The Systemization of Synergy w/ John Petitte | Ep. 143

In this episode of the Biz/Dev podcast David and Gary talk to John Petitte, Co- Founder of Amplifi Labs and a handful of other startups. They discuss the systemization of synergy and what fuels your passion to scale.

Links:
John's LinkedIn
Amplifi Labs on LinkedIn
Trade Insight AI on LinkedIn

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] John: I'd say the majority of it is in English and there's definitely some that's in Portuguese. Absolutely. You can just copy and paste that in ChatGPT and say, Hey, translate to English.

[00:00:16] David: Hello everyone. Welcome to the biz dev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host. This week i'm joined per usual by gary voight. How are you? You look like you're in the dark. You okay over there?

[00:00:28] Gary: I'm doing fine. How are you?

[00:00:30] David: I cannot complain. More importantly, I am joined by John Petit, who is the CEO and co founder of Amplify Labs.

Welcome, man. How are you doing?

[00:00:39] John: Good. Good. Thanks for having me. How are you guys doing?

[00:00:42] David: Cannot complain. So you run Amplify Labs, which if I understand correctly, is very similar to what we do. You build custom software. How long have you been doing that? Okay,

[00:00:54] John: yeah. So first I guess a clarification, we have two business lines. One is custom software development and the other one is staff augmentation. So each makes up about 50 percent of our business right now.

[00:01:05] David: how did you start? Which one was it or both?

[00:01:08] John: We started with projects and then we added staff augmentation onto it. And now we've, we can talk about this a little bit more later, but we've noticed an opening in demand and the market and staff augmentation we expect it to grow. Dramatically more over time. 

[00:01:25] David: So pretend I'm an idiot. It's not hard. What is staff augmentation?

[00:01:29] John: Staff augmentation is when a customer already has internal processes for building things right, just in general, and they need extra individuals. To be added into their team. And there are a number of different reasons why they wouldn't bring those folks on as W2 employees, right? But that's the critical, let's say, aspect as to why they're going to come to somebody like us, right?

They have the processes in place. They just need more experts in specific areas to be added to their team.

[00:01:59] David: Okay. So how did you guys were doing projects and you guys have been around five or six years. Is that about

[00:02:05] John: and a half at this point. Yep.

[00:02:07] David: How did you guys go from projects to staff augmentation? Was there a client who said, Hey, can you help? And then you were off to the races or how did that happen?

[00:02:16] John: Essentially. So we're very up to this point. We've been very market driven. So we get out there, we interact with people, we're working with people. We analyze what people need, the type of problems they're trying to solve. And they come to us with specific types of problems that, that they needed solved.

And we would just say, sure, we can do that. Which is a very normal thing for startups to do. You, as Guy Kawasaki would say, you shut up and take the money and then you solve their problem. I think Teddy Roosevelt said something like. When somebody asks you if you can do something first, you say yes, and then you figure out how you're going to do it.

So that was very much our philosophy for the first three and a half, four years and staff augmentation became a big part of our business. When one of our partners Patrick Clancy runs a dev shop called bit face. Awesome guy. Really classy guy. He came to us and he had a project with a much larger customer.

Patrick at the time was focusing strictly on. Web development, react front end, and they had mobile components to it. He said, Hey, will you guys help me on this proposal and we can get a much larger project from this? We said, yeah. So we merged together for that project. We did that for about a year. And then that customer said, we really want to switch over to staff augmentation rather than you guys running the projects, because they were a scale up that had grown by acquisition and they wanted to become a much more mature.

Organization in terms of execution. So that's why they wanted to switch over to staff all, because they wanted to mature that port, that portion of their organization. So we said, okay, sure. So we switched over, we modified the way we operated and that kind of became the first trigger point for, we're going to have a mature staff augmentation department.

So it was just very market driven, right? Customers need this. And we said, yeah, let's adapt to it.

[00:04:13] David: So did you, before Staffog, did you have the process and procedure that each dev that was on your team, because these were internal hires, right? Were they dedicated only to that project beforehand?

[00:04:28] John: No. That case, they were primarily dedicated, right? That was a big project. Customer's pretty big. So it was consuming a lot of their time, but in general, prior to that, we would shuffle people around based on projects that had needs, project hours, et cetera, trying to maintain budgets on projects, those sorts of things.

So it was very fluid.

