Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Tales from the PROS is hosted by Michael Georgiou, Co-Founder, and Eric Lawrence, Director of Growth at Imaginovation, an award-winning app and software development company. Each episode dives into honest, unscripted conversations, hard-earned lessons, and educational insight into how to help bridge the gap between technology and people.
If you’re a founder, exec, or innovator trying to navigate the tech world without getting burned, this podcast is your no-BS roadmap. Through real talk, personal stories, and insights from the front lines, you’ll pick up smarter ways to build software, steer clear of common mistakes, and choose the right partners in a crowded, often confusing space.
Whether you’re scaling a startup, driving digital change at a larger company, or just love keeping up with tech innovation, Tales from the PROS brings you straight-shooting advice and inspiration without the fluff.
Michael Georgiou (00:02.434)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Tales from the Pros. And I'm your host, Michael Georgiou, co-founder at Imaginovation joined by my co-host and our director of growth, Eric Lawrence. Today's episode is a little different. Eric and I will be answering a bunch of rapid fire questions about tech, apps, and product building. And we'll write our answers live on whiteboards for all of you to see our horrible, horrible writing.
Hopefully we can make this very interactive for you. So we'll have a really good time today. But no, you know, these are really fun questions and we feel that this is going to be a really interactive episode for you. And we today want to talk about some of the overrated features in the app development space. Some of our pet peeves, startup mistakes that we've experienced, even which old tech.
we secretly miss might even be something that we might talk about. So if you ever wanted to hear how two experts in the industry really see the world of software, then buckle up. Hey, Eric, what's going on,
Eric Lawrence (01:08.37)
Hey Michael, I'm excited for this. I got my whiteboard ready. I got my marker and yeah, ready ready to drop some knowledge.
Michael Georgiou (01:12.461)
Yes.
Michael Georgiou (01:15.968)
Let's do it, let's do it. All right. You know, it's, of all, happy Friday. We usually do these episodes on Wednesdays or Thursdays, typically, right? So it's kind of cool that we're doing this at like the end of the day on a Friday after a very busy week. But no, I think it's a really good ending to just a busy, crazy, crazy week, man. So I love it.
Eric Lawrence (01:45.86)
Yeah, same here. Well, I'm ready to kick this off.
Michael Georgiou (01:49.984)
All right, let's do this. Yeah, so let's talk about the first question here. Okay, so we're calling it round one, which is app trends and features. And the first question is, what's the most overrated feature in apps today? So we can kinda talk about it. I think obviously, know,
Eric Lawrence (02:12.625)
That's a good question.
Michael Georgiou (02:18.754)
We'll probably have some different opinions about every single question that's going to be asked today in this episode. from all the apps, Eric, that we've used and just like the apps that we've built for our customers right here at Imaginovation, it's pretty wild how many features we've been exposed to.
building, right? Some that are very valuable, some that may not be so valuable, but it's like the client still wants to incorporate it, right? Even if we might feel that, hey, this may not be the right type of feature for this phase of your development, but hey, if there's a business need and it solves a problem and we want to test it out, hell with it. We'll build it as long as they kind of understand some of the
know, potential repercussions of having some of those features in there, but typically we'll guide our customers and we'll make sure that everyone's in agreement of why the feature's being built and what it's gonna solve and the outcome that it's going to achieve for the users. So yeah, let's kind of think about this. Do you know? Cause I think I know. you've written it down? All right. All right, all right, all right.
Eric Lawrence (03:37.01)
Yeah. Yeah, I've written mine down and it might be a little bit of a hot take.
And there's, there's a little bit of a caveat to it. I'm going to hold it up, but I wrote down rewards and referral system. That's what I think personally is a bit overused. And what I will say is like, let's say, you know, you, you go to McDonald's every week and you know that you're going to buy food and you want to be able to use the app to unlock maybe like a free fry, free burger as time goes on. I'm okay with that, but I get the sense.
Michael Georgiou (03:49.965)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (03:55.576)
Hmm.
Michael Georgiou (04:04.462)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (04:12.782)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (04:16.621)
now that like every single business has some sort of reward system on it. And it just, feels a little bit overdone at this point. And especially for other apps that are constantly asking for you to refer and kind of giving a, we'll do this or that for you. If you refer business over, it just feels a little drawn out for me personally, when it comes to an app, if you deliver the value,
Michael Georgiou (04:23.235)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (04:43.885)
of what your core app is trying to do. That is the incentive in itself for me to refer you to somebody else. I'm going to tell you, you know, my friends, my family about an app that helps me out. That's providing value in my life. I don't necessarily look to a referral system to necessarily,
Michael Georgiou (04:50.157)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (05:03.727)
be kind of like that linchpin to be like, you know what? I wasn't going to refer this, but now I am because of that. It feels a little bit kind of like a pyramid scheme in a sense, but that's, just my hot take.
