Unleash Your Business Superpowers with No-Code

Chris Kiefer (00:00.604)

very, if there's like bad stuff, we can cut it out after the fact, but I like the casual intro. So we'll just jump in and then we can connect on how I came across you and everything. Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kiefer. Today I am joined by Kylie Luft, who is our automation architect at Boolean. And we have the pleasure of interviewing the author of this fantastic book that is going in and out of focus on my camera.

Low code no code. So Phil Simon is here to discuss the world of No code and low code tools and prop maybe talk about some other books that you're working on So first of all Phil, thank you so much for taking the time to come on today

Phil Simon (00:44.302)

Hey Chris Kiley, happy to be on, looking forward to our chat.

Chris Kiefer (00:47.932)

So we were just chatting before this and I wanted to get all this on recording, cause I think this is the fun stuff. So I came across like my journey in the no code world. I came across Airtable like three years ago and I looked at it and was like, hmm, looks like Google Sheets. This is stupid, it costs money. And then I went back to Google Sheets. So I've been a Google Sheets fan for 10 years. I'm obsessed like.

I take a lot of pride in like how complex my formulas are, you know, and trying to explain it to someone that is a peon that doesn't understand. And then, uh, about a year ago, I came across, uh, Gareth, uh, prone of us from, um, gap consulting and started watching some of the videos that he was doing in airtime. I was like, Oh my goodness. I completely missed, like, I just totally did not understand what it was. And it was one concept in particular that.

he just like blew my mind is relational databases. That's like the, like we could talk about that for an hour. We won't, but that was the thing that was like, okay, there's something here. And then long story short, I interviewed Garret as I took his like air table, you know, course, and we've hired gap consulting for some consulting projects here and there. Um, but then he, when I had him on my podcast, I don't know if you knew this, but he's, he has this book in the background of all his videos. And he was like,

anyone that's doing any sort of automation and air table, this is the book you need to read. And it was his number one recommendation. So I was like, I better get that book and I better read this.

Phil Simon (02:22.894)

Well, it cost me two bucks because every time someone mentions him, I got to kick him a VIG. But no, I did talk to him a couple of months ago because I was working on my own Notion product and I saw the book and actually I take that back. I did watch one of the videos and I go, God, that book looks familiar. Got to get me some of that. And I thanked him for doing so. No, no, no. I was really happy to do it. He's got a great case study in the book because citizen developers, as you know, are still developers, right? They may not actually use their.

Chris Kiefer (02:27.708)

Ahahaha!

Chris Kiefer (02:50.62)

Hmm.

Phil Simon (02:52.718)

keyboard, they may use the mouse. That's why on the cover you see the little arrow, which I was pretty proud of when I came up with that idea and my cover guy took it to the next level. But yeah, I think it's difficult in general, Chris and Kylie, to think about new tools. There was an article that just ran yesterday on Forbes about Notion and how a lot of people just don't get it. It's a page. Well, then why is it an underword doc, right? Or a Google doc? And it goes, it's a page, but it's so much more.

And I just did a demo for my little product this morning and the woman was kind of throwing around and say, well, can I just do this in Trello? I go, you probably could mimic 80 or 90 % of what it did in Trello. But I think as humans, we like archetypes, right? It's tough for us to really grasp something new. And I think you're not the first person to look at Airtable, I'm sure, and go, yeah, it's basically just a paid version of Google Sheets. But you know, relational databases are the bee's knees.

I know when I taught myself Microsoft Access a million years ago, I'd kind of pushed the limits of what Excel could do. And once that opened up, got myself in trouble a few times because I didn't understand a few things. But yeah, it really did change the way that I thought about enterprise tech and about data. And as a result, made me a lot more organized, which drives people crazy, but I can usually find what I need.

Chris Kiefer (04:13.724)

Hmm. Yeah. I think that, um, the, I was, uh, this is the, we're going to start doing this more often where I bring on some of our key team members to podcasts. But one of the things I was really excited to have Kylie on here for is because Kylie is, uh, like a serial learner and like she has, I don't remember all the things that you've done, but writing degree did like some comedy writing and wanted to do the screenwriting for awhile. Anyways, then she became a network engineer.

Phil Simon (04:43.31)

Hmph.

Chris Kiefer (04:43.964)

And we've known Kylie, um, are my wife and I and our family for a couple of years now, but I feel like Kylie is in this book, the textbook citizen developer, uh, of just like someone that is able to conceptually understand business objectives, like, all right, start with the end in mind, what are we trying to do? And then like break it down and no code is like the just opens up a bazillion opportunities for someone like Kylie.

And there's many of Kylie's out there that are just like smart, like give me a process, tell me what we're trying to do and I'm gonna make this more efficient. And 10 years ago, it was like, do you have a million dollars to develop, like hire developers to solve this problem for you? Or now you can pay 20 bucks and watch some YouTube videos and actually build like an app that would have literally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars 10 years ago.

Phil Simon (05:37.55)

Or if you try to do it internally, you'd have to get on the IT waiting list. And I quote a lot of statistics in that book and COVID, I'd argue accelerated the need for new apps. Because if you think about it, if most people work in the office, you don't need an app to figure out who's in the office. But when some people are coming in on some days and companies, as I read about in my new book, The Nine, intentionally when their lease has run out, lease fewer square feet, all of a sudden,

you can't email everyone and a sheet doesn't quite work because this, that, and the other thing. So yeah, I'd argue that COVID actually accentuated the need for these kind of glue apps, but many times they get 90 % of the work done and you can get it done very quickly. So I know that with Notion and Airtable, they come with all sorts of automations, hooks into Zapier, since you're an automation guru, then you get it, but you really...

I think the curse of the citizen developer is when you see a manual process and you know you can do it better and you can't because of internal politics or whatever, a little piece of you dies inside. I know that in my previous life as a college professor, every minute that I had to spend in an inefficient system, which would then be multiplied by thousands of professors every semester, drove me crazy. And if we got paid hourly or overtime, I guarantee they'd fix that in a hot minute, but because we were.

exempt, there was really no cost to keeping the inefficient process alive. So in the book, I talk a lot about some of the reasons that citizen developers face challenges, sometimes even at small companies. I was on the phone with someone a couple of weeks ago about how it was only a 10 or 12 person company, but automatically people were already using their preferred tools. So getting them to change to one tool can be difficult. And then as the company gets bigger, that

Chris Kiefer (07:06.076)

Mmm.

Phil Simon (07:31.822)

only gets harder.

