From Tito to Vito

Matthew Revell: Thanks for taking the time to join us. As I mentioned earlier in the introduction to the day, we've been using Tito since I think the very first DevRelCon and maybe an event before that as well. And one of the things obviously that we've been going through with this pandemic is a lack of in-person events and just like DevRelCon Earth, most of the events I've seen.

Paul Campbell: Which is a good thing. Stay safe, stay home.

Matthew Revell: Yeah. But for you as someone running a business, it's perhaps been difficult, but first of all, I want to know what prompted you to start a business or as side project initially that dealt in tickets, because there were lots of options already around. So what was it that Tito brought to the table?

Paul Campbell: Yeah, so it goes back to about 2009, Andy McMillan, who now well was running XO XO Fest. You may have heard of a big indie fest in Portland, Oregon at the time. He was younger and he was hosting a conference called Build where he was inviting really prominent web folk to Belfast and he cared so much about the experience of everybody from the point of buying tickets all the way to the badge and the design and the welcome pack at the conference. And I love this. I thought it was great, and I wanted to replicate his amazing ticket buying purchase or experience, which was buy tickets, pay, and now you got tickets so you didn't have to fill in half your demographic information before you even got tickets. You paid and you had tickets. And then later I think he sent an email saying, now fill in your badge details.

And it was all done at your own pace, and I loved that.

So I was super inspired by what Andy had done at Build. And so instead of using Eventbrite again, which we had used the first year for a conference that I was organising called Fun Conf, I said, okay, well I'm a developer. I know I've got some PayPal code lying around. I'm going to build an API that lets me create a pay button. And then you get back and you've paid, and that was it. All it was was an API that sent people to PayPal and came back and stored the purchase in a database table. There was no ui, there was no anything in order to find out who had bought anything, I had to log into the consultancy. It was good fun.

And that was why it remained a side project for a long time because the first functioning use of it was me and just for my own use.

And then as we did start to develop a ui, and it was so, so simple, but I think people appreciated that and people kept saying, this could be a business. And I was like, no, it's just a toy. It's just a toy. And then three years later, it was a toy that was making 10, 20, 15, 20 grand a month. And at that point I was like, okay, it's now what do we do next? And so we incorporated and yeah, I mean it's in stark comparison to Veto in the sense that I used to go around and give presentations like this and I would go through the first Tito's first year. We've processed a million euros in ticket sales for customers worldwide and we have made zero euros.

And it was almost like I wore that a badge of honour. It was amazing that I was giving away this software for free and not making anything, but in the background I was kill myself doing contracting for other people and not charging people to use the software.

Whereas with Veto, we started the first line of code on March 3rd, obviously under serious duress, and the first revenue was 41 days later. And so yeah, star contrast that we didn't need to make that revenue 41 days later, but I definitely wanted to break the back of the Tito experience where we'd gone two years before I think we charged anyone because we were shirking. Well, nobody would buy our software. It's like that's not how it works. So yeah, I built it as a toy for myself and it took a long time to convince me that it was worthwhile as a business. And I think that sort of hurt the business that I didn't take it seriously.

Whereas Vito, I've come out and it's a business because it's in the backdrop of not only being built in a company that already has an existing business and Tito that's now making or was making toward a million euros, Vito is coming in and that bike truck. So it doesn't have the luxury of saying, oh yeah, we can flap around for two years before making any money as if that's a luxury.

Matthew Revell: So before we move on to the story of Veto, then I'm interested to know, so the people becomes devcon and watching now a broadly speaking work in developer relations. So they're running meetups, they're running conferences, they're sponsoring conferences and so on. And you as someone who's organised events as well as creating software for event organisers, what would you say that you've seen in that position over the past? What is it, 3, 4, 6 months depending on where you are in the world, what have you seen change? And I know that might sound like a really dumb obvious question, but you have so much contact with other event organisers. I'd just love to hear some of the things you've seen happen.

Paul Campbell: Not as much as you might think, because I mean with the pivot it meant 16 hour days and that kind of thing, but there are a few highlights mean. So we started putting on shows as our way of saying, okay, well let's just start doing what we would've done and show people what you can do. Yes, with Vito, but I'm going to go back actually a little bit. Part of me rejects the premise of a tech conference. Maybe that's a little bit controversial, but I learned jQuery for example, at a Ruby on Rails conference, I think in let's say 2009. I mean already dabbled, but I really learned it by going to a Yehuda Cats talk. He was on the core team and he did a deep dive into how to make the most of jQuery. And I had to be there.