Michael Georgiou (05:15.682)
Yeah, no, that's good. No, I like it. That's good. Very, very cool. And that makes sense. they're, yeah, they're definitely very common. And I think some of them don't even really need them. I think you kind of mentioned that, you know, so it's almost like they could be wasted space. And in my opinion, because we've built referral systems, you know, at the company. And I think when it comes to referral systems,
you have to build it at the right time in the company or the startups, I guess, kind of the phase that you have to build in the right phase of development. It may not be ready to be built immediately, you know, because if it is, you know, first of all, if you build it like off the bat, just immediately in the MVP, the users may not even want it.
even if you think that they will, they may not even want it, right? So you really want to get users on the app first, as we've talked about many times. I think most people know that is, you know, getting that initial user adoption and then determining, okay, how this is going. Is it generating traction? Is it starting to generate revenue? Is it promoting very well? And then with that said, it kind of gives you the, it could give you the green light of like building a potential referral system, especially like maybe in the second or third phase of development.
You know, that's not, that's just an opinion. know, there, sometimes referral systems can be done very well in the first phase. So, all right. So mine is this in my huge, big ass whiteboard that probably doesn't even fit the screen, but here, let's see if you can, you can see it in my crazy writing. What does that say? Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's a big one. A lot of these apps, man, they are just,
Eric Lawrence (06:44.486)
there.
Eric Lawrence (06:48.954)
Exactly.
Eric Lawrence (06:54.406)
Yeah
Eric Lawrence (06:58.84)
yeah. That's a good one. Endless notifications.
Michael Georgiou (07:10.872)
flooded with notification systems, which is good in a balanced way, but some apps are
or really overdoing it with notifying you via email or SMS, or it's just crazy. And it clutters your phone and it forces the user to have to go into the settings, their notification on what they want or how they want it to work. But some apps I've even used, they don't even have that. They'll send you like crazy amount of notifications that go on your phone and...
And some of them don't even have the ability for you to edit the permissions, but just the settings for that feature. So it can get really annoying and it can reduce user retention.
Eric Lawrence (08:10.395)
Yeah, I.
I feel like a good rule of thumb with notifications is if it has something to do specifically with you and it's important, then it's a good notification. If it's just something random or if it's an action in an app that happens often and all the time, then I think there is a bit of a fatigue. was a point where like with Snapchat, I had to just turn notifications off because you're getting pinged all the time. it's, you know, there's just not a ton of urgency.
Michael Georgiou (08:14.732)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (08:28.792)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (08:38.888)
yeah.
Eric Lawrence (08:41.263)
to it and a lot of times I think people are trying to not be on their phone and to constantly feel like they have to check and look and see what's going on can really detract from the experience.
Michael Georgiou (08:42.19)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (08:54.082)
Yeah, yeah, that's critical. Yeah, agreed, agreed. Yeah, so that was good, man. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, some good different opinions here. So, all right, so let's go to question two. What's one feature you wish more apps had?
Eric Lawrence (09:09.425)
Hmm, that's a good question.
Michael Georgiou (09:11.84)
Mm-hmm. I think...
I think I know, let me start writing it down. Since I write slow and my handwriting is so bad, man, it's embarrassing and the whole world gets to see it. All right, let's take a look.
Eric Lawrence (09:20.817)
Yeah, I gotta think about that one person.
Michael Georgiou (09:28.492)
So as we talked about, apps have a lot of features and it needs to be very strategic. It needs to be based on what the users want and what they're looking for. And there has to be a business need and it needs to solve some sort of a problem. So I think it's gotta be either or all of those.
Michael Georgiou (09:54.23)
Yeah, so I think I know.
Eric Lawrence (10:01.009)
All right, I have mine. I'm gonna go ahead and share it. In the tiny, tiny corner of my whiteboard, I wrote down offline mode. I think that's one that a lot of apps need.
Michael Georgiou (10:04.77)
Go ahead while I write this.
Michael Georgiou (10:14.658)
Hmm
Eric Lawrence (10:18.297)
And you see offline mode for a lot of more like industry specific apps where somebody's working out in the field where they might not be that. But I think even like going a little more mainstream, a lot of apps should have an offline mode where certain features and functionality, like there's nothing worse than not being able to use an app entirely. If let's say you have a little bit of like signal issue and you can't get internet. So I think every
Michael Georgiou (10:21.454)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (10:25.645)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (10:46.081)
app for the most part should have some sort of functionality, at least the core of it, that you can still use the app when it's offline. And when you get back online, if there are certain actions that are just an absolute must, that you need to have like internet connection in order to use, can just kind of catch up and sync up when you do hit internet.
Michael Georgiou (11:08.706)
Man, that's a really good one. Yeah, I don't know if you're, man, yours might be better than mine. Dude, that's really good. Yeah, I know, I like it. Look at you. Head of sales getting technical here. All right, good.
Eric Lawrence (11:18.385)
Makes up for the first one. I'm sure we're going to have some listeners that be like this guy is an idiot. I love reward systems.