Kiley (07:33.108)

Yeah, I was going to say while reading your book and I'm making my way through it because I'm taking a lot of time to make sure I'm understanding certain principles really well, since this is basically in some ways the Bible for the role that I've taken on with Chris's company where I'm diving very deep into Airtable with our clients. And it really does feel like low code, no code tools are superpowers. Like it's giving that gritty

Chris Kiefer (07:33.468)

Absolutely.

Kiley (08:01.684)

go -getter employee or a small business owner or team member, a superpower, and then saying, okay, I know that you can do this and now just wow me. And I wanted to ask, have there been times where you do meet someone, maybe in a consulting or maybe even a sales situation where you go, hold on, like I am seeing that you have the capabilities of crushing citizen development and becoming a citizen developer.

And what are those like four or five key characteristics that you see that you're like, you got it. Like you can do this and I know you're gonna make it through. It's gonna be hard, but you can do this.

Phil Simon (08:41.358)

Yeah, that's a good question. I'd say they're both positive attributes that I describe in the book, and I've done some informal surveys of folks on LinkedIn. It's not scientific, but at least it's something. And then there are what I'll call negative characteristics. So to me, it's curiosity. It's an intolerance or inefficiency. It's just a willingness to learn, right? Growth mindset, Carol Dweck, all that. Just the fact that you know that if something takes two minutes to fix and it's a one -off, who cares?

But if something takes an extra two minutes once a day, do the math, 10 times a week, that's 10 minutes. And let's say you work 24 weeks out of the year, 240 minutes, that's four hours. If I could give you back four hours, what would you do with your time? And it would drive me crazy going back to the negative characteristics when I would just meet folks and go, yeah, that's the way we do it. And I'd go, why? That doesn't make any sense. There is a better way to do this. I'm not that smart.

But if I can build an access database or a Notion tool, there's got to be a way to automate it. And you might spend an hour trying to figure something out. But then you know that you can do that. So in this example, you save the other three. But it also increases your confidence. So for this Notion app that I built to help managers handle books, I automated the process of gathering book blurbs. And in the past, I'd done this with Google Sheets. I'd created Google Form.

I'd email 20 smart people who didn't hate me and say, please fill out this form. And then I'd get notifications that Kylie has blurbed my book. Now I might go back and forth with, hey, and this actually happened with a friend of mine. He wrote a book blurb that was 400 words long. I said, I'm glad that you liked it. But if I put nothing else on the back of the book but your blurb, it wouldn't fit. So with Notion, and I guarantee you can do this with Airtable and Coda and

and all these other no code tools that I described in the book, I said, all right, there's gotta be a way to automate this. So you could have done it with type forms and their notion integration. You could do it with Zapier. I actually found something called note forms. And now I sent out a mock blurb to myself and then the information flows into a notion database and it sends me a notification through Slack. Now I had to monkey around a little bit with Zapier for an additional integration.

Phil Simon (11:05.934)

But to me, that's awesome. I am not a proper coder. Yeah, I know HTML, that's not that hard. CSS, when I was a college professor, I taught some Python. But I am absolutely not a proper developer, but that's the point. You don't need to be. And the quote on the back of the book in huge letters from the former CEO, I think it was Chris Wainwright of GitHub, the future of coding is no code at all.

Now my book dropped, I want to say three weeks before Chat GPT on November 30th, 2022, and I'm off Twitter, but I did see on LinkedIn someone posted a tweet of now the most popular programming language is English.

So you could argue now that you even need to know less code. I mean, you go into some of these tools like Gemini or Claude and it'll actually generate code. Now there are downsides to that which we can talk about, but the point is I like to think I'm pretty good at enterprise tech after being around it for over half my life. It is not that hard to figure out where we're going to be. And...

Kiley (11:46.868)

Great.

Phil Simon (12:10.958)

I say you could fight it. You could say, well, it doesn't do this incredibly minor feature or there's a security risk, which again could be a fair point. I would never say, well, build a no code tool to replace an HR information system because you would want to lock down a social security number, health information. You don't want to get in HIPAA trouble and all that. But to me, the benefits of no code, low code and citizen development far exceed their drawbacks or costs because you can basically...

let the IT department focus on the things that citizen developers can't do or shouldn't do. And to get that off their plate and the product backlog really reduced and empower employees and to build an app. And we all know about the IT business divide, right? You submit specs, they build it. It's not written right. It comes back, back and forth, back and forth. That's very common, as you know, and you're smiling, Kylie, so you know what I'm talking about here. The fact that you actually have the users of the app building the app.

to me is an enormous benefit.

Chris Kiefer (13:12.316)

Yeah. I feel like Kyle, you probably have stuff to say cause you were in this network engineering world. Talk about red tape and enterprise. I've never experienced that. I've always been in the small companies where they're like, you can fix that. And I'm like, yeah, give me a couple hours and I'll see if I can get this task automated. That's been my background.

Kiley (13:30.676)

I mean, we weren't unionized, but the way that when you're working in like the big cog of corporate IT, especially when you're dealing with network, like data center networks, it's basically like, hey, you don't do that job. Like that's that guy's union's job. And it's against that union if you touch that switch and he's not allowed to do that. And it's hilarious to then move into a space where it's almost a wild west of ideas. And you get to utilize like in my previous role,

It would be a project manager who was excellent at time management and making sure we stayed on time and on budget. That project manager probably would have also made an excellent network engineer because they were very detailed oriented. That's really what a network engineer has to be, is technically minded and detail oriented. And what if that project manager had the ability to no code, low code network engineering? He'd be the best network engineer because sometimes...

you guys probably experienced this in the tech world, people who are tech minded might not have that organizational prowess because they're just so in the weeds and they love to learn about new technologies and love to try to solve a problem. And they might try to solve a problem that takes them way too long and then forget that they had four other problems that were due last week. So you're empowering. This probably goes back to my question last time you're empowering the person with all of those skills that are hard skills outside of tech.

but hard business skills to be able to utilize low code, no code to be a combination of both. It reminds you of the quote in the book, the T .S. Eliot quote. He say, the immature poet imitates the mature poet plagiarizes. I mean, I know that was specifically talking about tools that, hey, I only want this tool. This is the only tool I ever want. No tool ever did that well. He's like, every tool has been copying every other tool since the beginning of software. And like,

I love that idea at a broader level. If you could speak to that, like at a broader level, how is low code, no code doing what T .S. Eliot's saying? It's the mature poet who's plagiarizing.

Phil Simon (15:34.446)

This might be the first pod in the history of the world to drop Airtable and TS Eliot at the same time, right? Yeah, I'm a big fan of quotes, the more obscure the better. Yeah, I mean, it's an evolution, right? And in the book, I think it's chapter one, I describe the evolving nature of citizen development. I remember back when I started building proper apps with Microsoft Access in 1997 and 1998.

