Low code development. Data Schema architecture. Video games

Chris (00:00.72)

Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kiefer and I am here with the one and only workflow Joe Martinez. Joe, thank you so much for coming on and talking about one of my favorite topics, which is automation. I'm excited for this.

Joseph Martinez (00:18.971)

Yeah, Chris, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. This is my first ever podcast interview, so I might be a little jittery, but I'm excited about this topic and I can definitely talk a lot about it. So I'm excited to hear some of the questions.

Chris (00:31.696)

Yeah. So I came across, Joe through, we always occasionally, I will reach out to some subcontractors to assist with thinking about things in a different way or solving specific projects. But Joseph, we stumbled across or cross paths because he is an air table expert as well as extremely proficient in Zapier as well. So I'm a big fan of air table for, home service companies and probably.

painting companies in particular to use for project management. And the thing that I think a good place to start would be, you said on one early call with me was that you like to joke that there is an objectively correct schema for every project or problem that you're solving in business or in Airtable or whatever tool you're using. Tell me about...

like break that down for me or first of all, for those that don't even know what schema is, describe what that is and why that's so critical to get right.

Joseph Martinez (01:36.187)

Yeah. So Schema is software development like 101. It's essentially the data that you're going to be building software around. And as a software developer, when you're working on projects as a team, you have to have an agreed upon vocabulary and a backend structure that everybody can work on and communicate clearly about. And that is what we call Schema.

And I find that a lot of business people who aren't necessarily software gurus don't really ever think about schema. They obviously they call things words and they know that at the end of the day there is data that they have, but they haven't really taken the time to define what their schema is, what business objects they work in and how those business objects relate to one another with the classic one -to -one or one -to -many relationship. So the first phase,

of my process with my clients is defining our schema, which is what I say there's an objectively correct solution to. This is not like a soft science. It's any software developer in any programming language from any part of the world is probably going to end up with the same schema. If you if you approach it like a math problem looking to be solved, like it's it's there is a correct solution to your schema and that if you if people were to Google, you know, technology database schema.

they would see images of these charts, typically consisting of, you know, three to maybe 20 tables, depending on how, on how complex the software trying to build is. That is the skeleton of any software project. So to developers schema is the first thing you start with. And I think it should, whenever you're working on business automations, it should be the first thing you start with because it gives you that working vocabulary and understanding.

Chris (03:28.048)

And yeah, it immediately puts not only for yourself, because obviously, even if you were the only one working on this would be valuable, but it's extremely valuable for the team to communicate and discuss the same thing, make sure that we're talking and talking about the same thing, correct?

Joseph Martinez (03:44.315)

Yeah. Yeah. The, the hard part, the bandwidth, like how much information you can get across in a couple of sentences is really important as a consultant and as a tech, as a developer, because you're kind of speaking about sometimes like esoteric and in like, you know, broad terms, you know, about iterating through things and like there's, there's this complex software that's not very easy to talk about sometimes, but when you have the correct schema and you know, when to use plural nouns and verbs and adjectives like,

that kind of get it, it helped to help facilitates clear, concise communication.

Chris (04:19.248)

So I want to take this specifically to painting companies. Talk to me about like, what would be the questions that a painting company should be asking themselves when it comes to, okay, I want to use Zapier and automate business processes, or I want to use Airtable to structure my project management. What are the things for someone listening? Cause we, we have a lot of home service companies that listen to this.

What are, what should they be thinking about when it comes to, okay, I want to set this up for myself or maybe I have, I'm working with a consultant currently that's doing this for me. What are the, how do I know that we're on the right path?

Joseph Martinez (05:03.003)

Yeah. I think if you're working with a consultant, you know, I think a good consultant will be able to answer the question. What is my schema? I know in Airtable, there's an extension or a little, super simple plugin that just shows you visually what your schema in Airtable currently looks like. I wish I would have printed out one to show. so when it comes to a painting company, the kind of some of the golden rules for thinking about your schema are.