I was in the room with him and I had to be there to learn all that.

But then if you think about it, I didn't have to be there. It was Yehuda giving a deep dive on jQuery. That could have been an online tutorial, that could have been a video, it could have been anything. I wonder if, did I need to sit there for 40 minutes? When could I have done it at my own pace? And maybe that time could have been used better building relationships or whatever, I don't know. But I do question.

So that's the most valuable technical talk that I've ever been to. And it didn't have to be in person. It was great that it was in person because Yehuda was there and there was the gravitas of it all, and maybe that's necessary, but it could have been that Yehuda was there anyway. And I could have gone to him to ask questions afterwards, and he was maybe curating.

So for the conferences that I've organised, I've tried to turn things on their head and give people space to do a presentation or an installation or storytelling, which I think is much more ephemeral and in the moment. And I've tried to push technical content if I can, into things like video presentations and one-on-one sessions and workshops and things like that. And so that's where I see the potential for stuff like meetups where these presentations specifically for sharing technical content ought to be so much more accessible in an online space. So that's kind of my controversial premise that maybe we were doing it wrong anyway and that we just needed to be awakened to a better way to learn specifically to learn.

Because I also reject the premise that we ought to try and replicate the intangible of meeting and gathering in person. And there's so much intangible and there's so much value to being in a room with a person in a time.

And Horace Dedieu, who's a Tito investor and a prolific writer on Apple and a mobile, he put it so beautifully to say that an in-person event becomes a part of you in a way that watching a show, and if you can call 'em e conferences or virtual conferences or meetups or whatever, but what they are at the end of the day is shows it isn't really any different from watching YouTube or show on YouTube or watching Netflix or show, and it's a show. So I think of all these things as shows and a conference can be a show as well, and it makes sense to describe a conference as a show because you go to a show at the theatre and it's live and it's in person. I just think I like that phraseology. So the things that I've seen that are really effective, you start with the basics.

So if you're videoing yourself, I really enjoy people who put a little bit of time into getting a corner of their house and lighting it well and moving things around and just doing a little speech. I'm a huge fan of the speech format where you just kind of think about your thoughts and it's like a video essay where you just present yourself and it's so simple.

And somebody did that at our first event and it was really effective. Then the loom is popularising the format of the little bubble in the corner and the slide deck, which works. But I feel like it lacks a little bit of imagination because slides are the kind of things that ought to be touched. And I don't think anybody has solved this particularly well, but I guess Apple did a WW C, if you put code on a slide and you're watching it online, you should be able to copy paste the code.

That's obvious, but it hasn't become commonplace that that's a thing you can do apart from in things like the e-learning platforms where all the slides effectively are html, CSS and JavaScript. Anyway, so that's kind of something that I haven't solved. And I mean, if we were doing it in this form and if I was sharing slides, you wouldn't be able to copy paste the code. So I think there's an opportunity there to create a really great experience where you can, if I was watching Yehuda to teach me jQuery, I could just copy paste from his slides.

And then that leads me to the harder stuff, which is edited video content. And this is where you think about your presentation as a movie, as a short movie. And movies are a broad spectrum right now because we have TikTok, which is the curated 15 second video Vine, it's even shorter.

Those are movies as far as I'm concerned, and some of them literally use movie special effects to create amazing results. But as you move through it, like YouTube, all of us love five Minute YouTube videos and explainer video about Game of Thrones or about Watchmen or about whatever we've just watched or how to tie a knot in your shoes five different ways or any of these people have been doing this. And these are great sources of inspiration for how to deliver the kind of stuff that we're used to sharing online or offline, online, all the way up to reading in the Blink of an Eye by Walter Merch and learning how to do a mode of editing and learning a bit about digital cinema, lighting, cinematography, all that, and taking these techniques like going and watching Star Wars and trying to replicate one of the famous scenes from Star Wars just for fun, but also because it's successful medium for putting across a message. So to sum up that whole point is that what I see people doing, the bits that really excite me are people being creative to solve the problems in new ways, and also just the opportunity for being forced to look at these problems in new ways. Is that enough?