[00:04:53] David: I was just, I asked because I would think if it was us. Our guys jump around pretty regularly. And if I had gone from say, our biggest client says, Hey, we're going to do Staffog and I want your guys to now be my guys that I'm managing those guys. Our other projects would take a major hit because those guys are now gone from day to day, my company.

So did you have that transition or was it smoother than that?

[00:05:18] John: Because they were so dedicated in that instance, it was a little bit smoother, right? It took a little bit of time, but it wasn't as, let's say, chaotic as the situation that you described.

[00:05:33] David: Yeah. Okay. So my, okay. So I saw from LinkedIn, I saw that you guys, most of your devs are in Brazil, is that correct?

[00:05:41] John: That's right. Correct.

[00:05:43] David: So our audience has heard me, my team is all us based. It's a, we're all over the place, but we're, it's a big thing for us as big pixel to only hire in the US. And so my, the audience has heard that spiel a million times.

What I want to hear is when offshoring works. From your perspective, obviously this is your model and it's working for y'all. Great. How does that work for y'all? How, because there's all horror stories and I'm sure you've heard them, but how do you get around those horror stories and how do you make it work for your clients?

[00:06:14] John: So I'll start with the history of why most of the company is in Brazil. So originally I'll fast forward a little bit through my entrepreneurial history, but I had a consulting firm with a fellow entrepreneur of mine and we just started it. There's maybe just a couple months, right? We maybe had a handful of customers who were starting to pay us a little bit of money to do things.

And we'd actually been working together for a while. He needed to get a little bit more stable because he had a kid on the way. So he went out and got a job in California at Rigetti computing, and it was an awesome opportunity. But he said, Hey, look, you can keep the consulting firm, do whatever you want with it.

And I was like,

[00:07:03] David: He was your dev or were you the dev or neither? You

[00:07:07] John: I was the deaf. That's right. That's right. And he said, you can do whatever you want with it. I was like, all right, cool. Makes sense. So I started working through my network in the Raleigh area and I reconnected with Rod Greco and he had just started a deaf shop at pretty much the same time that we had.

Now, Rod is Brazilian. I think he's actually a U. S. citizen now. He's been in the U. S. for maybe 15 years at this point, something like that. And so using his connections down in Brazil he leveraged that to focus his dev shop on near shore software development. So we merged together. I honestly knew nothing about Brazil or anything like that.

Like I, I may not have even known that they speak Portuguese in Brazil, so we merged together and it was like, okay, all right, cool. Let's do this. So then we added Paulo Reek as co founder and CTO a little while later. And that's when we got underway. So it was really just opportunistic around whether or not we were working in the U S or Brazil.

Now the opportunistic portion of it is, let's say, important because previous to this, I never actually worked at any big software companies, right? I never worked at Facebook or Apple or honestly any software job previously. No one had paid me to write software. My background, my degrees were in chemical engineering and biochemistry, and I'd worked in the pharmaceutical medical device industry for.

Four years as a consultant prior to this. So during that time I'd been teaching myself computer science for years, right? But no one had paid me to do anything. And so there was nobody out there saying, yeah, I trust that John can build something, right? I knew I could. I'm an engineer at heart. I know how to do that stuff, but it's different when you've got folks who've worked with you for a couple of years prior and say, yeah, I trust John.

He knows what he's doing. Go ahead and hire his team and they'll get it done. So having a dev shop that was near shore Allowed us to compete on price initially, and that allowed us to gain credibility. And we've just taken that momentum and continue to work into that niche because that's where we set up, right?

That's what we know really well. And it our structure has allowed us to do that very effectively. Because we know, let's say the Brazilian market very well.

[00:09:32] Gary: Seeing that you have deep roots in Brazil, are a lot of your clients Brazilian based?

Or Southern America. They're all,

[00:09:40] John: Yeah. We've had some come to us and say, Hey, we really want to work with you. We got close with one, but unfortunately one of the co founders got sick and they had to put things on hold, but typically we price ourselves out of the Brazilian market, right?

Which is why we really focus on us

[00:10:01] David: So your project management. Is where?

[00:10:06] John: in Brazil.

[00:10:07] David: In Brazil. So I'm a client. I call you and I'm like, dude, I need you to build me this awesome gizmo. And you're like, cool. Here's your team in Brazil. Is that, it's bammo. There's no U. S. contact from that point on for all intents and purposes.

[00:10:23] John: side is pretty much on the U S and so there's that, other than that. Everything's in Brazil, everything's in Brazil and we were fully remote right from birth, right? So companies that understand that it's very natural to them. I've actually never met Paulo Reek in person or CTO only ever known him via video calls.