Schemas are lists of nouns. Like there are plural noun. A table is essentially, you know, it's many things that are the same. So, for example, for a painting company, you would obviously have a table of of your clients. You would have a table of probably the the houses or I guess the commercial buildings or houses, the addresses that you painted at. You would have a table probably of the visits.

that you have gone and then you would have a visit would relate to a property into a client. And then a visit would probably have the applicator, you know, something that relates to what product was applied, whether it was a paint on this wall or whatever, some description. And then that visit would probably relate to some line item that ends up on an invoice or to some work object.

I can't, it could, we would have to get into the weeds about it. But the, the, the, the schema is like, it's a, once you discuss it for like an hour or two, it ends up like, you just kind of sit there on air table and you can, you can put together tables and then you're left with the network that is the business.

Chris (06:52.4)

And I did, so we have something to talk about. I was just going to say, cause it says for someone that hasn't seen what you're talking about, this is specifically the, whoops. this is just a random one that I grabbed.

Joseph Martinez (07:04.635)

Yeah. Yeah. So that looks complex. If you could actually go to the settings icon on the top right and flip, flip off all the ones except for the top one. Yeah. Flip off all of them except for the top one. Yeah. This is going to make it look a little simpler, but this just shows how the main object, which is going to be that left one, which it looks like you call projects, how a project connects to each customer and to invoices and how.

Chris (07:14.768)

These ones.

Chris (07:18.512)

Chris (07:25.84)

Right.

Joseph Martinez (07:34.331)

Yeah, so.

Chris (07:35.376)

And then I guess what I, so this is like, yeah, this is the schema mapped out, right? Of my project crew leader is a, is linked to my worker table right here, right? so we know that and then it's, there's AWOs which go to the AWO table, whatever. So that stuff is there. My thought is, when someone is like, obviously if you're, if you were smart and you're a painting company, I would say,

Here are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven objects that are probably going to serve you well in the painting business. Right. and that's a, those are objects, of like, I've always thought like, how do I explain this to somebody that doesn't get it? So I'm going to give you my answer and you tell me if there's other analogies or things that you can think of. But to me, objects are like, like things they are.

Joseph Martinez (08:15.035)

For sure. Yep.

Chris (08:33.648)

a record of something in the business that is distinctly unique or different than another thing in your business. Like projects have names and there's crew leaders and there's a customer and there's a job number and a whole bunch of other stuff. But that's obviously different than a company table, which is who you're working with. And those are associated with people that are the customers or, you know, invoices.

clearly are not projects, but invoices are a part of projects or related to projects. So, yeah, exactly. So, how else would you, like for someone to think, how many objects do I need? Where do you draw the line of like, this is a property with like a multi -select versus it should be its own object that's its own table with other properties?

Joseph Martinez (09:09.051)

On a one to many basis or on a one to one basis. Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph Martinez (09:29.467)

Yeah, it's going to be down to the one to one or the one to many thing. So for example, if I'm looking at projects and somebody is asking, well, why do I need a table of companies when every single time I have a project, it's with a company. So you would think that a company would just be an aspect or property of my project. To my answer would be, well, what if that company changes their website domain? Then you would.

essentially need to look up all the projects and go and edit each projects company's website domain name, which is a bunch of properties where if you just had a relational database, you would just have the one company object who's doing an edit and therefore every other linked project that you had with that company, you wouldn't, you know, it's, it's through the relationship through the one to many relationship, meaning one pro one company can have many projects.

the one property of the company affects the many properties of the projects, if you want to know the projects company's website.

Chris (10:34.608)

And then tell me if that, if building on that, it would be like, let's say, you start out with, I have my projects and one of the properties as a company. And I also have a website and it just so happens that that website is always tied to the company. And I also have a billing address, which is also the company address. Right. And so when you start out realizing how many of the properties in a given table are all tied to,

one of the properties that probably is an indication that you could simplify this by saying, all of these change based on the company. Why don't we have a separate table for the company? Right.

Joseph Martinez (11:05.243)

Yeah. yeah.

Joseph Martinez (11:12.475)

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, with working with Kylie over on your team, one of the things we were actually talking about in our last meeting was we had a table of projects and we were talking about a table of events, which effectively site visits or things that need to happen. And one of the things we noticed was the address of the event is always the address of the project's location.