Alright.

Matthew Revell: Yeah. Yes, that's great. Thanks. Okay, so you were faced with a situation where your customers weren't making money, so you weren't making money suddenly. What led you then to say, okay, we can build something to replace what's missing in super quick time?

Paul Campbell: I'll start with super quick. So I cut my teeth building software super quick before I started doing things by myself.

In order to make money quickly, we would advertise that we'll build your app in five days. And we did. We absolutely destroyed ourselves a couple of times to build apps really quickly, but it worked and it was about just focusing things and narrowing down the backlog to the smallest working parts and identifying the absolute minimal viable, all that stuff. We used to do that for money. So I mean that was back in those days, head days before I had built Tito and that became everything. And so I had a lot of practise building apps and things quickly, so that was the fast thing. I had faith that we could get something shipped and out the door quickly. The other reason I thought we could do that is that we had just done, it was like a six month rewrite of Tito spread out over three years.

And so we'd spent a long time making technology decisions like choosing to go with view and then learning view and then relearning view and then relearning it again properly because we didn't read the documentation first time and tools like web sockets for real time and learning the nuance of how Rails treated those kind of things. So we had done a huge amount of homework and technology decision choices and made so many mistakes that we knew the answers to but hadn't yet implemented in Tito. So when it came to starting a new app in March, it felt like there was six months of research that we didn't have to do so that we could get up and running quickly. So that's how I feel like we managed the fast bit. And now I feel like I'm forgetting the first part of the question.

Matthew Revell: Well, I mean just what led you to God.

Paul Campbell: Oh yeah.

Matthew Revell: Okay.

But you used to build something online like that.

Paul Campbell: Yeah, so that's, again, there are a couple parts to that. So we had started branching into events ourselves, come to this TTO event and we'll buy you dinner and we'll bring you around Dublin and then we'll just talk about running events. And so we were doing these things for event organisers, and a common question was, where do we go to hang out or meet each other or find each other after the event? And I mean, do you have an answer? Do answer to that. I guess for devcon it Slack. Yeah, I don't want to get into why I think Slack is not appropriate for this kind of thing.

But I mean to me what sums it up is Slack is for workplace teams and there's this notion of an ephemeral social network that is that Slack sort of half or quarter or maybe 75 for different teams.

Slack solves the problem for a certain number of the problems, but there's a certain beauty and elegance to a group of people who you're best friends for a couple of days and then maybe you don't talk them out as much, but then you do want to come back. The other part of Slack is Slack is optimised for much smaller groups than the thousands that can end up being part of a conference community. So I had been thinking about this problem for a long time anyway, then when it came to our own answer to where do we hang out, we didn't really have one. We set up a Slack and maybe five people posted messages and then it just died and nothing ever happened again. And it struck me that it was like, that's sort of sad, but wouldn't it be great if there was a tool or a product that allowed you to do that, but sort of celebrated that fact that it was just like there's a flame of activity and then that becomes just a record of that time you spent together and that's okay.

And wouldn't it be cool if there was some kind of thing that did that? And so I've been thinking about something like that over and over and over for the last couple of years.

And we were going to call it Mito, MITO, but we didn't. So there was this community idea that we had. We knew we wanted to try and solve that question, what do you do when you want to hang out? And that was for in-person events very much for in-person events. What's the tool that you get into when you buy a ticket? And that could be Slack as well, but it's like maybe it could be more. And then about a week before, no, it was a month before the Lockdowns, coronavirus had been in the news for five or six weeks and there was rumblings that this might be serious. And so we sat down as a team and we said, well, what are our contingencies?

And people are probably going to need a video platform, they're probably going to need to be able to put their sponsors up. They're probably going to need to, I don't know, to leave comments or whatever. I mean, you can see so many platforms had the same idea, but we just put that in case and we shaped it in case we needed to build it. And what I ended up building was just, it was like a live updating schedule for an in-person event that had been happening that week. And it was kind of pointless because then the lockdown did happen, but we had the idea for the video thing and we had the idea for the community thing. And as I was kind of building the live updating agenda thing, I was like, hold on. If I put a video in there and I put a little sort of Twitter like community here on the right and then put these things in the, we sort of mashed them all together.

And so that was where we got veto.