Kiley (15:40.692)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (15:41.532)

Hahaha.

Phil Simon (16:03.31)

And Access is the one app that refuses to die, but to me, Airtable and to some extent Notion are basically access for the web. They're not as powerful as SQL Server or MySQL or Oracle, but far less expensive. You pay by the month or by the record or whatever Airtable's pricing is, but they're much more accessible. And I do think it's important, Kyle, getting back to your point about organization, to have that kind of mindset, because it's one thing if I, just for giggles, have a little to -do list task.

And it's not organized very well, but I get it. Well, in an organization, if I'm a developer, I am, wait for it, developing things for other people. Other people need to understand it. And there's another sidebar in the book from a guy named Matt Wade, who's most famous for, I think, the Microsoft periodic table of the elements, not elephants. Google it. But it looks like basically your chemistry chart from back in grade school or high school, whatever.

And he talks a lot about design. And if you are building all these tools and the design is incoherent or inconsistent, it's unreasonable to expect people to use them. Or if they do, they're going to just inundate you with questions. So organization is really important. And if you're launching a tool, you'll want to collect feedback to make sure that it makes sense to folks, knowing that there might be limits. If someone says, I absolutely hate the Airtable UI, you might say, well,

OK, we could look at something like softer or another third party tool that kind of lives on top of it. But you're probably talking about an additional license. And cost at some point can add up because you're talking about these tools that are on a SaaS model. Hey, it's great. You only pay $10 per user per month. But before you know it, your streaming bills are higher than your cable bills back in the day. I'm totally dating myself for that, which actually happens. So there are a lot of trade -offs involved. But I think the point is that

You can build basically whatever you want within limits. And the idea that you'd have to build something from scratch. I mean, there are more technical folks like Gareth who absolutely can take it into the end zone. And then you've got things like private APIs and hiring people to build apps that live on top of it. And that's wonderful. I'd say if it gets too complicated, then you may need to actually get IT or a proper developer involved because there may be six or seven features.

Phil Simon (18:26.318)

that you just can't live without. But the premise, I think, of no code, low code in citizen development is that you can probably get 90 % of the taste for 20 % of the calories. And most people will go, yeah, I'll order two of those.

Chris Kiefer (18:38.364)

Hmm.

I just had to pull this up because I feel like this is just classic. I just love that this is possible now in today's world. So check this out. This was when you said this, I was like, I had to pull this up. Here is chat GPT's periodic table of the elephants for you. But is it? Yeah, that's right.

Kiley (18:41.14)

you

Phil Simon (19:02.35)

Wow, well, it'll start trending. We've created a meme on the show. Yeah, it adds a very dangerous tool because your typo now can actually be a thing and all that. Yeah, that's that.

Chris Kiefer (19:12.476)

Yeah, it's so funny. The periodic. Phil Simon taught us about the periodic table of the elephants today. Yeah. But yeah, I would.

Phil Simon (19:18.382)

Maybe that's the next book.

Kiley (19:20.244)

There you go.

My local no code tools are giants.

Phil Simon (19:26.286)

Ooh. Well, it's funny you mentioned that riffing on books for a second. There's a book I read maybe 12, 14 years ago called Small Giants by Bo Burningham. And he used to be, I think, the editor -in -chief of Think Magazine. And the premise of the book that there are a lot of companies that would prefer to be great rather than big. And he gets into things like Dunbar's number. Once an organization hits or a group hits more than 150 people, then things change, right? It's...

you know, when it's five people, 10 people, yeah, that's Chris, he does X and that's Kylie, she does Y. But you get to a certain point and it's who the hell's that guy, right? What does that woman do? I don't know. They don't know what I do. So I guess when it relates to the no code, low code, you actually can get tools that previously, I think as Kylie, you mentioned earlier, you'd have to spend a boatload of money for, you would get them months or years later. By that point, the business needs to change. And in fact, one of the key drivers of citizen development,

very much overlaps with cloud computing and software as a service. You can't tell a VP of sales at a private or publicly traded company, hey, these are your goals. And then you don't give him or her the tools to accomplish those goals. That's why I write about, if memory serves me correctly, this notion of shadow IT, right? We live in an era of BYOD, right? It is dangerous in a way because of hackers and AI and deep fakes make that even more terrifying. I don't know if you guys saw maybe a month ago.

was some company got built out of $2 million because it was a very authentic looking video, you're nodding your head. Yeah, so there are downsides to that, but to me it is unacceptable to tell someone that their job is, they can't use the tools to create their job for months or years at a time and then hold them accountable to the goals that they need to accomplish, right? It'd be like saying,

Chris Kiefer (20:57.948)

of the owner, the CEO or whoever.

Phil Simon (21:19.502)

The Masters is going on right now. It's a par five. You have to get there in two. But I'm only going to give you your seven iron and your eight iron. Well, unless you're Bryson DeChambeau who just crushes the ball and it's short par five, there's no way that you're getting on in two. With my luck, I'd be lucky to get on six, but that's a different discussion. So you have to give people the tools they need to be successful, and you no longer need to know how to code. And again, AI is just accentuated.

Chris Kiefer (21:48.092)

Um, what are your thoughts on that? One of the things that we, cause are interestingly enough, our niche for Boolean is painting businesses, residential painting businesses. So we like, if you're a residential painter between three and $7 million and you're trying to grow to 15 or 20, we can change your business. Like you wouldn't believe in 90 days, it's the biggest ROI. It's crazy. And we use a lot of no code tools to do that. And then some custom development here and there, but.

The point, the reason I'm bringing that up is because I have a lot of opinions about this and I would love to have your, um, color or perspective on this, just this debate of everybody is looking for the one app that just solves all their problems. And there there's like this desire of like, Oh, we have so many apps. It's like, it's painful and everything's copying and pasted between applications. So let's just find the one app that can do the scheduling and the estimating and the CRM system. And.

project management and our accounting and just do everything. Because in my opinion, they experience like the beauty of connected interfaces with like Apple. It's like Apple products are setting this expectation of what tech should do, which is good because it tells us that I know it's possible that I do something on my phone here and it shows up on my computer and just automatically, right? But they underestimate that that was a billion dollar company that made this

interface that you're like just mindlessly using because it's so intuitive. And so they, they take that into the, their painting business and the number of businesses that have tried to build like self funded, like a $5 million, $10 million painting company that's building their own app that is, does everything. Not, not using no code like from scratch to me, I'm like, that is the most asinine thing you could possibly do. What do you have to say about that?

