or has it all come pretty natural the whole way through?

Steven Quayle:
Well, I mean, without going too far back, we kind of did that from the start because when we built it for the wind industry, we went and stayed at a wind farm. We went and climbed the towers with, you know, which, yeah, okay. Well, I mean, okay. Well, we said we weren't going to start with the pub, but we can go back to the pub.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool, love it. Yes, this is the story I wanted.

Patrick O'Meara:
That's all. That a lot of climbing.

Steven Quayle:
You know, that's how the product started. I met a Danish guy at a birthday party in a pub and we had a few drinks. The next thing we're having bets over whether you can kick an Australian rules football further than a soccer ball. You know, one thing led to another. you know, he says, we need some software, you know, coming to the office on Monday. So this is how we kind of got into the wind energy because, you know, the Danish are...

are really big on the wind side. And so that kind of flowed on to, yeah, Pat and I went and stayed at a wind farm. This was when most of the towers didn't have lifts. So, you you've got to climb the 80 meters up to the top vertically. So I'm sure Pat can still remember stopping at the first platform for a little rest. All these techniques. Yeah, so you're in the tower, you're sweating.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, I've never done so much upper body load. Developer!

Steven Quayle:
These technicians have, you know, forearms, huge forearms from climbing up. And so we kind of wanted to do that from the start and follow them and see like, what are the pain points? Now, so that gave us kind of good foundation of that. And now we, you know, we learn different industries, we learn about the rental properties and we learn about hospitals and what they need. And that just comes, you know, like any other product, just talking to the customer and understanding their pain points. But bringing it back to what we discussing before is, you know, as Padaway says, just tell them with the problem, because a lot of customers want to give you the solution upfront, but whereas really we want to hear what the problem is. And that's also respecting the customer as well, because also you don't want to be coming in from the other angle, like, I know better, we know better than you do.

Patrick O'Meara:
Right.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Steven Quayle:
because it's a joint effort with the customer to kind of get to the right place. You have to have all of those elements in order to improve the product.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So if we have some people listening and that is always the case who look at the two of you, look at your career, look at your company, look at your success and look at the place you've been able to kind of set yourself up and want to be where you are today. What are some things that have helped you to get here? And this could be books, videos, articles, experiences, previous jobs or whatever else. And I want each of you to answer this. I guess we can start with Pat because you're higher in my screen. But each of you like what?

What has gotten you here and what could somebody do to kind of help get to a similar place in their.

Steven Quayle:
I know Pat's gonna go first, but the instant answer for me is Pat..

Matt Stauffer:
All right, I love that.

Patrick O'Meara:
I mean, yeah, we were young when we started this for sure. And if you had asked me, you when I was 22 or whatever, would I be in maintenance software? I probably would have ran as far as well as I could, you know, but yeah, Steve said we've kind of grown with the product. We've learned all the different industries. Yeah. What got me here?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
Like technically wise the coding book I've gotten the most out of is Refactoring to Collections by Adam Wathn you know, that cleaned up a lot of my code and kind of made it

Matt Stauffer:
Wow. I love that.

Patrick O'Meara:
Pretty early, when I was learning more about Laravel and so that gave me a deep sense of pride, not just the optimization, but the way it looked, the way it read. Yeah, another big book for me has been, well, actually I should mention that I haven't read Radical Candor, right? And if you, if once I had read that, that would probably be the answer, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Sure, because it is for everybody in the podcast, apparently.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, I did hear that a lot. The book for me was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Matt Stauffer:
Great book. Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
It was written in like 1936 and I read it ages ago. And for the most part, I was doing a lot of those things outside of the business world, right? Cause I'm overly dealing with people. That's kind of Steve's responsibility. But outside of work, I definitely like a community builder. Like I run PHP Melbourne, well now PHP X-Mel cause jumped on that PHP expand wagon, which has been great. But I build communities around, you whether it's what the kids are doing with the school with with sport. And so like remembering people's names, remembering something interesting about them goes a long way. Yeah, so yeah, I guess that's over to you Steve.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, that's great. Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
Right. So, you know, we touched on it earlier in terms of like building things and before getting into specifics, you know, books and influences and whatnot. I think in terms of Pat and I, and Pat mentioned it yesterday actually, it's like the yin and the yang. But we're both similar in terms of liking to build things.

And that goes across other aspects of our life because a lot of what we talk about is, like what home project have you done? And we've renovated houses and come up,

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, the combi van.