Chris (11:27.632)

Hmm.

Joseph Martinez (11:42.299)

So we kind of knew, okay, so the address, the event itself doesn't have an address. The event is tied to a project and the project is tied to a property and the property is the thing that has the address. So the address of the event is a derived property by looking back through the relationships, looking at the project and looking at the property. But to what you just said about how when you start noticing that properties on a particular table,

Chris (11:53.008)

Hmm.

Chris (12:03.535)

Mmm, I love that.

Joseph Martinez (12:12.443)

are copies of other properties that might be related. Like it's, I don't know. It's, it's hard to, I can see how if you're new to it, it can seem confusing, but once you kind of get what's going on and you've like maybe looked at examples, like it's really, it's, it's, it's really just, it is programming one -on -one like to kind of know when it's, when it needs a new table or when it doesn't. And the thing I say is it's plural nouns. Like it's very rare that a plural noun that you talk about.

when there's plurality to it, it wouldn't deserve its own table. Adjectives. Yeah, that's a noun. Yep. And voices like all those are nouns. A more complex use case might be.

Chris (12:46.928)

like projects, customers, companies, yep.

Joseph Martinez (12:59.099)

I honestly, I wouldn't be worth like, if anybody would want to talk to me about like, if they think there's this complex, I'd be happy to talk to them about that. like there's maybe sometimes where a verb or like an action could be a table. but it would be like, it would ultimately be just depending on how you use that word in a sentence, whether it was a verb or a, or a noun, I think. Yeah. But it's mostly just nouns are your tables. I think.

Chris (13:18.64)

or noun. Yeah, I like that. What are the most common pitfalls or misconceptions that you feel like, every time I get on a call, you know, 80 % of the time this is misunderstood or this is a pain point for companies or business owners?

Joseph Martinez (13:44.443)

Yeah. I, so when I started doing this about eight years ago, I wouldn't, maybe even for the first two or three years, I wouldn't schema. Wasn't really something that like was front of mind for me. And I would ask people like, let me see how, what you're working, like, let me see what you're working in. And they would pull up softwares and screen share and show me inside of the hub, the CRM hub spot or their air table or the pipe drive or whatever they're using. and.

we would basically come to the fact that, this fits perfectly. And then they would ultimately come to an area of the business that didn't like fit in their choice of software. And through the years, I've realized that all that I, as a, as a consultant really need to know for the first hour or two is what are the, what is the schema, which is known by, what is the schema, which is like, whenever I'm looking at people,

you know, telling me about their stuff. Like that's kind of what I'm, that's what I am listening for. Yeah. So only with time do I realize that's like what it is called and that's what I need to listen for. So now that's like the first question I ask, which is the answer to, you know, to not to beat the horse, beat the dead horse here, but it is literally people don't know their schema as well. And all of my clients, most, you know, the people that I've worked with for, you know, 15 hours, 16 hours, we start every meeting with,

Chris (14:46.512)

listening for filtering in.

Joseph Martinez (15:12.827)

Okay. Like for example, I just got out of a meeting with my fuel delivery service and we were discussing properties of an invoice and they have many different ways they generate invoices. And we were this client I've been working with for about a year and a half. And it's so easy for us to talk about because she was able to say, yeah. When we make an invoice, the property of the fuel type being Opus affects the invoice line items, variance.

and that it's hidden or not hidden. And then the collected tax on that should be shown or not shown based on the additives being either this or that. And those are all additives as a table, collected taxes as a table, variance as a property of the delivery. Like it was just really easy for us to communicate. So my clients. OK, so that way. So I kind of talk about two things. One is how clearly it is to talk to customers that understand their schema and then

Two is we start the call like another meeting I had earlier where, hey, you know, hey, Dennis, let's start today. Okay. So we're housing group fund, distressed loans. You guys have a table of loans that you ultimately come from manifests that you gather your asset managers deal with these loans and ultimately build out loan modifications where you'll generate documents based on document templates to get sent via an interaction to your borrowers.

and sometimes call, call, you know, call in entities. So we just said in a sentence, you know, his seven tables that he works in, and that's kind of how we get our brain juices throughout flowing to now discuss what feature we're going to focus on there. So schema, schema, schema. The pitfall is if you can't say that sentence and say what your business is in just 25 seconds, you're probably missing something. It can be, can, can nail something tighter.