Phil Simon (23:45.198)

So you just totally gave me the alley and I'm going to dunk it for the oop. During my time as a college professor, I used to teach the capstone classes and the guy who runs the company that painted my house when I bought it is Doug Karras. And I'd stayed in touch with him, played around golf with him, nice guy. And when I was reaching out during the summer, I think it was 2017 for capstone projects for my students, I said, hey, you know, you want some free labor.

And the course was enterprise analytics. He goes, well, funny you mentioned that our data is a mess. And they used Google Sheets for their advertising. So when they quickly gave the students the data about which ads were working, they said, is this right? Because for, let's say they ran a Facebook ad, they didn't have it hard coded or dropped down with data validation. It was just people typing stuff in. So you'd see Facebook and FB and Fbook and...

typos and they said they couldn't do any kind of analysis because the data was just trash. And one of the recommendations they actually made was to get a proper CRM. So when the students came to me and said, it's not like this in the real world, is it? I go, oh, you poor thing. That's exactly what I thought when I was your age, because I can remember going to work at Merck and looking at this enterprise system filled with for 60 ,000 employees. I think there were 65 ,000 job codes ago. How is that even possible?

Chris Kiefer (24:59.196)

Hahaha!

Phil Simon (25:11.918)

What's the difference between admin assistant and admin period assistant? And it's because there was absolutely no control over that. So I understand why these companies want to build bespoke tools and they certainly can. I'd say this, you're 100 % right on toll fatigue and the, I think, effects of that are particularly pernicious. People lose stuff, they duplicate stuff, they spend too much money on things they don't need.

Notion and tools like it are trying to be magnet apps. And yes, it doesn't do, actually, I take that back with Notion Calendar, you actually can do scheduling. It's not, in my opinion, as robust as a tool like Calendly, but it would not be very difficult. In fact, it takes two seconds to take a Calendly link embedded in Notion. So I don't know if we'll get to a point, Chris, in which we will just use one tool, but I think that we absolutely can get to a better point in which we're not using 62. Okta.

ran a survey, I want to say two years ago about how their average client used anywhere from 70 to 150 different apps and web services. And you're justifiably raising your eyebrows, but in a large organization, you're not going to use five or seven. I don't know the right number, but in many cases you have folks, and I came across this when I wrote my book, Zoom for Dummies. You've got folks in one pocket of the organization that use Zoom and another use WebEx and another use...

Microsoft Teams, so they use Teams and Slack, or they still use different Atlassian tools. I believe that you can consolidate them and then use the native integrations or third party integrations to something like Zapier to really consolidate those notifications. I don't want an email and a badge alert from Notion, right? I don't want to. When people talk about being overwhelmed, then I just teed off on a vendor that emailed me that I was running out of a product.

and I looked into the account and said, well, I'm on auto renew. I said, oh yeah, you should ignore that email. I go, dude, what are you doing? Do you want to train your customers to ignore your emails? That's insane, right? It's conditional logic, right? If then, if customer is on auto renew, then do not send this email, right? That's not hard. Have your IT folks figure it out. As Seinfeld said, we put a man on the moon. We never should have done it because now we could say we could put a man on the moon, but we can't get a company from sending you emails. You don't need to.

Chris Kiefer (27:16.796)

Nor your, oh, yes.

Phil Simon (27:35.566)

To me, there is a technical aspect of it. And Kylie, you alluded to this before. There's also the change management and the communications aspect of it. I find it absurd that people think, well, it's my job. I'll use whatever tools you want. No. At home, use whatever tools you want. But by the same token, IT needs to step up and take a position on these tools. And if you can't use them for whatever reason, then you damn sure better have a lot of internal developers to respond to people's needs. And yeah, there is a downside of this.

Wild Wild West Notion. So these tools change so quickly, as you guys know. I really tried with the book to write more of a conceptual one that would outlast the latest ones. I saw this on Reddit the other day. It was one vendor. Is this thing even still around? And I said, I have no idea. But so much investment has gone into no code and low code tools. There'll be winners. Notion's valued at $10 billion. Airtable, I think, is even north of that. But there'll be other.

smaller ones, AI is the same thing, that will go bye -bye. So if it's a conceptual book that gets people thinking about the right ways to build apps, and I struggled with creating a taxonomy just because there's so much overlap with these tools, I just decided, I forget the quote from that one, but it was something I thought, oh, that actually applies, because it's really tough to put these tools in buckets. One of my favorite posts I've written in the last year or two on my website is,

Chris Kiefer (28:50.396)

Hmm.

Phil Simon (29:04.27)

Notion and Amoeba. Amoeba are notoriously amorphous, right? They shift and turn into different things. And I don't know what Notion or any vendors working on. I'm sure that when ChatGP Tree dropped in November 2022, a lot of them said, oh, we need to pivot, right? So who knows where they're going, but they're definitely, if you're trying to build an air proper database,

Airtable makes a lot more sense, but if you're strictly focusing on automation, I'm sure there are limits to what Airtable can do relative to Zapier because Zapier's specialty is automation.

Chris Kiefer (29:42.46)

Hmm. What would you say for the, um, uh, like I expect that niche or like, uh, one software versus niche ones. I would say that, like, I don't think that it's realistic. Not only, let's say you, it was possible to get to one app. The other part of the discussion is I feel like all of these niche applications are being developed to solve hyper specific problems in businesses that have never like, no one is conceived like, Oh, we should try and solve.

you know, automating accounts payable, uh, with AI, cause that didn't exist three years ago and now you can. So now there's a company that's trying to solve that. And then you have all these like AI scheduling tools and like just they're complex things. And I feel like many AI apps currently are still like 85 % of the way there. Like it's really impressive, but you can't just unleash it because it doesn't, it's, it's illogical and doesn't make sense. Right. So there's going to be a lot of finessing of those tools.

Phil Simon (30:18.894)

Bye.

Chris Kiefer (30:41.788)

And the need for a company to not try to do a lot, just pick something, solve it really well, and then integrate and prioritize your integration capability as a software above all else. Because if you can solve one problem and integrate with anything, that's way more valuable than trying to do 12 problems that are all solved at 70 % that no one's going to use. Cause it's terrible.

Phil Simon (31:04.974)

Right, and this gets into the chapter, it's chapter eight on philosophies. I can't tell you that there's a right one. Lowell Van de Kamps was, when I interviewed him, a friend of mine and a CIO at an education tech startup here in Arizona. And he talked about in the book, when I interviewed him, being a Microsoft exclusive shop. So if Microsoft makes it, so when you talk about one app, Chris, I don't know if we ever get there. I think it's much more common that we'll see one vendor.