Michael Georgiou (11:23.65)
Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they'll probably be like, man, what are you talking about with referral systems, Mike? know, they're so powerful. No, they are, but yeah, we have their opinions or experiences, but all right. No, I love it. So mine is...
Eric Lawrence (11:34.161)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (11:44.244)
Smart personalization that actually feels human.
Eric Lawrence (11:48.826)
Nice.
Michael Georgiou (11:51.148)
So I put that because a lot of these applications and even not even just talking about mobile apps, right? Cause everyone, just so you know, we're not only talking about just like mobile iOS or Android apps, talking about web applications as well. Okay. So it's kind of for everything. It could even be relative. It could even be relative to websites too, depending on the functionality that it has or what it's trying to achieve.
But yeah, I I think there's a lot of applications that they kind of, they have their functions and they have obviously something that they are trying to provide value to, right? They're trying to help their users in some way, right? That's what people build apps for people to use them in some way. And...
and to increase user adoption and purchase the app and all that. That's how these app companies make money. But I think a lot of apps are still not, they're not kind of personalizing the experience for the user. And that could come later in a development phase, you know, because it's kind of a big piece of functionality.
It's not something easy to produce. I know even with AI and vibe coding and all that stuff that's going on now, you still need user data to personalize an experience, right? So just from my experience, there really needs to be something within, I mean, a lot of the apps that we use where at least the success, even the really successful ones, the day-to-day applications that we use that
can help to really personalize the kind of the, even the interface on the way we use it, or even some of the features. Like for example, if there are some features that it knows we don't take advantage of and we don't use in X, or Twitter, or whatever, or there's something like an Uber that we never use some of those other features, maybe they can be removed for that.
Michael Georgiou (14:05.134)
personalized experience when you're using that application. And I think that could increase user retention. It could make the app a lot more engaging, less clunky, less cluttered. So there's a lot of benefits, I think, with having a kind of humanized, personalized experience for an app.
Eric Lawrence (14:29.125)
Yeah. Yeah. I think that that makes a lot of sense at the end of the day, people have different uses for one app. One person could do something totally different within it. So the app needs to be able to be flexible enough to personalize itself for each person.
Michael Georgiou (14:30.434)
You know, and I think, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (14:38.284)
Yep. Yep.
Michael Georgiou (14:45.484)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, so you wanna go to round two here?
Eric Lawrence (14:50.479)
Yeah, let's do it.
Michael Georgiou (14:53.92)
All right, tell me. Let's kick it off. Kick it off for us.
Eric Lawrence (14:54.947)
And I can kick this question off. So this one, what's the most overhyped buzzword in tech right now? I'll be interested to see what you put here, Michael, but I think we can count down and flip it at the same time if you want. All right.
Michael Georgiou (15:12.546)
Alright, alright, yeah, let me, give me one second, let me see, alright.
Eric Lawrence (15:19.855)
And I say that because I'm pretty certain we might be saying the same thing here.
Michael Georgiou (15:29.602)
All right, let's go one.
Eric Lawrence (15:31.939)
Alright, three, two, one. It's, yeah, essentially the same thing.
Michael Georgiou (15:36.846)
Ha
Michael Georgiou (15:40.398)
Essentially the same thing. I have what AI powered and you AI? Yeah, it's everywhere. And guys, we love AI. I mean, our company loves AI. We love AI. We use it every day. It's our best friend. man, it's just everywhere. And let me give you an example. Okay, okay. So we'll talk about LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. We're a huge...
Eric Lawrence (15:43.79)
Yeah, yeah.
Michael Georgiou (16:09.838)
huge proponents of LinkedIn. We're huge fans of it. We use it every day for our business, for ourselves. It's a great platform. I'll never say anything bad about it, but some people who use it, and it's not even just LinkedIn. I'm seeing on Instagram too, but mainly LinkedIn because it's a little bit more businessy. All I'm seeing every time I log in is this is the best agentic experience.
agent, AI agent experience or AI agent that you can build for this reason. And then it'll say, it'll give like a little story. It'll talk about the AI agent that they built. And then it'll say comment AI agentic experience or AI healthcare or whatever it is. And then you're gonna see like hundreds of comments, cause they'll try to send their blueprint through DMs. And you know what, I've tried that.
several times where like, I don't post about that, but I've tried like commenting, because I'm like, this is interesting. Yeah, I'll comment, know, AI, whatever. And I don't get a DM. So it's like, that was just, you know, it's, don't know what, it's crazy. Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (17:23.919)
You bring up a good point. And maybe that's that's a better word than just AI. think agentic in general, people are throwing that word around, acting like agentic is at a place right now where it's just crushing everything.
Michael Georgiou (17:31.427)
Yep.