And it's because we started right before the pandemic. We were at first, we're like, Oh, we're not making that much money. We need to save money, invest into the business. I'm not going to fly out and visit anybody. Then the pandemic hit. I guess we're not traveling for a while.

And I guess we don't need an office. So just continue. And then after the pandemic, all right, we're growing so fast. I don't have time to go visit you. We need to focus on growing the business. And we still haven't done it. So maybe at the end of this year,

[00:11:08] David: We're all remote as well. And I know that as a remote company, building culture, building a company that people want to engage with every day. Is hard and we're all speaking the same language So I would imagine That in your case and correct me where i'm wrong It seems like you'd be very bifurcated.

You've got all the brazilians, which is most of your company They probably have a culture and then you have the americans who probably have their own culture And there's probably some mixing but not a ton. Is that fair? Okay, Sure,

[00:11:42] John: America, I think is one benefit is that it's fairly close to us culture. And. U S culture, even in itself is divided into different cultures. So I think in the U S people are much more accustomed to that than they used to be. So there've been certain aspects where, I chat with Paulo and he says, yeah, we see things this way.

We see things that way. These are, let's say, environmental or cultural differences that, you Influence the way people react to certain things, but it's not that much different than let's say if you were working in New York and then you hired a bunch of people in California, Like you're still gonna need some guidance on.

This isn't normal in California or this isn't normal down in South Carolina. This isn't normal in New York. I'd say it's closer to that than it would be a cultural difference between the United States and Japan, which is just cavernous,

[00:12:47] David: Yeah big difference You But I would think, I'm assuming you guys live on something like Slack or Teams or

[00:12:52] John: Yes. Slack. That's right. Google meets. Exactly.

[00:12:56] David: But the core difference that I would see if I go to my Slack and I open up any channel, I can read and I can dive in anywhere I want to. But there's, if I'm in the American in your company and I open up Slack, three quarters of the channels are in Portuguese, I would assume.

[00:13:10] John: There are some, but everybody gets hired because they can speak English.

[00:13:18] David: Okay.

[00:13:19] John: I'd say the majority of it is in English and there's definitely some that's in Portuguese. Absolutely. You can just copy and paste that in ChatGPT and say, Hey, translate to English. And it's the 

and LLMs have made it so easy to do translations that when I'm You know, chatting with friends in Japan online, instead of trying to like manually do the translation, I send it in English and Japanese.

I just have chat GPT translate to Japanese for me. so even those barriers are going away, but everybody does speak English in the company.

[00:13:54] David: Okay. That's just fascinating. So now you're seeing your future is in StaffOg. You're just finding that's where people are leaning, which I've, I think the term I've heard is the body shop, right? That's what I've heard StaffOg is called. And

[00:14:10] John: People

[00:14:11] David: people Mills, I've always, and I've worked,

[00:14:14] Gary: human capital.

[00:14:16] John: Yep.

[00:14:17] David: I have worked adjacent to StaffOg companies. And I've always thought that It was really hard to you those people they're basically not your employees except from an HR perspective, right? You never see them. They're not coming to a christmas party They don't know who anyone else is even is on the team and I was like, man That's not what I want to build, but I also know there's a big, huge pile of money right there because it's for all intents and purposes.

Once you've found them and you've stuffed the person in that hole, you just make free money from that point on. You make a percentage correct me if I'm wrong of their bill rate from that point on. And it's just like free money as long as they're not crazy. And you have HR problems. It's free money for as long as they're out there.

So I have a friend who ran one. He's dude, it's just. Nuts. Cause the margins are locked in and they're forever. They get on this project for three years, 40 hours a week. I make a number of it. It was something like 25 bucks an hour off the top forever. And I was like, I see the appeal. I do. But in my case, I was like, man, but I like building things. That's my heartbeat. I like building things. I like dealing with people. But I

[00:15:29] Gary: We had a guest, we had a guest prior. That was, she ran like a, I guess it would be like a creative and ad advertising kind of agency that was all staff hog in Canada. And it was this. It's very similar model, but she also had most of her employees or people that she put into positions were offshore from Canada, not in Canada, but she was in Canada and offshoring in there.

Yeah.