But fundamentally, you're talking about things that I've seen really in the last 25 years of my career, this notion about best of breed versus vanilla. So Slack, perfect example before Salesforce bought it, best of breed communication hub, my opinion, the best one out there. And it shipped with things like private channels, which Microsoft Teams took a while. Ditto with clips, it basically loom inside of Slack, so quick asynchronous video because we don't need to have a meeting.

Right? You can watch it whenever you want. And now you throw AI on top of it. So here are the five things you missed in this clip in theory. Microsoft Teams didn't drop that until I think a year later. So if you were all in on Microsoft as a vendor, Chris, you'd say, you know what? The fleas come with the dog. But when you talk about these best of read apps that accomplish one thing and integrate, I agree with you. It is probably better to do one thing well than 15 things, 70 % well, because when it comes to accounts payable, someone who runs his own

company and has to deal with accounting, I don't want it to be 70 % accurate. I don't want it to be 99 % accurate. I want it to be 100 % accurate. But if I put on my corporate accounting bean counter hat, I might say, well, why are we paying 27 different license for 27 different tools? Is there something out there from Oracle or SAP or Salesforce that basically does it? And this is where the judgment calls come in. I can't tell you that this is the wrong philosophy.

I just know that there are different ones out there. And when I decided to write No Code, Low Code back in mid 2022, I did a quick Amazon search as any author should and saw one book out there on citizen development from the Project Management Institute. And I haven't read it. I looked through it. It's very different than the way that I write. I'm a big storyteller fan and I'm not doing any kind of certification for this book. So there's no test at the end, but.

Phil Simon (33:25.166)

That was a lot different than I wrote my project manage when I wrote my project management book because that came out in 2022 as well. And spoiler alert, it was not the first book about project management. In fact, I looked on Amazon, there were 30 ,000 books on that subject. So I asked myself, you know, what is in a very red ocean, right? What is my unique take? And very few of those books actually came out after COVID. And I don't think there was a single one with the word hybrid in it. Now, could you get.

basically the sense of project management. If you read eight or 10 other books on it, yeah, probably. But there were certain things with the prevalence of remote work that not only changed project management because things can be different if all of a sudden you're hybrid, but also, as I mentioned, increased the need for better tools. I mean, I remember sitting in meetings when someone would look at, we'd go through a Microsoft project plan and yeah, you could export to Excel and import, but it was just kind of clunky.

and not nearly as fluid as now with things being web -based. So, you know, things change and even new models and ways of working sometimes have to adapt because of a new environment.

Chris Kiefer (34:30.236)

Hmm.

Kiley (34:31.476)

I keep thinking about experiences I've had where internally someone's trying to build that one, like that perfect product does it all, all in one. They roll it out. It's horrible. It is buggy and glitchy and doesn't do what you need. And they spent millions. And so they go, use it. Now you're worse at your job. You're not as efficient. You're not as effective. You're frustrated. And if you don't have like the badge that you use their tool to do it.

then you get the slap on the wrist. And then on top of that, you're probably figuring out ways to do your job faster on the side, and then just plug in where you need to into whatever tool they botched in or forcing you to use. And I feel like you can take that story to so many businesses and say, okay, this is the story of you trying to do this on your own, either build your own tool or have one tool that does it all, or you could use low code, no code.

We could build tools that work for you and you can help with the development of them. And if they don't work, big deal. We'll figure out something else. We didn't invest millions of dollars in years and people's entire job was revolved around that. And it's just such an exciting thing to see for someone who lived in the frustration of it for so long. It was just like, I guess I roll my eyes because I'm not the owner. I don't run a giant bank or a giant tech company.

Phil Simon (35:55.534)

Yeah, it is very difficult for me to tolerate substandard tech. It's like choking me out and I can't breathe. It's just so frustrating to me knowing that there is a better way if people would just be open to it. I'm not necessarily talking about tomorrow or next week, but just the idea that this is the perfect system. And again, I spent a decade as an enterprise systems consultant. My first book is called Why New Systems Fail. I've seen as recently as 2000 and

nine green screens and people, oh no, don't touch our system. They go, it's the ugliest thing I've ever seen. There's not even a field for email address or website because this was conceived. It runs on a mainframe. Is there a mobile app? Oh no, no, no, no. And it would just far outlive its usefulness. So I agree that it is easier to create and launch these apps, but getting the buy -in is essential. And that's why I recommend things even for citizen developers, like familiarizing yourself with the software systems.

development life cycle, think it is very important to gather user requirements and to communicate with folks who are using your tool. That's great. That's on our roadmap, right? We'll launch this or I'll pick on Notion for a second, because I think it's notifications flat out suck. The idea that it tells me that a task that I already completed is due, again, reminders that don't make any sense. And there's no way to hack it. I've spent more time trying to figure it out, trying to look at, like you said, crazy formulas and...

And someone came up with a way on Reddit. Basically, if you build a separate database, you can do it. I go, wait a minute, my database needs a database to fix something that shouldn't be broken. But on the whole, Notion solves so many other issues that I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect app, even for a currugin like me. And then if you get 10 people together with different roles or different personas and different backgrounds, they might say, yeah, but does it have to be this font or why can't I do this? And I've seen people, as I'm sure you both have, get hung up on the most.

Ridiculous things really that the font is a deal -breaker. Okay, stop. We can't go live

Kiley (37:59.092)

David Lizzo.

Chris Kiefer (37:59.132)

Oh no, it's still recording for him.

Chris Kiefer (38:15.58)

Phil, come back.

Oh no. Well, it looks like it's just you and me. Let's keep talking about.

Kiley (38:23.7)

I have so much to say about Locodoco.

Chris Kiefer (38:28.38)

Um

Kiley (38:28.5)

But if he's like that fractional CTO, it's like, sorry, time is up.

Chris Kiefer (38:34.588)

All right, I'm done. You're gonna have to pay for the next 10 minutes. It's like the video game to end it. Insert more quarters.

Kiley (38:44.052)

is exactly what happened. If only escape rooms could figure out a way to harness the power. You were on a roll. That's what happened. I think graphic designers, it was some sort of typography professor heard you yelling about fonts and destroyed your connection. Up there you put fonts down.

Phil Simon (38:48.471)

I don't know what happened there.

Chris Kiefer (38:50.844)

There we go. Yes, we are very excited.

Phil Simon (38:55.543)

I know!

Phil Simon (39:05.143)

No, I was probably done with my rant and I'm sure you're, I guarantee you're better audio editors than I'll ever be. So we can just pick up where we left off.

Chris Kiefer (39:16.156)

I'm trying to restart it, just cracking jokes as soon as you left. I'm trying to remember what was the last thing that he said that was recorded. Oh yes, yes, yeah.