Eric Lawrence (17:42.098)
And that's not to say that agentic, maybe even by the time this episode releases or, or, know, by 2026, 2027, there is a lot of potential with agentic AI. And what I mean by that is it's not just there to, you know, provide you information or answer a question. It's actually taking action on your behalf. It's booking a reservation for you. It's, uh, doing outreach for you, for your job. But at this point in time,
A lot of agentic feels very early and very rough. And I think a lot of people are doing it just to try to optimize their own time. But at the end of the day, whenever I look at agentic, think, it making, is it doing a better job than I am? And also freeing my time up? It might be freeing my time up, but I, it's very rare that I see anything that has agentic AI behind it doing a better job than what I would do.
Michael Georgiou (18:41.378)
Yeah, no, I agree. And we all want it to work, right? We want these AI agents to work. And listen, I there are some really powerful platforms out there that we've tested out that can work. It depends on the workflow that you create within it. for example, there's a platform called NAN. So it's like letter N8N.
I think it's nan.ai, something like that. But it's an AI agent creation platform. So you can create a workflow that, for example, it can go and do research on your target audience, let's just say, by using some other platform that it will connect to. And like for your buyer persona or your ICP, okay? So for you marketing people, you know what I'm talking about.
it'll go research your ICP and your buyer persona, your audience, your target audience, and then it'll collect certain data that you want it to. And then with that data, can ask it to draft personalized messages to focus on something that you want to pitch to these people, for example. And then when you can create, it'll basically create those messages and then you can...
you know, create like an image for each email using one of those AI image creation tools. Okay. And there's tons of them out there. mean, there's tons of them. mean, even Canva now has AI. and then you can send it to them through some email marketing tool. So that's like a little bit of a simpler workflow. So you can do that type of stuff, but...
Eric Lawrence (20:19.569)
you
Michael Georgiou (20:34.658)
But some of the more complex workflows, they don't really work as well. I think it's just still new, but it's coming and they're getting better and better and better. But yeah, you know, I mean, going back to kind of this question, yeah, AI is everywhere. It's not going anywhere. You know, it's going to continue to evolve and grow and improve every single day. I just think that we need to, you know, try to make sure we don't lose the human in us.
depending on where things are going to go with AI, because we don't have no idea, man. We don't know. We don't know where it's going to go. Yeah, some people have a fear-based approach and they think it's going to just be robots and they could take over the world. Hey, maybe that's true. I don't know, but I'm not going to worry about that. It's just we need to try to use it for good and just make sure that we have some sort of a balance when using it. When there's any new technology, we try to use it for the right reasons.
with a good purpose that's gonna help humanity and help us live better lives instead of making our lives worse. So yeah, we just need to make sure that everything's humanized and we don't lose ourselves in the process. Let's hope so, but.
Eric Lawrence (21:50.865)
That's, that's very true.
Michael Georgiou (21:53.814)
All right, so what's the next one?
Eric Lawrence (21:56.517)
You want to read it off?
Michael Georgiou (21:58.69)
Read off the next question, all right.
Michael Georgiou (22:06.158)
Let me look at the right one here.
Michael Georgiou (22:10.199)
AI again, okay. What's one thing AI will never replace in software development?
Eric Lawrence (22:16.719)
So it's a nice bridge.
Michael Georgiou (22:18.656)
It is. Yep, I kind of have an idea.
Michael Georgiou (22:24.814)
Do know what you are gonna write? Okay. All right.
Eric Lawrence (22:26.351)
Yeah, I know what I'm going to say. I just wrote it down. I'll let you go first this time,
Michael Georgiou (22:47.202)
go first. So
me.
Michael Georgiou (22:57.133)
Mine is.
Eric Lawrence (22:59.025)
Let's see. Vision and empathy. Very true on empathy.
Michael Georgiou (23:04.78)
Vision and empathy. Yep. Yeah, so, you I kind of chose that because, you know, you can't really automate true understanding. I mean, I'm sure people are gonna disagree with this and it's just an opinion, but, you know, I think great software starts with emotional intelligence. We use that word sometimes. And, you know, I think seeing like a real...
human problem and caring enough to solve it beautifully is so important. And I think that's something like no algorithm can fake or create. Does that make sense or is it a little too neat? yeah, you know.
Eric Lawrence (23:47.019)
That does that does there's there's definitely you know, what what makes us us in a sense and People might be able to argue that we're all just binary down to the smallest of details But no, I I would agree It's not gonna seem that way when when I show you this but I wrote nothing And when I say nothing
Michael Georgiou (23:59.832)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (24:10.094)
Alright.
Eric Lawrence (24:14.565)
There's the caveat that there's a lot that AI can't replace right now. But I look at where we are with AI to, you know, the dial-up days for the internet. When we were all using AOL and getting CDs from grocery store lines to get internet minutes,
We can never envision what it is today and what it's become and all the different applications that we could use it for. And I truly believe the same with AI and there's, you know, arguments out there. saw a video just the other day of, you know, Charlie Puth, the musician, the artist who is saying AI music.
Michael Georgiou (24:38.424)
Hmm.