Steven Quayle:
Yeah, Pat's got the combi van and it might be, you know, repointing is the concrete out the back or redoing the fireplace. And I've been renovating a house for five years. And so a lot of those same skills and interests, I think it's just like building something, you know, that's it, it's kind of core and that's helped us along the way, both liking the building aspect. And so you're building a product, you're building a house, you're building a business and the satisfaction that comes along with that. That's the big driver. In terms of, you know, influences along the way, I like also an old book, I guess, an old now, in good Good to Great, which is Jim Collins. And there's probably two aspects in that which I like to apply to the business. And he popularized the flywheel effect, so creating momentum from small wins. So accumulating that over time. And I think of an Australian business, it's more of a conservative approach. You know, traditionally, even if you look at the Australian business, a bit of

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
made it big, you know, Canva maybe not so much, but Atlassian and, and whatnot, there's always been this concentration on profitability from the start. And it's, it's, it's definitely more of a conservative approach here, rather than kind of just like, the market and then work it out later. And so yeah, the flywheel effects are, you know, small wins in this compounding and just, I mean, it creates a really good discipline.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
in everything across the business from building it to dealing with customers to how trustworthy you can be to them, things like that. And the second thing, I mean, there's a lot in that book, but the second thing that he kind of popularized there was the hedgehog concept. So core areas where you're gonna be best at in the world. We talk about it, not trying to be everything to everyone and really zeroing in on who are we trying to sell this product to right at this point in time. Let's push aside some of the noise of what others are doing and be the best at that and stay focused at that and where does that intersect with what you're passionate about and so that comes back down to the building process and then the third aspect is what makes economic sense. So you've got to make it work and so you've got to sell the product as well. So, you know, I think there's some elements of those that we've tried to implement in the business as well, at least I have.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's awesome. I've really enjoyed kind of hearing the collaborative and relational nature of y'all's like kind of connection with each other. I mean, you're obviously friends and yet you live right now, you live across the world from each other and you both have mentioned, I don't remember if was before or during, you know, being in Australia and we've talked about Chicago and San or Wisconsin, Milwaukee, somewhere up north of Chicago and San Diego and all these different things. And I know that your team, your founder group and also your your clientele are spread out across the world in a way that I think is pretty unique when you're not talking about a company with thousands of people, right? Like in a normal, you know, small to medium business, you guys are pretty spread out. What are some aspects of that that have been brought about kind of interesting challenges and are there things that you're still kind of like, yeah, this is still a struggle or something you're really proud of how you solved with the distributed everything of your team?

Steven Quayle:
I mean, I can go first if you want, Pat, what are you thinking? But we have talked about this recently in terms of when COVID came along, we just kind of kept operating on as we were because we had those systems in place.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
And so we've been doing that for long enough now that we've ironed a lot of that out. Pat might mention about specifics in terms of identifying things that help with the communication. But in terms of tools, like everything from the technologies that we choose has to be built around that. We very rarely hesitate in implementing a tool that even if there's, know, small costs involved, if it's going to help in that process, then we will generally go for it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
And it's allowed us to stay efficient, lean, and kind of gets things done remotely.
Yeah, probably. That's I mean, I don't know what else to say about that is that we were kind of onto that early. But we've also, I guess, through that process, it's given us the benefit of traveling around because I know that I've lived in three cities in the in the US and Pat can talk to you know, his travels through that. So in building the business, it's also given us the flexibility in life as well to do things that we probably wouldn't have been able to do otherwise as well.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
Well, from a business point of view, it was difficult. Do you remember, Steve, when we had, I think, US dollars and British pounds? But this is before merchant of record stuff was so readily available. So moving to things like paddle and strike has just been game changing on that front. But yeah, so we went remote in 2010 is when we closed the Melbourne office down.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
Steve, you know, we had good growth over in the US in just wind. So that was just when we were in. So Steve went over there to kind of handle that, that industry in that one country, right, which has worked out quite well because, you know, it gave us, it extended our support hours quite, quite a lot. So Steve would be supporting Europe and we had, yeah, obviously Australia, New Zealand.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
So it gave us, support wise, gave us a bigger window. Team wise, we've got a handbook that we give to all people coming on. It's like a living document, right? So if we kind of come across something new or a new way to do something, then we put that in the handbook.