Chris (16:56.272)

Chris (17:09.52)

And the yeah, because I think that that's a fundamental like someone I'm just trying to think of all the reasons that someone like, we have our schema figured out. We've got projects and customers and companies and invoices, whatever. But that's so that's important to identify what are the objects. But then the next level is which is still part of schema is intelligently deciding the restrictions and or requirements of how

the objects need to relate to one another. And yes, there's one too many, but then there's also like, I want my projects to relate to my worker table, but this property can only be my crew leaders in the worker table. Right. And just like being very intentional about the re the associations that you are defining. And that also like, yes, if you don't have it totally figured out in the beginning, you will.

get it figured out. But the more that you have this defined at the beginning stages, the easier it is to tell a developer or someone that's building this stuff out for you or your own team to exactly. I love what you just said of the example of a customer that understands it to be able to tell you that this property of my invoices is affecting this other thing. And they can tell you with very specifics like what's going on because

I think a lot of times when people lose faith in automation or systems, it's because the system that is not in their minds functioning the way it should, it's usually the system is functioning exactly the way it's been told to function. You just haven't, you just haven't identified this variable or this edge case. And now we need to account for that and make the system more robust to handle that. In addition to everything else, it's also, it's already handled.

Joseph Martinez (18:52.091)

Yeah, of course.

Joseph Martinez (19:04.315)

Yeah. Yeah. The joke is that automated systems are like literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of characters in a perfect order to, to, to do like, there can't be any typos. There can't be any miss and, or, or statements. It has to be a perfect order. and the, the, the, the bones of that are the schema. That's how a business entrepreneur and communicates with their developers and how.

Chris (19:14.032)

Hmm.

Joseph Martinez (19:32.827)

they communicate with their operations people. It's all, it all comes down to the, the opt it'd be like, it'd be like trying to be a doctor and not, you know, one doctor calls your quad, your quadricept. And one guy calls it your, your top leg muscle. Like they got to agree on something and it's the names. Yeah. The names have got to be agreed upon.

Chris (19:41.168)

understand the body.

Chris (19:49.328)

names.

What are some, like, I don't know if there's another topic that you're interested in, but I guess one thing I am always curious about is what are the processes that you have helped or seen automated that have most surprised you?

Joseph Martinez (20:12.059)

Yeah, this is a fun question. I think, so I've been doing this a while and I've helped, like, it's not like I specialize in a particular industry. I've like, I've seen a lot of, of companies and the way they operate. And that's one of the things that whenever I talk to friends or family about the work I do, they say is interesting that I get to touch and see so many different industries. so that question to me sounds like, like, what are some of my favorite projects like past projects or current projects?

So the, I would say one of the most fun ones, I mentioned the fuel delivery service. That's essentially us taking serialized truck pump output data and keeping track of all the taxes, payroll, invoicing, collections, data from that. But they were a client that I got.

maybe my second year of doing this. And I've been with them, you know, I maybe do at this point, just like two to four hours a month, just of maintenance and sometimes producing data. But that project was fun because we just scrape just a CSV that comes out of a old school, like, you know, 1990s computer out of like a truck pump. And they, that, that industry doesn't have like high technology touching it yet.

So we've been able to leverage Zapier and Airtable to where they just like come to work in the morning. The woman imports the tickets, the system populates. She's able to check all the collections for taxes and deliveries and trucks and all this stuff. And within maybe an hour, she's produced and emailed out invoices for like 115 to 200 deliveries over three different states. Something that used to take them every day, all day to do.

Chris (22:05.2)

Wow.

Joseph Martinez (22:09.339)

even sometimes falling behind and coming on weekends that now just is something that's so brutally obvious because we've systematized it and everybody knows what's going on and what's missing. Another fun client of mine is the, my gosh, there's so many, but one of my biggest clients ever is a consulting firm that took executives to be usually, usually people like fifties and over that have been in a

Chris (22:19.056)

That's awesome.