[00:15:56] John: so I, I know what you mean, David, I know what you mean, Paolo and I have gone through this exact same thoughts and conversations in the end, what we always told ourselves was, we want to build something, big and great. And we're not really concerned with what that is. Because. It will allow us to do the next even bigger and greater thing, right?

Because we are, in the end, Paolo and I are builders, right? We are both engineers and the interesting thing about Staffog, it's got its own problems, right? The biggest thing is that. You're working with people and people are dirty, right? Their lives are, my life, you're everybody, nobody has a clean, perfect, like a well oiled machine life.

This is rolling wrong along. People get sick, people, family members who die, like people, sometimes they get depressed, right? Things just happen to people. And so you have, in a crude way, like your product is people, but, They're human beings, right? So there is definitely a dynamic to it where something's going to happen to somebody along the way, right?

It, this is the law of life. It's going to come at you and it's going to punch you in the face. You don't know when that is. And so for each of these individuals, at some point, you're going to have to help them through it, help the customer through it, figure out the best path forward.

So that is definitely something that. Is say a little bit different than if you're running projects, right? And when you're running projects, you can keep that more internal to the team. When you have a third party that's directly interfacing with this person, it's a little bit more open, right?

Because there's an, the customer, if something's happening to somebody, they need to know at least there's something going on, right? Somebody's grandmother died. Somebody, crazy stuff. Like somebody's child died. You can't, you have to handle that in a way that's. Compassionate to everybody, compassionate to the customer.

Who's got customers of their own that they need to feel compassionate. The person who's going through the worst thing in their possible, their life could possibly endure. So that's a different dimension to it. But the building aspect comes from the fact that there's a lot of beauty to me in systems that just work really well, and the systematization of getting people with.

The right other people, right? Engineers QA PM with the right customers doing the right kind of work and just cranking along and people are happy with what they're doing, putting together those systems where it's just like a machine, it just turns and everybody's comfortable and they're feeling fulfilled.

That to me is a very beautiful thing, right? I love those types of systems. Even with Staffog, I can get this really beautiful sense of fulfillment by seeing all of the gears and all of the people working in a way that, they enjoy and produces a good outcome.

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[00:19:45] David: So how big, vaguely, do you see Amplify Labs getting, or is this a stepping stone to, I'm going to get it this big, I'm going to sell it, I'm going to do something else, and we're going to keep riding this train. Like, How big, like I had an idea in my head of how big I wanted BigPixel to grow and I've always joked that when if, and when I reached that I reserved the right to change my mind, but I'm curious, do you have that same kind of thought or do you have a, this is where I want to be a 10 million, 20 million, a hundred million, billion, whatever in your head and that's what you're striving for.

Cause you're like, we want to be big. We don't really care what it is.

[00:20:20] John: Paulo and I have always said to each other that the path is building bigger, more interesting things. We know that right now. The only trajectory to do that is growing Amplify Labs. Exactly where that goes, we're flexible. And is it with an acquisition? Is it with just continuing to grow it? And then Amplify Labs funds other bigger ideas, more interesting ideas.

We're totally open to it. We run the calculus of what gets us closer to doing bigger and more interesting things with every decision. And it'll change over time, right? Would. What looks like the decision that we make a year from now, maybe not be the case. So we're very flexible.

[00:21:06] David: You remind me of a friend of mine. He just loved business. He wanted to run a business. He didn't care what that business, what he actually bought one, very random kind of business. One of those businesses that you're like, I didn't know that kind of thing existed. But he's grown it. He's tripled it size or whatever.

I can't remember the numbers of course, but that was, it wasn't the thing. It was the business. It was creating the process. Like you were talking about. You sound very similar to him, like your passion, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but your passion isn't necessarily building software and Staffog, it's running a business.

And this just happens to be the one you're running right now.

[00:21:46] John: Yes, that's correct. Yeah that's absolutely right. And that became clear to me in my let's say senior into super senior year at in college at NC State. That's when I, Discovered the entrepreneurship program there and everything just clicked into place, right? I realized why I wasn't great at competing in a corporate environment.

I realized why I was ultra competitive, but everything that everyone was competing at just really wasn't that super interested in. I didn't feel like I understand the rule. I understood the rules of those games, but then once I found entrepreneurship, I realized, okay, yes. This is why I haven't fit in anywhere else, right?

This is what I should be doing. What you described matches perfectly.

[00:22:38] David: That's so interesting. I and yet I'm just, it's you're a pinball. You were a chemical engineer. Was that right? Chemical engineer.