We did a naming session where we had all these kind of silly names and Veto just popped up. There was just going to be Viral Tito or Video Tito or Vito, whatever. And then of course, finding a domain name. We started off with Tito wtf, and then we got Vito Community, which for a long time I was saying the community is everything. Community is everything. But I've sort of started to look at Veto as more of a circle with maybe four or five components. And community is certainly really, really important because people stick around for community. If you're going to a conference, you don't know the community before you go.

So you go and you look to see what the content is. And so content was really important, but then you stay for the community, you go back the next year because you want to meet the people you met or you hung out with.

And then access was important for us because of Tito when we knew that at least our customers would probably want to continue making money from what they were doing. And I think gathering groups around similar topics, particularly programming, which people use programming to make money and people use programming all sorts of ways, but I didn't want to shy away from making money. So content access community. But on top of that, then commerce is integral to conferences and events and meetups and things in the form of sponsorship. So why shouldn't that be E-commerce, so content access, community commerce, and now you're building amazon. com, but whatever.

And then finally the piece that I think too many people forget about, and indeed I'm guilty of forgetting it so many times, is accessibility as a top level. So that kind of brings you then to the description that Veto is an accessible platform for controlling access to content for your community and making money from the whole thing.

Matthew Revell: Great, thanks. So one of the things that I took a look at the veto site and am I right in thinking it's invitation only right now?

Paul Campbell: Yeah, we've only had about four or five actual real proper customers.

Matthew Revell: So how do people who are watching this and wondering about how to replace their in-person events or supplement them when they come back and we're allowed to do them again, how do they use veto?

Paul Campbell: Good question. We've been running a few sample veto shows and we call 'em the place where you go to experience stuff on Vito is called a Vito Hub and the Hub, all those things I spoke about, it's a circle.

The hub is the centre of all that stuff. So yeah, we're putting out a few things. So you could watch the at Veto community Twitter to see what we're doing and we're putting out a few things. But yeah, there's a request access thing, which if you fill it in or if you fill in your email that sends you a survey and you can fill in a survey to describe your event. We haven't been super proactive about getting back to people on that up until the next couple of days. So up until I took a week off last week and before that I was just like code, code, code, code, code.

And I'm definitely guilty as charged of spending too much time in the code. But I've basically kind handed that over to a very capable engineering team now, and I'm now starting to move more into a customer focused role within the team as CEO, which I guess I should be from day one.

But there you go. And we're starting to get our process for onboarding folks. So if you have a show, particularly a meetup, definitely excited to hear about meetups. I think Vito is going to be great for meetups. Please do get in touch and describe your use case and badger me on Twitter or whatever if you really want in.

Matthew Revell: Cool. Now, I don't want to put you on the spot, but is there any chance of having a quick look at what Vito looks like or should we Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Campbell: Cool.

Do I hit share screen to do that?

Matthew Revell: Yeah.

Paul Campbell: Cool. Alright, so that is very much me on the spot. Google Chrome would like to record this computer screen, so that means I can't, so do you want me to, will you man the stream for a second while I restart Chrome?

Matthew Revell: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool.

Okay. Well look, I would like to encourage you, if you're watching to ask questions, we've got a couple of minutes and Tide you, we'll bring them in once we've got them. So do post your questions in the Slack. If you're there in the Twitch or the YouTube comments is fine as well. One of the things that I'm really interested in finding out is how we can use Veto for DevRel on Earth in future. Now, like I say for this one, we're in Slack, we're in YouTube and a little bit of Twitch, but I really like the idea of building this ongoing community for devcon. But yes, let's bring Paul back in.

Paul Campbell: All right.

Hello. So if I do this one, yeah, did I finish the story that we got VI to, which is great? Oh, cool. Yes. Shout out to Duck, duck go. So this is the signed in view on Vido. Well, and you see I said four events, but we've had a few more. So let's have a look.

So I did actually set up a hub for this. Where did it go, Paul, at devcon. So this is a veto hub from the backend, right? And all I did go into my hubs, I did create a new hub and I just filled in a title and that's as much as I did. And it's a template for starting Simple and there's a template for being a conference. But what's cool about it and what I think is really cool is that before I touch anything, I get a hub that can invite people to, and I mean it's not, but it's sort of your own private Twitter.