Joseph Martinez (22:37.403)

in an executive position that wants to just make a change. So they'll pay this company to teach them, to kind of bring them up to speed on Google Suite, Microsoft Suite tools, HubSpot. They just kind of trains them up on modern software tools and then puts them in touch with their network and a bunch of surveys and all this stuff. So they come to me with like this

crazy company that's built on spreadsheets and consultants, you know, emailing files back and forth to one another. And we're able to basically identify, okay, Airtable is going to be the source of truth. We're going to plug in Asana on top, which is where your consultants collaborate with all of their consultees, I guess, or clients. And then Google suite is going to be where all the documents that get generated and the, and most of the forms that we use live.

And that company is, I think like 24 consultants. I mean, thousands of consultees, clients, all over the world. And they've gone from what felt like a headache and a mess to just this beautifully automated. Once the sale is made and payments taken to collaborating with tasks mutually in Asana, you know, anybody who works kind of in the admin administrative section is able to go into the air table database and.

look up any data they'd want about any survey or questionnaire or meeting and pull up recorded links and look at charts of performance metrics and look at placements. And it's a really, it is a complex business that like they were stressed out about it at the beginning, but then after, you know, maybe three months of working on it with them, we got their schema settled and they have a lot of, I mean, I think they've got like 27, 30 tables or something.

Chris (24:17.328)

Wow.

Joseph Martinez (24:32.411)

crazy in our table. Like you have to like scroll along the top to kind of see all the things. So.

Chris (24:33.04)

Wow.

Chris (24:37.648)

That's crazy. And obviously they're not working in the back end of Airtable. They're working through the interfaces of Airtable or a different tool.

Joseph Martinez (24:43.739)

They actually work in the backend. So interfaces on Airtable is a relatively new thing. I was actually one of the beta interface testers with Airtable. So as much as I love interfaces, I came up in the era before Airtable interfaces where you did just only work in the backend of Airtable. So this company actually doesn't use any interfaces. They operate all on views and the backend that they've made.

Chris (25:03.152)

Chris (25:11.664)

Wow.

Joseph Martinez (25:12.603)

And then of course, a lot of them operate in Asana, which links to some views in Airtable sometimes. But.

Chris (25:20.08)

I didn't know you could connect to sauna and air table.

Joseph Martinez (25:23.259)

So we just do it based on task and project and section IDs. Like you can be in Asana and you can, it's not really a sink in so much as it's like, Hey, if I'm in Asana, if I'm in a project in Asana and I'm looking at a particular task that might talk about a particular survey answer, the answer, the survey's answer is stored in Airtable, which I know is table, you know, JK72.

Chris (25:28.124)

Is it a two directional sink?

Joseph Martinez (25:49.691)

And the answer to the survey might be record, you know, 97, 82. So I can, I can use a formula to make a URL that they can click that brings them to the air table record. That is that, that answer. so it's kind of a soft integration.

Chris (26:01.616)

okay. So it's not linked or it is a, you have a URL that's pulling it up and you've automated generating that based on what's correct. Yeah.

Joseph Martinez (26:10.179)

Yeah. Yeah.

that URL is automatically made. Yeah. To allow simple connections and clicking in between them. Yeah. And then I can have one more to give us three examples. So another awesome one that I actually was in a competition, in a competition for, I didn't win unfortunately, but it was a inventory tool that I had to make a tea leaf company of mine. And I, and actually I've sold this interface or anybody with inventory problems out there.

If you got things that make things that make things that make things like, and so on and so on, then we have a beautiful air table base that me and a guy named Mateen made, spent, I don't know, we spent like 50 hours like working together, coming up with the perfect schema. But basically it's like, yo, I get shipped leaves, just leaves and like boxes and bags.

and I need to take those leaves and I need to put them into tins and I take those tins and I put those into boxes and I take those boxes and I put them into gift baskets and I take those tins and put them into massive pallets that I ship to other places. So it's like he makes things that ultimately can also make things and even those things make things. So it's kind of this weird problem that most inventory if not, I don't think any inventory solution really has that like things that make things that make things. So we are able to produce.