[00:22:45] John: Chemical engineering and biochemistry were my two

[00:22:48] David: Chemical engineer major bounced over, started writing software, bounced over Staffog doing both together, building up. And now you don't know what's next. You do know what's next.

You're already starting another business

[00:23:02] John: Correct.

[00:23:03] David: around AI and LLMs and all that. What is that one? And is that tied to Amplify or is that just totally separate? Or are you and Paolo doing that together? Like, how's that working out?

[00:23:12] John: The co founders of that business are myself, Paolo, and Hal Berman. And that business uses large language models to correctly categorize the 3 trillion worth of goods that come into the United States every year for taxation. So everything that comes into the United States needs to be taxed properly.

You need to figure out how it's taxed so that you can then pay the proper tax. That is a very manual process right now for the entire country.

[00:23:43] David: that sounds horrible.

[00:23:45] John: It is. Yeah. That might be an understatement.

[00:23:49] David: Ooh, I just found this is totally. It's tangentially related. I just found out if you airbnb your house Then everything in your house. That's not like part of the house itself. Let's say a rug becomes a state taxable Thing

[00:24:06] John: Really?

[00:24:07] David: most people don't know because it makes you income. It makes you revenue, right?

[00:24:11] John: Oh,

[00:24:12] David: And so if you have if you bought a nice couch for your airbnb

[00:24:16] John: Uhhuh

[00:24:17] David: That thing. And here's the fun part. It's not like normal depreciation. Like I bought a laptop. It is, let's say it was a thousand dollar couch. You can depreciate that over 10 years, but the tax never goes down below 25 percent of the original value.

So you will always pay that. Let's say in this fictional thing, 250 of value that'll be taxed forever. And that's every single thing in your Airbnb. And most people and I only learned this just because I was talking to this person I don't have an air bb or anything I was just blown away because i'm like how many people actually know that and then the other question is how would they even calculate?

That but anyways crazy, right? And the counties know this and the counties are coming.

[00:25:01] John: Oh, they are. That was my next question.

[00:25:04] David: yeah, they know this and they want their money. This is coming. Yeah

[00:25:07] John: Okay.

[00:25:07] David: Which is just great. It was just again idle conversation I was having but wild that's a thing.

Sorry So you're talking about taxes across

[00:25:14] John: Yeah, imports. That's correct. That's right. That's right. So everybody, every fortune 500, every fortune 100, it doesn't matter, right? All of the big players require this type of work done because they're all moving things into the United States.

[00:25:29] David: but don't think if I'm making refrigerators and I'm bringing stuff over, I know I've got 12 refrigerators in that container. I know what my taxes are. Like it's, this is a, I would assume these big boys know what they're doing. Am I wrong?

[00:25:41] John: So that is so fascinating. It's so fascinating because it's not that simple. And I'll give you an example of. One area where you'd think it would be right. We have our 2024 line of refrigerators from GE, right? Classify everything once you're done. One of the areas that is unexpected is that pretty much everything coming into the U S is logged via a PDF invoice.

[00:26:11] David: That sounds awesome.

[00:26:13] John: and so that PDF invoice then has to be taken by a human being. And then the things on the invoice are classified. So the automation of it is extremely poor.

[00:26:26] David: You would think pre AI, this was already been a solved

[00:26:30] David: someone has made.

[00:26:31] John: they tried. Hal came to me in 2016 saying, John, this is a huge problem in the, so Hal is an expert in this space. He is one of the few folks who've passed the broker's exam, has passed the bar exam, and his family has been doing this for a generation. He came to me in 2016 and said, John, this is a disaster, right?

It's all manual. They've been trying to automate this for 10 years, doesn't work. And the biggest names have been trying to do it. Deloitte, Tradewind, like huge amounts of money have been poured into trying to automate this and it's all failed. And in 2016, he and I sat down and I said, yeah, here's some ways you could do it, but nothing really looked inspiring compared to what everyone else had tried already.

[00:27:17] David: That's very cool. 

[00:27:18] Gary: John, Since you recently discovered that you are an entrepreneur at heart more than an engineer or developer What would your top three pieces of advice be for any other new entrepreneur or business that are starting?

[00:27:30] John: Yeah. So for me, the number one thing that made a difference was finding the right co founder. In Paulo Rieck and that connection to somebody who is a hundred percent aligned with the idea that we're going to build something, life is going to be hard, but that's okay because this is what we were born to do.