Michael Georgiou (24:53.486)
Mm. Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (24:56.015)
The problem with it is that it sounds too perfect. And what makes music beautiful are the imperfections and the mistakes. But my argument to that is you just have to train the model on those, on random imperfections and it can get there eventually. It'll eventually be able to figure that out as well. And when we think about like, well, you know,
Michael Georgiou (25:02.702)
Perfections. Yeah, love it.
Michael Georgiou (25:14.414)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (25:21.081)
At what point is AI gonna outpace humans? mean, just two days ago, there was a GEMMA model that helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway. And we were talking about this before, there's gonna be a point where AI out innovates humans. And I think we're starting to creep up to that point.
Michael Georgiou (25:39.523)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (25:42.522)
where when we're trying to make arguments and as much as it helps our ego to say, Hey, AI is never going to be able to replicate this out of us or beat us at this. just, I just foresee unless something catastrophic happens, I just foresee it getting better and better and being able to do whatever we need it to, but we're still far away from that sort of singularity, so to speak.
Michael Georgiou (25:52.846)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (26:03.15)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (26:09.464)
That's sometimes, I mean, when it comes to something broader than just software development, in AI integrations or building an LLM or something like that, or using an AI tool or creating an AI personalized experience in like a web app product, I think going bigger, broader, more about just
humans and life and everything. That's what's a little bit scary. It's just, I worry sometimes, I don't let it consume me, but I do worry sometimes that, is it gonna get to a place where it's kind of taking over our ability to kind of...
show our skills and our talents as human beings and just our ability to make mistakes, like you said, and be imperfect, right? Because with AI tools and all that, you can almost do things so quickly and it can be so good. Obviously, it's very early days now, but things that we do, that we implement in a workplace perspective, for example, I mean, it can seem so perfect.
Right? We talk about this like with emails and stuff when you write an AI email and it just, you look at it you're like, dude, it's just so, it's like, man, it's like you miss even like the grammar mistakes sometimes, you know? And I think things are changing where that stuff won't be accepted at all. So I think it's all about how we adapt, right? In the workplace, how we adapt out of the workplace, how we utilize artificial intelligence in our lives.
Eric Lawrence (27:45.338)
It's not good.
Michael Georgiou (28:06.126)
and just try to make sure that we stay human, but we can adapt and evolve with that technology, you know? And we don't lose ourselves and go nuts and go crazy. And it's gonna happen with some things, of course, it's kind of already happening, you know, in some instances, but, you know, let's just see what transpires from it. But yeah, that's an interesting answer, yeah.
Eric Lawrence (28:14.437)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (28:30.703)
Yeah. So are, yeah, yeah. And are you ready for round three? All right. So round three is about product building and startup mistakes. So the question is what's one common mistake startups make when building an app?
Michael Georgiou (28:52.526)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (28:56.165)
There's a lot of potential mistakes, you know.
Michael Georgiou (28:56.334)
It's one common mistake.
Michael Georgiou (29:01.262)
I think I might have an idea.
Michael Georgiou (29:09.356)
What's one common mistake startups make when building an app?
Michael Georgiou (29:17.836)
Hmm, I got one.
Eric Lawrence (29:18.641)
And we've touched on this topic before in previous episodes. So I'm going to try to bring something a little new to this. And this might be a little more personal. This is less on the app side, but still, again, we work with a lot of startup businesses where, you know,
Michael Georgiou (29:23.981)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (29:36.652)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (29:39.428)
Regardless of if you're building an app or not this, this one rings true. And maybe some of the listeners here have run into this before, but what I wrote is choosing the wrong business partner. And that, that one, man, like when you start talking about messy and basically an issue that can.
Michael Georgiou (29:50.798)
Oh, I like it.
Eric Lawrence (30:01.573)
kill you dead in the water. Choosing the wrong business partners is like number one all the time. And we see that often where like it could range from anything of you thought you had somebody on board that was going to help you fund this. And then they just leave you high and dry, or they try to hijack your vision and strong arm you out of what you guys mutually agreed to, or it could just be a difference in temperament. where
Michael Georgiou (30:24.749)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (30:29.859)
it becomes a miserable experience for you, for the, the both of you to try to make a successful business because one person just cannot handle the stress or roll with the punches quite like you're able to. So make sure that this person, whoever you're going to be working with is, is the right temperament, the right fit for you. if they're, if you guys are both going in financially, they're not going to get skittish and back out last second. Those are all things that are going to be critical.
Michael Georgiou (30:58.646)
Yeah. 100%. Man, I love it. That's a great answer. It's so true. we've seen it too, unfortunately, where there is like a really a cool startup, right? And we end up meeting like the main point of contact of that startup and they have a great idea. They want our team to build them an innovative mobile app or a web app or both. And they're trying to...
trying to solve a problem in the industry or whatever it is. And then we meet their partner and we're like, ooh, it's like you can feel it, right? It's like, you can tell just from having a couple of conversations, sometimes even the first conversation, they're not aligned. There's a disconnect or even sometimes how they might treat the vendor or how they might treat each other, the things that they might say.