Chris (27:31.088)

and keeping in mind how many things is needed of this to make the next thing and so on.

Joseph Martinez (27:35.739)

Yeah. Like if you get an order for a gift basket, then you need to go look at the variety pack of tens as well as the six pack of black tea. And if you're out of the variety pack of tens, then you need to make more of those, which means you need to pull more black tea. So it's like this watered down inventory problem. and we have a beautiful, I could still recite the schema by heart. It's essentially you get shipments. you have product offerings that have variants. So that's three tables, shipments, offerings, variants.

You didn't have customers who place variants would be like a product offering might be a like a T six pack, like a six pack of tens. And you have multiple variants of that. They would be like, well, one's black tea, one's green tea, one's red tea. So.

Chris (28:05.936)

What do you mean variants?

Chris (28:17.168)

Chris (28:23.472)

So is it kind of like a package name? Packages?

Joseph Martinez (28:26.843)

It's like on his, it's like online, whenever customers are filtering for products, the product offering might be a filter that they would apply in the Shopify site, for example. And the variant is the most granular object, which is like the thing that they would ultimately be putting in their shopping cart. They'd be putting a variant of an offering, which is how in fact that's a, that's relationship that we got from Shopify. And looking at his Shopify site.

Chris (28:37.104)

And that's the variant.

Chris (28:48.432)

Interesting, okay.

Joseph Martinez (28:56.379)

we realized, hey, on your backend, they have these things called product offerings, which you can't buy, but it's how you filter some stuff. And then you're ultimately buying a variant. So, so that's the inventory solution is shipments, product offerings, variants, customers placing orders that produce needs. They did our fulfillments, which I think it's like seven tables, but those needs, a table of needs.

Chris (29:05.392)

Mmm.

Chris (29:21.968)

And needs is a table. So the order comes in and it's like, we need these things still in order to, to satisfy that. Yeah.

Joseph Martinez (29:29.947)

Yeah. Yeah, an order comes in in order. A need is essentially a line item of an order, like an order might be for six tens. And. Yeah.

Chris (29:38.39)

cause an order could be a bunch of stuff and then you need like, we're missing one thing for this item. We don't want to say the whole order is not well, the whole order might not be fulfilled, but we need specifics. What is the thing that we're held up on?

Joseph Martinez (29:50.778)

Yeah. Yeah. So, so the system is really smart and they like, and it actually uses interfaces. That was the competition was we, I took what him and I had made and we worked together to kind of make an even more bad -ass interface once that, once that feature was added. So his system, he can basically it's a, it's a live system. Like he went from having the, the back warehouse buildings. And then at the end of the day, entering it in, like what happened in the warehouse to having, and what I call reactionary system.

to having a predictive system to where he can come into the warehouse and look at the orders that were placed that night or yesterday. And then the system tells him, hey, go grab this much of this lot to produce this sort of packages. And it's I mean, it's an awesome base. And I like the tea guys, I have used that I have some maple syrup people that use it. I've got a snow cone company that uses it. I.

made up a company called Table Enable that uses it, but I think only a couple, but it's just a fun base to work on and to go back to. So, yeah.

Chris (30:58.512)

That's awesome. Yeah, what else is, we've got like maybe three or four minutes left. What else is a hot topic, something you're interested in, you like talking about?

Joseph Martinez (31:11.546)

Yeah, I got two things. A quick one would be obviously a buzzword a lot of people talk about right now is AI. And one vision I have is I'll say this. So an amazing thing that we're going to have in the future is the ability to just pass order data, shipment data to an AI.

And then we just ask it questions as we would like a really smart human, like, Hey man, how's, how is my, sales looking in the, the AI would say, you've made this many sales today and here's how much product you've used. And you'd say, okay, well, how much of that do I have left? And then the, I would be able to tell you how much you have left. And so I imagine a future where an AI, cause right now I am models. You just ask them a question of a certain length that is, you know, it's pretty short at the, in the grand scheme of things.

then it produces an output. But at the day where we can ask a question, then that AI can look at our data schema and produce an answer and come back to us with an answer. It's going to be an amazing day when an AI has access to our company's data. And it doesn't have to be included in the prompt, I guess, right now.