Um, and so things like, uh, we got one, like a full document just on communication. It's like, you know, we prefer video calls because we like to see the emotion of people, you know, it's very difficult to do without, without seeing that. And even like, there's a section in there about like using emojis. Cause like, you know, you can get, you don't really read what's going on. If it's just text, you're like, eh, is this guy like, is he angry at us? But you know, throw an emoji in there. It really helps.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
So then, and then obviously it's got like, you know, the Git workflow, how to how to write great commit messages. And so that's the first thing. So after the application process, like we'll send the handbook, and kind of just get everyone on the same page with that. And that just enables us to, you know, spike up teams, you know, whenever we, whenever we need, but yeah, we've worked with some great, some great developers over the, over the years for sure.

Some really talented developers that have moved on to, you know, think they've moved on to Microsoft, to Square, and I'm still in contact with all those people.

Steven Quayle:
Booking, I think Booking as well, right? Booking.com or, right? Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one. So he was based in Denmark and still is in Denmark. Great guy. And like that time zone was difficult. Melbourne to Denmark. Yeah, I actually, Steve, you mentioned the travel. So I lived in San Diego before Steve did and actually in the same spot like Ocean Beach in San Diego. So that was 2011 and then I did a year down in South America and then two years in San Francisco, year, oh sorry, a year in Berlin and a quick stint in Tokyo as well. So like the good thing about already being remote was that we could just go wherever we want. And so like in my twenties, that was great. You know, I could tick boxes and build a product at the same time, which tick travel boxes I mean. Yeah, don't get that.

Matt Stauffer:
That's special. Yeah.

Steven Quayle:
Just two things to extend on that. And that's probably like a minor point, but you mentioned about the video, just to come back to that. We also apply that to customers as well. So if it's a call with the customer, a lot of customers won't turn their video on, but we still will. So even if you're just talking to yourself on the video, just because everything's remote and it's all about just being upfront and seeing the person and kind of putting yourself out there and that's who you are and you're gonna see me. And even if you're not on the screen, you're still gonna see me. And it helps kind of push through to create those relationships as well. And in terms of the relationships, we talked about one of the guys that worked with us that went on to booking.com and he worked with us in Melbourne and then actually went back to Europe and then was kind of like, can I...

Can I get a letter of referral? And we're like, what are you talking about? Just keep working, come work for us again. And became a great friend.

Patrick O'Meara:
That's right.

Matt Stauffer:
Keep working.

Steven Quayle:
And there's a lot of people that we've worked with over the journey and people go on and do things. It's hard to keep all the great people that you wanna keep, but we've actually managed to stay friends with a lot of these people even when they've kind of moved on. And so I think, yeah, building those relationships. Which I think we're both able to do and then you're able to do that with customers as well and it's I think super important across the whole business.

Patrick O'Meara:
The Tuesday morning meeting, so Steve and I meet every morning for me and it's usually Steve's afternoon. So here's Monday afternoon, my Tuesday morning, that call goes for like way longer than it needs to, right? Like we're not just...

Steven Quayle:
For sure

Patrick O'Meara:
Why don't I just cover work stuff. He's sending me photos of like his stairs that he's been working on. You know, he's put tiles on his stairs. Um, and sometimes if I'm working at home, my partner Eve will be like, what are you guys talking about? Like, oh, we're like, like we're building our relationships. So, you know, like we've got to have that. We are at opposite ends of the world. Um, well, it's actually not too bad across the Pacific. Um, but yeah, we've, we've got to keep that relationship going, you know, not, can't just be a work, work, work.

Matt Stauffer:
Hahaha

Steven Quayle:
But we've also had times where we slipped out of that, right Pat? And then we're like, we need to do like course correction. And so then we're like, okay, well, we need to make sure that we're sticking to that because yeah, there's risks involved. Like Pat said, even if it's talking about emojis or it's talking about how often you're actually talking to each other face to face, you've kind of got to have the discipline to kind of keep that and work hard at it because.. Yeah, it's relationships, know, just the same as your home relationships. You got to keep working at it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Um, God, there's so much good stuff you guys have said in there. Uh, it's one of these things where I'm like, I have a next topic for us to talk about, but I've like, I just kind of let it trail here cause I'm just like, so in with you guys. One of the things I really like what you said here at the end was about it being like relationships. Cause you know, people say, Oh, marriage is hard. And one of the things my wife and I talk about where like it's, there's a difference between it being like, hard versus just you have to work hard at it. Like it doesn't make it a hard thing. It just means you have to be very intentional. And so even before you said it's like relationships, I'm like, yeah, you you have to be intentional in order to kind of sustain these long term relationships and these long term connections and sure distance does add some of those costs. But in the end, I think it probably is for the better having done it because the other the ones in person still need the work. It's just not always as transparent that it needs it.