Um, there can be some really big red flags. So you just need to be very careful. If you are going to have a partner, um, yeah, just choose, choose wisely, you know, and, and I, you know, I can vouch for Pete being my partner. Pete's my brother-in-law, know, we're 50 50 partners of Imaginovation. And we've been doing this together for 14 years and we've had a lot of our own ups and downs, but look, we're, we have a thriving company and you know, and, and we know our rules and responsibilities and we know what we want.
And it just requires a lot of communication and transparency and just kind of making sure that you're aligned is very, very important, you know? And that you have some similar values too is, I think, important. You can be yourselves and have your own, yeah, of course, you're not going to be 100 % similar to each other, but it's good to have some of those kind of main important values aligned and similar as you grow your business.
Eric Lawrence (32:32.837)
Well said.
Michael Georgiou (32:54.54)
Alright, I love it. So mine is... if you can read it...
Eric Lawrence (33:02.545)
That's a good one. Falling in love with their idea instead of the user, which is critical. It's, have you ever read the book, Michael, the platinum rule? It's a, it's a sales book and I could some summarize it. It's basically what you said there, but for apps specifically, everybody's raised to understand the golden rule, which is do unto others as you would do unto yourself. But the reality is
Michael Georgiou (33:09.74)
Yes.
Michael Georgiou (33:14.196)
No, I've heard of it.
Michael Georgiou (33:21.293)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (33:27.714)
yourself. Yep.
Eric Lawrence (33:30.415)
the way that I treat myself may not be the way that you want to be treated. I might be really hard on myself and because of that, and that's the way I want to treat it. You may not enjoy that. And the same goes for an idea. The platinum rule is do unto others as they would wish unto themselves. So it's a very small tweak, but to your point, what you wrote down, do unto build your app.
Michael Georgiou (33:48.995)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (33:57.38)
so that the user loves it, not necessarily that it's what you love.
Michael Georgiou (34:02.348)
Yeah, and it goes to something that I believe in that when you start a business or you are working in a company, and let's just say, know, whatever you're trying to do in life, all right, whatever you're trying to do and how you want to make money, how you want to kind of live your purpose, right, what you're trying to achieve in life, it's important to do that.
Right, with purpose and passion. That's important. And enjoy. Try to have some, try to have joy while, you know, in the process, right? It's important that you wanna love what you do. I think that's a critical piece for anything that you're trying to achieve in life. Knowing that there's gonna be a lot of ups and downs and you have to persevere and build resilience, right? That's gonna happen. But purpose and patience and passion and perseverance are all,
very critical in my book, I call them the four P's. However, when it comes to building a product, a digital product, like in our space, those four P's that I mentioned are gonna be critical when you are running the business. When you're starting the business, whether it's you or a partner, like we talked about a couple minutes ago, or you do it yourself, or you're working at a large company and you're in charge of a project, right?
I think having those four Ps is very, important, right? However, when it's on the product side of it, you wanna think about that user and what it's gonna do for them instead of about what it's gonna do for yourself. And we see that with a lot of startups, unfortunately, right? Where it's like they're so emotional about...
their idea and they make even emotional decisions that can be wrong, that jeopardize their business or jeopardize their startup. And it can ultimately lead to failure. So that's why you have to really look at user data. You got to look at measuring your target audience, getting feedback from them before you even start the app process and even during it and even throughout the, it's a phased approach.
Michael Georgiou (36:28.142)
It never ends. You're never going to stop learning about your customer ever. We've been doing it for almost 15 years, right? And we're still learning about our clients. We talk about this all the time, right, Eric, in our company. So yeah, I think that's really, really important. And I highly, highly, highly recommend to make sure that you just take the time to learn about your users and what they want, what they don't want.
Yeah, just kind of go through that process and use real data as well. Use real data so you're just not assuming and you're not guessing. So, all right.
Eric Lawrence (37:05.519)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So Michael, what do you think? Do you want to take this last round and enlightening round it? All right. So we just have a couple more questions left. They're meant to be fun. A good way to round out a Friday. So the first one was, if you could build any app for fun, what would it be?
Michael Georgiou (37:13.826)
Yes, let's do it. All right, because yeah, we have a couple of minutes here. Okay. All right.
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (37:33.232)
And I actually have something, is something that I'm not gonna share my whiteboard for. And all credit for this goes to Pete. This is Pete's idea through and through, but I love it. I think it's a great idea. And he's been playing around with VR, the Apple Vision Pro. And this idea I think is great. So there's this product that I have in my own house. Maybe some of you have it. This is a Bug Assault.
Michael Georgiou (37:34.798)
Hmm.
Michael Georgiou (37:39.629)
Okay.
Michael Georgiou (37:42.99)
you
Eric Lawrence (38:01.136)
So it looks like a little, kind of like a Nerf gun almost. But the point of it is, in here you put table salt, and if you have a fly in your house, all you have to do is pop it. And it goes down.