Chris (32:26.96)

And you're saying that the, the, it is necessary for the schema and base and everything to be built out well, but AI could access that. It's not like, or just to clarify, you're not saying that you wouldn't need air table because of AI. You're like AI would be literally reading everything in the air table and being like, ask, ask anything about the business and it's going to know all the stuff.

Joseph Martinez (32:45.979)

Correct.

Joseph Martinez (32:51.035)

Yeah.

Joseph Martinez (32:56.635)

Yeah, I think with sufficiently advanced AI, maybe even the tables themselves is kind of hidden in the black box of what the AI is doing, but certainly a stop gap in what we're going to see hopefully in the next, say five years is going to be an AI, like an air table where an AI is built on top of it to where you can just ask good questions like you would, because any business owners should be able to ask their database any question and get an answer. And whether that's with air table now by producing views and filtering your data and sorting it and grouping it.

Chris (33:16.528)

Hmm.

Joseph Martinez (33:26.747)

But hopefully one day an AI is able to look through your schema and find up those answers for you And then another thing I personally thought I love a lot is video games I've been playing them since I was a kid and love thinking about game engines and how Gamers game and compete with each other and how to get better at stuff. So yeah, yeah

Chris (33:46.832)

That's awesome. Let's dive into book recommendations. So what are your three book recommendations for us?

Joseph Martinez (33:55.515)

Yeah. Okay. So I'm a sci -fi book nerd. I think one of the ones that still I remember, which it's hard to remember books, I think sometimes if you, if you really think about it, but it's, it's ring world. and I don't even remember the author, but it's probably the only book ever called ring world. and it's, it's a pretty quick, it's probably about 130 pages and it's about, some travelers who come across one of the space mega structures that is a.

ring built around a sun. So imagine if the path the earth traces around the sun, if that was like actually just a giant structure and humans that were explorers in space came across one that had been used in the ancient time, like way a long time ago by some alien race. And it's about explorers exploring this ring world, which is pretty incredible. Yeah. And then I guess another one.

Chris (34:48.848)

Interesting.

Joseph Martinez (34:54.299)

would be, so I got lucky and I read Dune, at least the six OGs before the movie even came out. But yeah, yeah, there are. So.

Chris (35:03.856)

There's six books.

I just watched parts of the first Dune and the second Dune within the last three weeks. Which books are those movies based on? The very first book. And there's five other ones.

Joseph Martinez (35:12.827)

Yeah.

Joseph Martinez (35:16.731)

They're based on the first book. Yeah. Yeah. The the the I'd say the last three are kind of like if you're just into the lore and stuff you should read. But the first three I think are worth the read. So the Dune and then the other one is a book called Golly what's it called?

Chris (35:32.144)

Okay.

Joseph Martinez (35:48.571)

my gosh. The people out there, there's something called the ends of invention. and it's,

Joseph Martinez (36:00.667)

my gosh, I might have to Google something. I can't remember it. It's my when I game, my my gamer tag that I play with is based on this book. And it's on the tip of my tongue. And unfortunately, I can't remember it. That's like I'm so sorry. I can't.

Chris (36:13.424)

No worries. Let's jump to the movie. What's your favorite movie?

Joseph Martinez (36:16.795)

Yeah. So, you know, I'm a.

I'm a Star Wars fan, so I think the third Star Wars, The Rage of the Sith, is my favorite to watch. Like, I just find myself, that's the only movie that I can just watch over and over again. I don't know what it is about it, but I love that movie. And then I love...

probably like as a kid, the Disney movie called,

man, I'm bad at names. It's about the family that gets stranded on island.

Chris (36:54.96)

What's it about?

Chris (36:58.992)

yeah, the, the Swiss family Robinson. Yeah. We just took our kids to, Disney, Disney world. And, we, I had forgotten about the tree house and stuff and they have it there obviously. So we watched that with them.

Joseph Martinez (37:06.587)

Yes, exactly. Yes. Yeah. So.