That made all the difference because no matter what you do, It's going to get difficult. It's going to get hard. You there's no way to avoid it. And so finding that person who can sit there beside you and just say, don't worry about the problems, focus on solutions. Don't worry about the problems, focus on the solutions.

We're going to get there. We're going to get there. That is huge. It is invaluable. You can't calculate the impact that has. So for me, that's the number one thing. And it took me eight years. Like almost a decade to find the right person. I worked with a bunch of different folks, but it took me eight years to find the right person to do it with the other.

The other one that I would say is

specifically directed towards the way folks talk about entrepreneurship is ignore the outliers, right? Steve jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. Those guys are outliers, right?

[00:28:56] David: For sure.

[00:28:57] John: And if you think that you're going to emulate them and be successful, that's just not correct. For one, they're outlars to begin with. Two, the stories that you do here, they're not true. The stories that they want published, you don't actually know what's going on behind the scenes. You don't actually know how they work. Even the people who worked with them. Let's say you talk to them. You're still getting some secondhand filtered knowledge.

Around the reality of how those guys operate, what their lives are like, et cetera. So completely ignore the outliers, right? That's the other one that I think will have a major impact on folks. The other one is back to what I said previously around life getting hard. If you are serious about going out and being an entrepreneur, save your money.

Like you already don't have a job today. So because I knew that this was the life that I was going to have, Right out of school I worked on a company with a friend of mine, David Ivey, great guy, he's now the CTO of Fly Exclusive. We did that for a year, and we decided we didn't like the market, cut it off, we weren't sad, we were like, yeah, we learned a bunch.

Then we immediately went out and got real jobs. And I saved money for four years I was still in college, right? I was making great money, but we had no furniture in the apartment other than like a desk and an office chair for, my now wife and I girlfriend back then and, drove her nuts, right?

You can't do that forever. But man, we saved a ton of money. And that really made a difference when there were three years that I was making no money.

And every startup I have ever done, every single one I have ever done, in the founding team has run out of money and life got real, real hard. It's I can't pay for my kids insurance.

I can't afford rent, right? I'm going to be kicked out on the street. Like these are real problems that happen to people. Save your money to reduce the probability that you will have to go through that. So those are my three pieces of advice.

[00:31:10] David: I like those man

[00:31:12] Gary: Yeah, real world practical

[00:31:14] David: that's that's down in the dirty muck of the trenches. I like

[00:31:18] John: right.

[00:31:18] David: So many of us and not that there's good and bad ones. Gary likes to judge people While they give their advice, it's weird

[00:31:24] Gary: don't judge the people

[00:31:26] David: now your

[00:31:27] Gary: them know if I Father advice was good or bad, but yeah,

[00:31:31] David: Right real time. It's great. It's

[00:31:33] Gary: making me sound awesome. Thanks.

[00:31:34] David: yeah, you're welcome.

But that was no that was good because that was very practical. I remember For me, that last one in particular, my wife and I were deciding whether or not we were going to go and do basically big pixel either for on its own or for the company I was working at. And I knew, and I was getting, a good developer salary at the time.

And so we started cutting back. I think we took, Oh, I don't know. It was something like a 40 percent pay cut virtually. Like I didn't lose the money. But like for the last year before I made the jump to see, could we do it? And I'm like, okay, cause I know I can't make good developer money, but I might be able to make this much money.

And so we did that. And then when I went out on my own, my wife goes, this is great. This is, you can't lose any more money. This is what you have to make. I support you, but you have to make this much money and no pressure. But but yeah, no that's wonderful. Good advice. No, I care. You're supposed to say something now

[00:32:31] Gary: I didn't know if you were done. Sorry.

[00:32:32] David: that I've done.

[00:32:33] Gary: All right, John. If anybody wants to learn more about you or your two businesses, how can they get in touch with you? Where can they find you?

[00:32:40] John: They can check me out on LinkedIn to see everything that I'm up to. I don't know if there'll be a LinkedIn link or anything associated with

[00:32:47] Gary: Yeah. We'll put the links in the descriptions.

[00:32:50] John: Beautiful. Thanks. And to learn more about amplify labs, they can go to amplify with an I at the end, instead of a Y amplify labs. com.

[00:33:00] David: Very cool. Thank you so much, man. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.

[00:33:05] John: Yeah. Thank you for having me. 

[00:33:06] OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net. The BizDev Podcast is produced and presented by BigPixel. See you next week. Until then, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and LinkedIn.