Michael Georgiou (38:14.838)
I bought Pete one of those for his birthday like six, seven years ago and he still has it. He still uses it. Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (38:17.773)
nice. It's great. It's great. Is it as effective as a fly swatter? Maybe, maybe not. That's debatable. But Pete's idea was to use VR to gamify the experience. So you could basically be able to spot, track the flies, and for each one that you down and pop, you get points for it.
Michael Georgiou (38:24.942)
You
Michael Georgiou (38:37.294)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (38:44.549)
And I think that's just an amazing idea. I would love to give that to my kids as well. And they're playing a game that is doing me a great service, which is clearing flies out of the house because they leave the screen doors open all the time and flies find a way.
Michael Georgiou (39:00.462)
No, that's cool, man. Yeah, and we actually even built a small little app that is about that, right? I don't know if Pete, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric Lawrence (39:10.575)
He's working on it right now. So he's, he's just kind of playing around with it, using some of those lovable tools. And I think, you know, it's vibe coding has a way to be, you know, to get to before they can actually like locate and track something as small as a fly. I'm sure. Our, our, you know, military has the equipment to be able to, track and do that sort of thing. But, you know, as far as like vibe coatings concerned, it's, it's a ways off.
Michael Georgiou (39:17.016)
Yep, the vibe coding tools.
Michael Georgiou (39:27.598)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (39:39.426)
Yeah, yeah, I know that's cool. Yeah, so I'm not gonna write this down either because I was thinking about it even a little bit before the show. And I was like, it's gonna take me five minutes to write it, so I'm not even gonna write it. But what would be really cool to build any app for fun is an app that lets people trade five minutes of their time to help a stranger with something small.
Eric Lawrence (39:41.883)
So what do you have?
Michael Georgiou (40:11.148)
So kind of like a really cool user friendly encouragement mentorship advice app that anyone can use that, you know, it can really relate to anyone that that's just trying to help somebody else. Cause I think in this world, we talked about it with AI, there's a lot of crazy stuff, a lot of good and you know, it's not all.
you know, some people are like, the world is shutting down. No, it's not. There's a lot of great stuff and a lot of amazing things that are happening right now in the world. But yeah, I just think it's important to sometimes just think about other people and, you know, we're so consumed with digital and phones and computers and making money and all that type of stuff and...
you know, social media, even I've tried to take a little bit of a break from social media for a couple of years, at least on Facebook, Instagram. And I'm starting to kind of go back on it a bit, but you know, I think building an app, yeah, that, really, increases human connection because that's what the world needs now with all this just digital and noise and clutter is to have something that I've mentioned before that we, need to make sure we don't lose ourselves.
during this generation and things are gonna get more fun, I think, with a lot of technology, but they can get scary too and there can be some big problems. So I think we just need to make sure that we don't stop thinking about how we can help other people. So I think we can build a cool little app that can be gamified of how you help somebody else and you don't do it for anything like, I'm not saying you would.
Eric Lawrence (41:43.824)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (42:04.61)
you use the app to make money from it, because you don't want to help people to always expect something in return. Of course not. But I think it would be a cool little fun app that could be like a game, possibly, where you could spend a couple of minutes just sharing your story or them sharing about how you were helped or how you helped somebody else. It's like, you know those YouTube videos where they go and give like,
a thousand dollars to someone on the street and they give them a car. I mean, man, those people have really changed a lot of lives. So yeah, that's kind of, yeah.
Eric Lawrence (42:35.887)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (42:43.045)
Yeah. I like it. That's profound. You know, I was just throwing out some silly flies app in game, but no, that's, that's something that would really make the world a better place. It's all good. It's all good. You know, I, I do think also there, would be good if there was, you know, an app out there that would help be kind of the reverse to doom scrolling.
Michael Georgiou (42:55.081)
You're like, thanks Mike. Yeah, I feel bad. I'm like a fly zapper. No, no. Hey, that's important too. That's important too.
Eric Lawrence (43:11.877)
where you could have a curated feed of things that didn't try to elicit anger because you know, half this stuff out there, anger gets clicks, anger gets views, but it's not productive. You got people going at each other now. Communities just completely siloed out and you know, there's a lot of good in the world. I think that's the one thing that gets overlooked that you said there's so much good in the world and it gets overshadowed.
Michael Georgiou (43:12.846)
Hmm.
Michael Georgiou (43:34.92)
yeah.
Eric Lawrence (43:40.374)
And that's just partly human psychology. It takes three good things. I think it's anywhere from like three to five. I forget the actual one to offset one negative. And when we are getting kind of a three to one negative, it just throws us off. So having a safe haven, so to speak, for information and news, where if you want to scroll and get that dopamine fix, you can do it without making yourself mad.
Michael Georgiou (43:51.246)
Mm.
Michael Georgiou (44:05.393)
Hmm. Man, we might need to have people sign an NDA before listening to this. I think we're throwing out some cool ideas. People are like, can you imagine we get a customer or something like that that's like, hey, I saw your podcast and I like that idea, I wanna build it. Hint, hint, everyone, hint, hint, hint. No, just kidding. No, no, Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (44:09.572)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (44:21.541)
That'd be awesome. All right. So the, we end it out?