And I literally told my leadership team two weeks ago, I was like, you know what? I feel like I have become so busy with all the operations of the company that I haven't been able to be social. And for the first 12, 13 years of the company, I had a co-founder and he was the one kind of running the business side and I was running the people and the tech. I just got like part of my job was just to be friendly and cool, whatever. And then when he stepped away and I become the CEO and the CFO and the COO is you, what we were all talking about juggling things. I was like, there's so many things on my plate. I don't have time for this.

And I just realized, I'm like, people don't know what's going on with my life. I don't know what's going on with theirs unless their supervisor tells me. And the last just couple of weeks, I'm just like, hey, it's Monday. Here's what I did over the weekend. What are you guys feeling? Just this kind of very small light personal things. And it's, man, it's so much better. Like you mentioned, I just appreciate you mentioning falling off. You people aren't often gonna talk about like, yeah, I kinda lost this thing. I'm supposed to be here on the podcast telling you how great I am and sometimes we don't get our things right.

So anyway, thank you for sharing that. I like this is therapy for me. So the actual next topic that I did want to bring you guys about was about hiring. You mentioned a few times about these wonderful people that you've had kind of working with you. You're still connected with them. You're still friends. And one of the questions I always ask and I have to kind of like wrap it up after this because obviously we can go forever and it's already 45 minutes was

Patrick O'Meara:
It's important.

Matt Stauffer:
What has your experience in hiring been like? And I both want to know in terms of hiring Laravel developers. Some people say, well, will it be easy or hard to hire Laravel developers? But I also think that you guys are doing something right. You've got people you want to continue these relationships with, and you're so proud of. What's your hiring secret? So I think those are my two pieces, is sort of like, what has hiring Laravel developers specifically been like? And is there anything where you think, hey, if you want to hire like we do, here's a tip I'd have for you.

Patrick O'Meara:
Right, well I guess there's definitely no magic, you know, no silver bullet.

Steven Quayle:
Yeah, before before Pat answers, was gonna say we haven't spoken about the bad experiences. We live them. We live those ones out which we've which you know, we've had.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Fair. It happens. Yep.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, I think with Laravel, it attracts entry-level developers as well. So it's so easy to kind of spin up a Laravel app and think that you're a Laravel developer. And what is that called? The Dunning-Kruger effect, But what we've found is that as long as you find the right people, you can kind of...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Patrick O'Meara:
bring them along for the journey, right? And they might fall off at a certain point where, you know, you've got to get into more complex stuff and that's fine. There's still got to be things that they can tackle. But yeah, I guess, and Steve and I was chatting about this yesterday. It was like, it's not, you know, are we hiring at the moment or are we ever hiring? It's like, we're kind of just always looking for great people. And then, you know, skill them up where they need to be skilled up. Yeah, it's kind of a double-edged sword with Laravel because you can get like, you know, crazy good developers, you can get entry level as well. Yeah, I guess Laravel has, you know, even the first party packages, you get, you get a lot for free, you know, so yeah, as long as the critical thinking is very important.

Steven Quayle:
I think we've also found Pat right there, where you look at like entry or mids or senior and a lot of people, there's a lot of seniors. Everyone seems to be a senior.

Patrick O'Meara:
Oof. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Seniors, yeah.

Steven Quayle:
And so within the senior, you've got to break down like, okay, well, who is actually senior? Because everyone seems to be.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, I interviewed a senior once that had never written a test and so I was like, you know, like, I don't know. But generally it's been, it's been a pretty good experience.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, love to hear that. I have so many more questions you guys, but because we're tight on time, I'm just gonna kind of wrap us with these last ones, which is, I just wanna kind of check in, it's like, are you hiring and is there anything you guys wanna plug? I'm just gonna throw those out there.

Steven Quayle:
I think as Pat just mentioned is that we're kind of always on the lookout and if it's particularly someone that we want to work with. So always, always hiring in a way. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing or a luxury or what it is, but that's just how it is and that's how we've kind of always been in terms of what we want to plug. I mean...