And I think Twitter as a model in terms of the following model. I call it the Twitter model, but it's the following model and it's Floyd in thousands of apps around the world.

But I decided that that was more effective for this kind of thing because what's nice about Twitter for a small group is that it feels like chat just like Slack. But for a large group you can do more interesting things and you can curate your own feed. And I thought that was really important. And you can follow people so that when you go back to another event on Vido, or if it's the same thing the next year or if it's another hub, you're going to be following the same cohort. So you are following follows you from hub to hub, which I think is so important and so interesting. But it also means that you can control what you see and you're not inundated by hundreds of messages from people that you don't know.

And then we're going to be able to pull out trends and things like that just like Twitter does, but it's not going to be Twitter. I think already we're differentiating from Twitter, but Twitter was the inspiration of not Slack or IRC or whatever because of that.

At a conference, you don't talk to literally a thousand people. You talk to small cohorts that then you want to stay in touch with after the event. And that's very much where the inspiration comes from. And so Twitter is definitely my go-to tool at a conference. And so I wanted something that was a bit like Twitter, but it's like who's going for dinner tonight?

And what's really interesting and exciting to me about Vito is that this is interesting before I've done anything at all, which is I think it's cool. So that's the basic unit of Interestingness in Vito is that you sort of get this kind of Twitter like experience with likes and out replies and profiles and basic moderation. There are other cool things like when you go in, you have to accept a code of conduct and the code of conduct is built right into the platform.

We're really dedicated to safety and security. Not only is a code of conduct built in, but you are post or private default. So if somebody adds you to a Vito hub, nobody can see you. Unlike in Slack where if you get added to Slack, you're more or less visible to anybody by default, or maybe that's different anymore. But incidentally, we haven't built dms and we're not prioritising dms right now for that same reason that we want to make sure that any vector for potential harassment is built in a way that preempts those potential bad actors and allows people to control that or to make sure that it doesn't hit them in the first place.

So we're trying to be considered in how we build it. So the content access e-commerce community. So the e-commerce piece is a little bit weak right now, so maybe I won't talk about that.

Accessibility. We're auditing and trying to improve as we go. So I'll just do a quick little demo of the content. You've got two ways getting video content into veto. There's a live stream over RTMS or you can just simply upload videos and then they appear. But if I go into a more established hub, which is probably something like this one here. So this is a hub for admission online, which is what we're trying to basically move our live events into something that is more spaced across time. So this is kind of a more filled up hub and it sees that in addition to the Twitter, you get a sort of a mini CMS, which I just think is really cool.

So if it were, again, if you think about it, if it were an offline conference, this would be all the logistics and all the questions that you had. You can put in your sponsors, you can link to your sponsors, they can put in offers and the digital goodie bag. So that's all pretty cool. And then you have your Twitter here, but you can also do Slack. You can divide your pages into different topics and that kind of thing. And then you can find out who's there and you can look at them and you can look at people's profiles and follow them and all that, which is kind of cool. And then this is what playing a video in the platform looks like and then that's all just been updated or uploaded in the backend. So in here in the video session section, we've just uploaded some videos, but what I think is the real magic is just the dynamism of it.

So I showed you the Twitter and I've showed you the slack with the pages, like the little mini CMS, and it's like WordPress. And are you seeing that maybe we've taken a lot of inspiration from great tools that have come before us, but let me see here, where did I go?

Matthew Revell: We're kind of at time now,

Paul Campbell: But no, yeah, sorry. Show us one last thing then. Well, one last thing is that basically all of these things, if you wanted to create a time session it, you basically just set a time like this and it's just so cool. And then if you want to change times during a session, you just swap them more hand and then you can set a length and yeah, it's cool. And then basically you can add pages in here and it's all dynamic, it's all live updating, and then as soon as you want you're done, you can hit publish all and everybody gets the updates without having to stop their video or refresh their browser.

Matthew Revell: Done.

Super. Thank you very much, Paul. So Vito is where to go if you want to Vito? Yeah. Okay. Super Brilliant. Well, Paul, thank you very much for joining us.

Paul Campbell: No worries.

Thanks for having

Matthew Revell: Me. Yeah, I'm excited to explore Vito ourselves for our own future events.

Paul Campbell: Cool. And I'm looking forward to sharing with you.