Michael Georgiou (44:27.778)
Yeah, let's do it. All right, so I'll take this last one here. All right, so if you had to describe the tech industry in one emoji, what would it be?
Eric Lawrence (44:38.683)
What an emoji. Let's see your drawing skills now.
Michael Georgiou (44:40.141)
Yes.
man, I didn't even think I was gonna draw this one. let me see. I think I actually have two emojis.
Michael Georgiou (44:58.914)
The tech industry.
Eric Lawrence (45:02.801)
All right. It's not perfect by any means.
Michael Georgiou (45:11.688)
This is so horrible.
Eric Lawrence (45:12.049)
All right, here's the one that I wrote.
Michael Georgiou (45:18.702)
Okay.
Eric Lawrence (45:19.685)
So my emoji is the mind blown emoji, which is to say in simplest terms, our minds are getting blown by the capabilities of what can be built and what can be done every day.
Michael Georgiou (45:42.368)
man, that's crazy. Alright.
Eric Lawrence (45:53.273)
Now I'm excited to see your drawings.
Michael Georgiou (45:55.118)
Alright.
Michael Georgiou (46:01.752)
Tour.
Eric Lawrence (46:01.978)
We got stocks, stocks and uh,
Michael Georgiou (46:08.398)
Okay, so not stocks. the blowing, the thing is this one, I can't draw, but basically in my head, it was that. It was the emoji where the kind of the half the head was, is kind of all like, ah, like doing that, where it's, yeah, it's kind of like the crazy like.
Eric Lawrence (46:11.18)
is that heartbeat?
Michael Georgiou (46:36.706)
blowing my head emoji, the one that we use sometimes where...
Eric Lawrence (46:39.643)
Put that up again? I thought that was hair.
Michael Georgiou (46:43.712)
Yeah, I mean it kind of is, but that's not what it was intended. But that's funny. So I you get to see the bad drawing. Yeah, it is kind of there. But in my mind, it came different where it's kind of similar to yours, where it's, it's that one where it's like, not happy, not sad, it's kind of in the middle. But it's like going like this, like, and I don't mean that in a bad way. All I'm saying is with the tech industry, at least in our space, it's just,
Eric Lawrence (46:47.409)
It's supposed to be exploding.
Michael Georgiou (47:12.096)
You don't know what to expect. And I'm talking about internally and running a business, right? But a lot of externally with customers, with leads prospects, with just the new tech tools that are out there, pricing expectations, just sometimes the misalignment with what people think about app technology and then what's actually reality.
You know, and it's just, yeah, it's a lot of up and down. You know, we go through it all the time, you know, and I think that's just the marketplace, right? It's just, you don't know. So it's like, it's like, there's not always certainty of what you can expect is gonna happen tomorrow when it comes to tech, you know? And it's just, yeah, it's a roller coaster. So the one next to it wasn't really...
It wasn't really like, what did you call it?
Eric Lawrence (48:14.245)
I said stocks, but now that you mention it, could be more like an EKG.
Michael Georgiou (48:19.054)
That's exactly it, yeah? Yeah, or like a kind of like analytics where it's kind of like there's like this analytics emoji where it's just up and down and that's the way I would describe it. So yeah, you know, it's great and we love it, but then it's challenging. I think most people would say that about their business. don't think it's, nothing's linear, man, nothing. Nothing is linear and that's why it's fun, right? You just gotta be...
Eric Lawrence (48:43.887)
No, never, never.
Michael Georgiou (48:48.29)
You just gotta take it day by day and enjoy and embrace the process. Yeah, and just kind of have gratitude and look forward to the next day and yeah, enjoy what you're doing. Have purpose and passion and love your customers and your employees. You know, that's what I always believe, you know, so.
Eric Lawrence (49:06.533)
Yeah, and be easy on yourself when it comes to handwriting. It may not be as bad as you think it is.
Michael Georgiou (49:11.422)
Yeah, right. I named it completely a different emoji, but in my head I'm like, how do I draw? Yeah, anyways, but yeah, that's all we have for today, everyone. Really appreciate it. Hopefully all of you learned something from some of our different perspectives and opinions and thoughts with all these kind of rapid fire questions. I don't even know if they're rapid fire. I think some of them we took a little longer, but that's okay. But we're here to serve all of you. And like we said, hopefully it's...
Eric Lawrence (49:16.955)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (49:41.472)
it's gonna provide some value to at least one or two people out there and that's all we care about. So thank you all very much. Eric, thanks again, man. Really appreciate it. This is a lot of fun. So until next time, everyone, thank you very much. And this is your host, Michael Georgiou from Tales from the Pros with my cohost, Eric Lawrence. And until next time, thanks guys.
Eric Lawrence (50:03.59)
Take care everyone.