Phil Simon (39:22.071)

Oh, people getting hung up over fonts and just, you know, it's a report they never used. Right. And when I'd say, can you explain this to me? They'd say, Oh, it's the benefits report or the payroll report. Oh, that one. There are, there are 150 in my Google sheet. And, um, yeah, I just, I think it's essential for us as citizen developers to recognize that there is no such thing as a perfect tool. And there might be things that you could change. If you were King, I don't run notion. I w if I were the chief product.

Officer of notion that would be the first thing I'd fix but I'm not and I understand that building out enterprise Functionality and incorporating AI are important to me. It makes no sense, but I'm not willing to blow up what I've built as a product just over that because I guarantee if I switch to coda or Microsoft loop there might be another issue and I'd also argue getting back to your point Chris the vendor that's focused specifically on X

by definition, just like Slack was versus Microsoft Teams, but is going to be closer to the customer and they are going to prioritize customer feedback more than Microsoft, which is worth whatever, two and a 0 .8 or 2 .9 trillion dollars. And they make so many products, QElephant chart or Element chart, if you would, you know, they're not, they're huge and they offer integration and there might be some pricing benefits, but.

Generally speaking in my career, I've seen the smaller vendors innovate a lot faster than the larger ones.

Chris Kiefer (40:54.94)

And I just feel like it's the classic, when you, when you do, I actually did a presentation at a conference recently and I use Slack as an example. It's like, I don't know if you knew this Phil, but, uh, Slack has 2 ,500 employees and 300 developers and they're solving chat. It's like, so you have a software company that, and these are the all in ones that have 50 total employees. And let's say.

10 developers, like generously. It's like, so you guys are trying to solve 12 problems that your business needs and your customers are like, hey, this isn't working in your backlog list of like errors and things you're trying to troubleshoot is through the roof. Meanwhile, you have Slack that's just like, let's just perfect chat. Oh, by the way, it costs $8 a month per user and you get access to this, you know, $100 million tool that costs, you know.

a lot of money to develop and it works every time and it's consistent. And the, the note of like, that's the, to me, that's the, I guess I would say the future of software, you know, it used to be like, oh, desktop first, then mobile first. I think it's integration first. Integration is the only thing that matters because if you integrate well, I don't even care if you have a mobile app, cause I might not even need to use the tool cause it's all integrated and stuff is, is automatically passed to other things. But I feel like.

Any software that is not focused on how well do we integrate is gonna be dead in 10 years. I just feel like it's insane.

Phil Simon (42:26.103)

Yeah, well, it's funny you mention that because in the new book, The Nine, one of the forces that I cover is automation. And we could talk about this for hours, but to me, it's kind of a cousin of AI. And when you talk about AP automation tools, were you referring to the one from UiPath?

Chris Kiefer (42:44.316)

Makers Hub is the one I've seen. It looks really cool.

Phil Simon (42:46.551)

OK, I haven't seen the maker sub one, but UiPath had announced a tool that would effectively let you scan in invoices and it would route it to the right place. It was kind of like an automated ETL or extract transfer and load process, which goes back decades. But yeah, look, I agree. If we want to make work more meaningful, I love manually copying and pasting or typing things into multiple systems, said no employee ever.

And the tools exist, we want them to be accurate. We don't want to worry about security, but yeah, it's just, if I am evaluating a tool, I absolutely am curious about integrations and the native ones, but also to what extent they play with tools like Make or Zapier, because I guarantee there's probably some interesting thing out there. Now, if you've got some sort of legacy system and there isn't a native Zap for it or integration,

That's when, as I write in the book, you might want to call developers to hit the API and build a special blah, blah, blah. But at that point, again, just look at it from a cause point of view. Imagine going to them with just two or three very specific things that need to be solved versus none of this integrates when you can take care of a lot of it. Now, to be fair, Zapier, as you both know, can get expensive. Sometimes people say, oh, wait, how many Zaps are we doing here? So sometimes you might say, well, you know.

doesn't make sense to build versus rent. And you even see this with once .com. Do you guys know the guys behind 37 signals? So they just launched once .com. And their premise is that SaaS is bullshit. Why are you paying $8 per user per month for basically bloatware? And their first product is basically a streamlined Slack, $299. Now, you have to host it yourself, spin it up on your own servers. But you pay once, hence the name.

And that's it. Now, do I think that SaaS is dead? No. But if I go back to 1997, 1998, before the advent of modern day cloud computing, at least grid computing has been around since the early 70s, I do see, and I saw this on LinkedIn a couple of months ago, basically a bunch of CIOs going to Microsoft saying, you guys are killing us, right? Go back to that periodic table. We're paying how much per month for a user, for what tool? I mean, Microsoft alone, not to pick on them, but I'm sure they can take it. They're...

Phil Simon (45:11.511)

they're adults, there are at least to my knowledge, four different tools for managing tasks or projects. You got projects, you got lists, you got, was it OneNote? And then you have Loop, which lets you kind of like notion. And I'm probably missing one. So, you know, these big vendors again, aren't necessarily focused. I mean, for years, people have called Salesforce bloaty. They've done so many acquisitions, I think 70 or 80, that some people say, look, I don't care about all this other crap.

So go back to your painting example, there probably are folks. In fact, when I recommended Salesforce to this guy, Doug, going back to 2017, he said, I don't need 85 % of this crap. Just give me something that lets me track the houses I'm painting and where they are and sets up a schedule for me because I prefer not to zip all around Arizona if there's a logical order that minimizes gas and downtime. So that's where hopefully the consulting comes in because many times there are multiple ways of accomplishing something.

And to the extent that, go back to your TSL quote, Kylie, I mean, yeah, these vendors are absolutely keeping tabs on what they're doing. The larger ones are not generally as nimble as the smaller ones, but it's not like they're going, oh, that's not useful.

Chris Kiefer (46:22.268)

Mm.

You got something, Kylie?

Kiley (46:26.58)

Now, I'm still just like so excited about the fact that we're just gonna be able to do so much.

Chris Kiefer (46:34.012)

What do you mean by that?

Kiley (46:35.668)

We're going to be able to do so much with Airtable with these clients. I mean, we sit on client calls with anyone from a operations manager to an office manager to a first impressions coordinator for these companies. And they have been siloed in what they're doing for possibly 20, 15, 20 years. And we come to them and we say, instead of all of you having your own processes that involve absolutely ridiculous steps.

Chris Kiefer (46:38.62)

Mm.

Kiley (47:05.812)

Why don't we all talk? Why don't we create a streamlined way to do this? And then why don't we work with you to literally create the interface that you'll be working with day in and day out, 10, 20, 30 times a day to book estimates, to invoice customers. And it's just, I don't know, it feels like we've got a low -code, no -code cheerleader behind us.