We're just working on some great stuff. We've of set out where we wanted to take the product to and we kind of really feel now that we're making some really good strides on that. So, you know, the stuff that Pat's working on in terms of interface, UI, dashboards and new reporting modules we're going to be doing and moving into kind of a more advanced checklist, inspections kind of modules and you know, it's kind of an exciting position that we're in at the moment. So yeah, we'll just keep plugging away with CMMS and..

Patrick O'Meara:
with C's for computerized.

Steven Quayle:
Yes, exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
That's my favorite part of the whole interview, I'm sorry.

Steven Quayle:
I mean, it just shows where the industry has come from. When we were kind of first started looking at how we're going to market this product, we're basically like, well, they're all still calling themselves computerized. Why is that? And so that kind of gives you an idea of where the industry has come from. And a lot of the major competitors are pre-internet. So they've had to move these 30 year old, 35 year old products over to web. And so that creates opportunity and that creates an avenue for other products to come in. That's where we see ourselves fitting, as I mentioned, not just repeating what's being done in the future. So I'm trying to differentiate ourselves from a technology basis.

Yeah, so hopefully we're going to be the non-computerized maintenance management system.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, just make the C redundant. That'd be nice. Like if in the lifetime of the product we could drop that C and just be a maintenance management system, I would be a happy man.

Matt Stauffer:
That does make a lot more sense. I'm just thinking, is it a computerized CRM? Is it a computerized CMS for content management? I'm like, no, nobody else has got that, but I hear it. It's specific to the industry. All right, last question. It's for both of you, but this time we're gonna start with Steve. If somebody handed you $100 million today and said, walk away from your business, take $100 million, what do you do tomorrow?

Steven Quayle:
That's a good question. I don't really think about that too much. Yeah, I don't know whether like I was saying before, culturally, it's not a, you know, Australia's big on the, you know, the tall poppy syndrome and you know, it's not a big thing to go around talking about and you know, how much money and what you're gonna do and all that kind of stuff. So it's not really something I would think about too often.

Patrick O'Meara:
Right.

Steven Quayle:
I guess I would come back to what I was talking about before is that both Pat and I enjoy the building process and irrelevant of money is that I think if you don't have that, you kind of behind from the start, if you start out being like, all right, yeah, I'm going to do this because honestly, being doing agency work, which I think you you're involved in agency work as well, A number of people you'd come along that kind of haven't not much idea, but they're like, I've got the best idea and I'm going to make whole heap of money and it's like, all right, okay. And so it kind of all becomes about that and not about just the building process. And so, you know, we just focus on that. And then if you get something at the end of the day, if you're able to be successful, then fantastic. We'll worry about that when that happens.

Matt Stauffer:
Great. I love it. Yeah. Okay. Pat, how about you?

Patrick O'Meara:
Well, I knew this question was coming and I've been thinking about it since I saw it and I'm like, I don't know what I would do. And I was talking to my partner Eve last night about it. She's like, you've always wanted to like, you know, deck out a van and just go around Australia with the kids. And I was like, yeah, that's probably what I would do, you know, but I would have to, like Steve said, I would have to come back and start building something again. I don't know what that would be. Maybe I would find that on the trip.

Matt Stauffer:
I have to keep building things, Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah, but I've got to be building.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it. There's a guy in the Laravel community.

Steven Quayle:
Always be building.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, great, all these building. It's not quite as good as ABC, but still, it's still good. There's a guy in the Laravel community who, as soon as he sold his thing, he bought a vintage Jeep and just spent months just fixing it up. And then he started building something else. He's like, cool, done with the Jeep, time to start my new... No, and then he started another software product.

Steven Quayle:
And the he bought another one.

Matt Stauffer:
So it's just sort of like, yeah, there's both of those, right? There's just kind of like wanting to do something with your hands and get away from it, be with your family. And there's also like, yeah, no, I think I probably have to build again. So, well, you guys, I'm gonna try and wrap it because over 10 minutes passed when I'm supposed to cut this, but that is just a sign we're having a great conversation. You guys were incredible and I really appreciate you hanging out and sharing kind of your experiences with us and thanks for being here today.

Patrick O'Meara:
Yeah. Thank you Matt.

Steven Quayle:
Thank you, Matt. Yeah, thanks a lot.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, the rest of y'all, we will see you next time.