Joseph Martinez (37:19.259)

Yeah. And I literally, yeah, I was in Disney world literally three days ago with my family. So, yep.

Chris (37:24.72)

Yeah. great. It's like, I hadn't seen it in such a long time, a little cheesy as an adult, but man, the kids loved it. And I loved it when I was a kid, but it had been, you know, it's one of those that I hadn't seen in such a long time. And when I went back to it, it was like, I remember it being like, I don't even know. It just, it was like I was watching dune, but the, the eight year old version of dune was Swiss family Robinson.

Joseph Martinez (37:46.747)

Nostalgic.

Yeah.

Joseph Martinez (37:53.275)

Yeah. Yeah. And I remember the book. It's called Consider Flavus is the name of a crazy sci -fi book. So if you ever get the time to read Consider Flavus, like it'll blow your mind. It's about like essentially like a type two civilization where humans are all over the galaxy and there's like massive traveling planet size spaceships and just almost like Hitchhiker's Guide, but...

a little more hard science and some crazy concepts and cultures and all this stuff. It's like it's part of the culture series who's the author I don't remember of course, but.

Chris (38:31.248)

So what is the preferred method of contact for people to reach out to you if they want to chat more?

Joseph Martinez (38:37.595)

Yeah, just my email. So my email is joe at workflowjoe .com. Workflow Joe, the website I had up, but it's getting redone at the moment. So I technically, if you go to my website, it's just going to say like domain out of action right now. But that's joe at workflowjoe, just like it sounds .com.

Chris (38:43.408)

awesome.

Chris (38:58.576)

I was going to tell you, you need to, this is a, my email for the longest time was like this. And my business coach told me to do this finally. And I was like, duh. I think this should be your website or something like this. Like this is literally my, this was, I have a different website now, but it's just like, Hey, this is what I do. And email me. And so I, when I was looking when based on what you told me, it's like, this is literally like,

Joseph Martinez (39:11.291)

Just super simple.

Honestly, yeah.

Chris (39:26.928)

It's an intriguing website, I think. and I don't know how far you are in the website development process, but the, we, we also have like our actual hello Boolean one, which took longer and it's, there's more to it. But my email for the longest time was sky media, cause that's been my business for the last 10 years, but it's evolved so much. And I used to work with oral surgeons, interestingly enough. And I was like, I don't, the oral surgeon website makes no sense now that I'm working in painting.

Joseph Martinez (39:39.163)

Yeah.

Chris (39:56.752)

So I was like, what do I do? I don't have time to make a website. I don't even need a website really. Cause I've got enough clients and my business consultant was like, just literally just make a paragraph and put your photo on it. So.

Joseph Martinez (40:05.835)

Yeah. Yeah. Mine is like, it looks like a screenshot of an iMessage thread. That is like somebody who says, I need help. And I say, I do this. Well, what can you do for me? And that's what I'm, that's what I'm going with. Yeah. but I, I appreciate you having on here, Chris. I'll say, if you can't answer what your schema is, then you should find a consultant or me to help you discover that, to where you can confidently.

Chris (40:11.824)

Ooh, I love that.

I love that.

Joseph Martinez (40:30.395)

sit down at your desk and say, all right, what table am I working in today? Or what's the thing we're going to make better? What tables are we going to improve on?

Chris (40:36.752)

Awesome. Well, it was fun and I know we'll be seeing each other again, but I appreciate you coming on today to chat about schema and base structure and automation and all that stuff.

Joseph Martinez (40:47.483)

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me, Chris. This was fun. I'll see you around.

Chris (40:50.416)

All right, and then I'm going to record an intro really quick before I stop recording. And then I had a couple other random things.

I will warn you, this is a technical conversation. So if you are not someone that loves the nitty gritty details like I do of how you structure the data inside your business, you might not enjoy this episode, but if you are someone that loves the technical details, how do I structure the data in my business and the schema in my business? This episode is for you. So without further ado, let's get into the conversation with Joe Martinez.

And then happy if you can take that and throw it into somewhere right after the opening of the podcast. That would be great. Thanks so much. Happy.