Chris Kiefer (47:26.46)

Phil, I have one question about the, this is the last one. I want to make sure that you have time. We have to wrap up in the next 10 minutes anyways. Are you good for another 10? Okay. So the idea of, or this is actually related to what Kylie was just saying, but local versus global. So local pain versus global pain. So local being the employee and like how I want to make my job easier versus how do we make the company's job? Like,

as a whole easier. And the idea that generally there's a trade off of if you optimize in a silo to make your receptionist job as easy as possible with blinders on ignoring the needs of production and finance or sales and marketing or whatever, you're going to end up, this person will be super happy. And then the company like you might've cost finance 15 minutes because you forgot to ask another question on the phone. And now they're

playing phone tag, trying to get the email address for the billing or whatever. So there's that idea, but oftentimes when you come in and you change processes for people, this is something that's big on my mind is that you have to tell everybody that's going to be affected. You might have a slightly more cumbersome process in your perspective.

to do X or whatever thing you used to do that you, or maybe you didn't have to do this before, but you now have to fill out a form and submit it. But what you have to keep in mind is that we're optimizing our business, not your job, and make sure that you tie that back to the bigger picture. What other insight or knowledge do you have in those, in that realm of just thinking?

I feel like it goes in line with like start with the end in mind. Like what is it we're trying to do? Are we trying to make sales job as easy as possible? Or are we trying to optimize the business?

Phil Simon (49:20.375)

That's a great point. Unfortunately, you're never going to make everyone happy. Ideally, you're making your most important constituents happy. And if there is an adjustment, going to a new system or adopting a new process isn't completely insane. But yeah, I mean, Gandhi says action expresses priority. So if a large university maintains an antiquated process for its professors who aren't charging any overtime, right? I don't agree with it, but I understand it. If the students...

or the applicants had to go through that extra fiction and fewer applicants, meaning quite frankly, fewer dollars, then I guarantee that thing would get fixed tomorrow. So there's a great quote. I think it was Don Olmheimer from Monday Night Football. The answer to all your questions is money. And if you don't realize it by the time you're my age or certainly before then, then you'll never realize it. So look.

If you're in the product building business, then it's insane to make it difficult for people to build and ship products. If you're doing bank security, I can tell you that there are aspects of my current banking app that I don't love, but they're saying there is friction, right? We're going to make you enable multi -factor authentication, which fine, make it harder for me or for someone not me pretending to be me to get it. I get it.

So hopefully there's a little bit of maturity, but go back to something you said, Chris, about communication. I think that is essential. If you just spring it on folks, they're probably not gonna like it, but you may wanna prime them ahead of time. And I'm optimistic enough to think that if you explain the reasons and you involve folks, generally speaking, it'll go better than if you just thrust it upon them immediately. But there are folks who are flat out pissy about the fact that they had perfected their job and now they're coming up with a new system.

and they don't like it, but democracy really doesn't exist in the workplace. If you want to call your boss whatever, you can, but don't expect to be fired. So it's tricky. That's why I think change management is so essential.

Chris Kiefer (51:24.988)

Hmm. Any wrapping questions, Kylie, before we go to the closer?

Kiley (51:30.74)

If you could go back in time and tell yourself or ask yourself, like, what do I wish I did before I knew these low code, no code tools existed? Like, what would you tell yourself?

Kiley (51:49.076)

How would you get started in all this?

Phil Simon (51:52.055)

I just jumped in. I was curious enough to say, well, you know, Excel at the time could only hold 65 ,000 records, give or take, and pivot tables were cool, but it was, there were limits to things like a VLOOKUP.

I mean, look, if I wanted to be a citizen developer, I would have not gotten my master's in industrial labor relations. But in a way, I'm glad because when I got into HR, because I went to Carnegie Mellon, I was good with data and technology. I got my first computer when I was 12 and it was a Commodore 64. Don't laugh. With floppy disks, yes, those, Google them. I don't think I would really change a thing because seeing the pain that I experienced and the willingness for my colleagues to accept it was just

Baffling to me. So I was pushing the envelope and trying to see I mean I remember using Microsoft front page to try to build websites and that's not even a rock hasn't been around for I think 15 years, but I guess that I've always been a geek and You could argue and I think that's one of the myths that I cover in one of the later chapters of the book that real developers Don't use no code local tools. Of course they do right I mean Why would you build a standalone app when you can get 80 % of the way done in? 10 minutes with a notion template?

or something. I'm sure Gareth would verify this. I mean, just because you can build a proper database with Linder, MySQL, and spin it up on a server doesn't mean that you have to do that. So yeah, basically, if I can do it, anybody can. I'm not that smart.

Chris Kiefer (53:16.476)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (53:21.148)

Yeah, love it. Well, let's move to book recommendations. I'm sure as a book writer, you've read many, many books. What are your recommendations for us?

Phil Simon (53:33.271)

I just finished Fluke by Brian Klaas, K -L -A -A -S, I believe, and it was fantastic. Basically how we think we're in control and we're just not. Life is so random. I shouldn't say only, but I mostly read nonfiction and I read it five or six years ago, Bad Blood by John Kari Roo of the formerly of the Wall Street Journal about Theranos. I could not put that down. And I have to give props to my boy, Geddy Lee.

lead singer of Rush. His memoir, My F 'n Life, dropped in November and I met him twice. I've been a Rush fan since I was, I think, eight years old. Saw him 36 times in concert, give or take, and just a really good book and not one of these tell -alls that goes into the weeds as much, but just his life, particularly being a Holocaust, his parents being Holocaust survivors.

I thought I knew pretty much everything about the band because restraining orders and all that. I'm kidding, but I'm not. There was so much that I learned, but just even if you're not a fan, just how his humility and just a really good read. So I'll stick with those three. But yeah, so many.

Chris Kiefer (54:44.7)

What was the title of that last one? My effing life. How do you, is that E F F or F I N G.

Phil Simon (54:47.511)

Yeah, F in life, EF.

E -F -F -I -N, I think there's a sky comma to what the kids call it. Oh, let me throw out a fourth, because I just, I guess, got it signed. Gary Goman's book, Misfit, the standup comedian. I got to meet him again. It was very funny. I love, he is my favorite current comedian. Very nice guy. Funny story. I'm a few years younger than he is, but I could relate growing up in the 80s. So I'll give you four because I'm verbose and want to show off my mad reading skills.

Kiley (55:21.492)

He has one of my favorite jokes of all time. Yeah, when he says, my brother -in -law loves to show off when he says the Benz is in the shop, so I had to take the Beamer to work. And he goes, well, the Gio was in the shop, so I had to take the bus to work.

Chris Kiefer (55:21.755)

and

Phil Simon (55:23.255)

Which one? I know it.

Chris Kiefer (55:35.58)

Ha ha ha.

Phil Simon (55:37.463)

There's something for the listeners, Google Gary Goman state abbreviations. It is the funniest joke I've probably ever heard. Other comedians have covered the joke. I'm not kidding. It's about a, yeah, it's... State abbreviations. It's, I can't do it justice, but, and try to see the, listen to the full thing, because you can watch clips of it online, but the full, I think it's a 10 minute joke, stories within stories from the stories.

Chris Kiefer (55:49.596)

What's the joke? I missed that. I was writing down the books. State abbreviation.

Chris Kiefer (56:05.66)

I'm so pumped.

Phil Simon (56:05.847)

And the world is so messed up right now. It's just, you have to laugh. And it's definitely not for everyone, but if you appreciate very sophisticated humor, he's awesome.

Chris Kiefer (56:17.66)

Are you a, where like Nate Bargatze? I don't know how you know Kylie, I don't know. No, no, no, no, not definitely not. Nate Bargatze is, he's been growing in popularity, but he's like 100 % clean. Just like really, I think he's like the most clever comedy and he doesn't, I don't know, I haven't heard of Gary Goldman, which I kind of am embarrassed about, but I'm gonna go watch this. But I was just curious how those two,

Phil Simon (56:22.423)

Oh, that's the guy without the shirt, the gut, right?

Kiley (56:25.108)

No.

Phil Simon (56:27.639)

Who's that?

Chris Kiefer (56:46.524)

The way you were describing him, it sounds like, yeah, it's just.

Phil Simon (56:50.231)

I'll check him out. I'm always looking for a good recommendation, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Kiefer (56:53.724)

Yeah.

Kiley (56:54.42)

Nate gives off like John Heffron vibes, if you remember that guy from like about 15, 20 years ago.

Chris Kiefer (57:01.66)

Awesome, well, favorite movie.

Phil Simon (57:06.615)

between Memento and the Usual Suspects. I like movies that hurt your head.

Chris Kiefer (57:10.652)

Oh, Memento. I'm in both of those. The usual suspects was, that's one of those movies where you're like, I got it, I figured it out. Nope, you just.

Phil Simon (57:17.879)

Yeah, so two quick stories. I met an actress in a coffee shop from Memento. She has a very small part, played Sammy Jenks's wife, Harriet something. She was on Frasier. She was on Broadway. I talked to her for a few minutes. I said, I'd say spoiler, but that movie came out in, I think, 2000. So if you haven't seen it 24 years later, you're not going to see it anyway. So we had this conversation. And then the next day in the Starbucks, I saw her again. I was going to go up to her because if you've seen the movie, it's all about, wait, what just happened.

I didn't though, and then with Usual Suspects, when I lived in Brooklyn, I actually met and talked to Gabriel Byrne for about 10 minutes. Could not have been nicer. This is for a smartphone, so I have a picture of it that I scanned and it looks totally fake because there's Gabriel Byrne in a gray suit with a pink shirt looking very stoic, and there's me in shorts and a t -shirt like this, just completely stoked because I meet Miller's Crossing. Yeah, so yeah, those are probably my two favorite flicks.

Chris Kiefer (58:12.156)

And what is your preferred method of contact if someone wants to get in touch with you?

Phil Simon (58:17.847)

LinkedIn works, but also PhilSimon .com has got a contact for him. I'm off Twitter because it's a mess and I dropped Facebook in 2017. I tend to think that social media is a necessary evil, but to me, it just gets so toxic. A LinkedIn is civil. People can disagree without it going from zero to 10 and I know where you live and that kind of thing. So yeah, LinkedIn or my website works.

Chris Kiefer (58:43.388)

Are you a Cal Newport fan?

Phil Simon (58:45.367)

So funny you should mention that I liked Deep Work. His writing, I think, is a little stilted, but he's an academic. And as far as academics go, he's actually pretty good because most academics can't write very well. I didn't hear great things about his most recent book because I heard it was a bit of a retread. Was it Slow Productivity?

Kiley (59:07.508)

Something along those lines.

Chris Kiefer (59:07.58)

Yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't read it.

Phil Simon (59:09.111)

Yeah, so deep work I read and I liked, but some of the other ones I just didn't like as much. And, but yeah, very smart guy. I've read a lot of, apart from the books, he does a lot with the Atlantic or the New Yorker. I will take issue with him. I wrote a fairly long post on my website, maybe three years ago, in defense of Slack because Newport mistakenly conflates Slack with email. And there are so many different ways we're talking about notifications with Notion before that.

It's not a binary. There are so many ways with keywords and different devices and different times and muting channels. And I actually will mute people. I used to mute students. Slack added that. So it's easy for us to blame the technology because the tech can't blame us back. But fundamentally, we have some degree of agency over the tools that we use. I've got the ultimate option when it comes to Slack. I can hit quit. And then it's not going to launch itself and start notifying me.

So the fact that something is bugging me, I agree with him, yes, you can't get any quality work done if you're constantly being pestered. And that's hardly his, and he doesn't claim that it is his discovery. If you go back to Flow by Mikhail Chik sent me high, who I think died about a year and a half ago. He did just groundbreaking research. If I want to talk about another book, Flow, the psychology of optimal performance or something, don't quote me on that.

But fantastic book about how, and people say, how can you write so many books? I say, well, I'm up early and when I'm writing, I'm hitting F6 on my Mac, which is do not disturb mode. So unless it's an absolute emergency, I'm zoned in. The idea that you can write a book, I've got 10 minutes here. Okay, I've got an hour. Let me just text. No, you just can't do that. And in Ditto for Citizen Developers, I think it makes sense to actually sit down. And if you're building an air table base,

Chris Kiefer (01:00:54.332)

Hmm.

Phil Simon (01:01:02.743)

then maybe you want to learn a few things about data modeling because you can build whatever nonsense you want. I guarantee you if you give someone not very experienced in database development air table, they'll make mistakes or you'll go, wait, why is this duped or why is this in four different places? Why isn't this here? How come I can enter whatever I want for a zip code and including letters? That doesn't make any sense.

Chris Kiefer (01:01:19.1)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (01:01:27.292)

Yeah. Well, Phil, this was fun. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. This was good. And if for any aspiring automation people, you can go check out Phil's book here. And thanks so much for coming on.

Phil Simon (01:01:41.655)

Chris, Kylie, I really enjoyed it. Thanks. Hey Ken.

Kiley (01:01:43.828)

Thanks, Bill.