The Pixilated Podcast

Ep. 100 | Interview | Patrick Rife & Nicolas China

October 10, 2020 Patrick Rife | Alex McGlynn | Nicolas China Season 1 Episode 100
The Pixilated Podcast
Ep. 100 | Interview | Patrick Rife & Nicolas China
Show Notes Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the Pixilated Podcast. I’m Patrick Rife and today we’re going to talk with Patrick Rife & Nicolas China.

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Alex McGlynn:

Hello and welcome to a special, special 100 episode Anniversary Edition. The Pixilated Podcast. So today I am going to be interviewing Pixilated co founders, Nic China, spelled China and Patrick Rife. So, yeah, we've done 100 episodes Can't believe we've already made it here. It seems like we just started this. Yeah, just just a couple months ago. But here we are. And we thought it would be cool to give our listeners a little bit of a history about Pixilated. The two men behind the company and kind of what they've seen change in the industry and what they think is coming. So I guess just to kick it off, could you each just introduce yourselves? Sure. Tell us a little bit about yourself, if you will.

Patrick Rife:

Sure. My name is Patrick Rife. I am the co founder and CEO of Pixilated. Nic and I started Pixilated nine years ago, and I have worn a ton of different hats over the years. As has Nic, I think we tend to trade almost everything in some capacity or another back and forth. But my, my, whatever, shall we call it my core kind of responsibilities are heading up, like marketing and messaging and kind of how we how we go to market from like a an outbound messaging point of view, Business, Business Development, a lot of our partnerships, a lot of just kind of getting it out there and, and hearing what people have to say about it making connections for us, I guess.

Nicolas China:

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that covers it pretty well. I'm Nic China. I am also a co founder, and I'm the CEO of Pixilated. My role, much like Pat's over the over the last nine years has kind of been wearer of all hats and you know, but I would say that my core role right now is is mainly strategy product and kind of having a grasp of all the data points across the across the company, and understanding what we should be doing based on the feedback I'm getting from these two, as they're venturing the new products out into the world.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah, you should see what you do as well, since we're such a small team would be,

Alex McGlynn:

yeah. All right. So I am the I My name is Alex McGlynn. I'm the VP of growth. So basically, it's a fancy way of saying that I am heading up everything that is revenue generating. So our sales strategy, our outreach strategy, the way that we're positioning our products in the marketplace. And, you know, trying to work with past to identify new verticals, or areas where our various tools and solutions could be helpful and impactful and help people's lives a little bit easier. I've only been on Pixilated for a little over a year. So I've not worn that many hats. But like anyone who works at startup, I've had a whole lot of interesting experiences, including now podcast host so often really appreciate you guys introducing introducing yourselves. I'd be curious, can you guys just share a little bit about the the origin story of Pixilated like how you decided to start the company? Why photobooths? before?

Nicolas China:

Yeah, so patent we have our kind of our, our way in, is in exactly the same. I know Pat, and his his wife had had an idea to do something similar to what the origin of Pixilated was, many, many years ago, I guess they kind of took a stab and it didn't really materialize. Fast forward, I don't know, maybe. But a year or two later, I was actually at a wedding friend of mines wedding in Chicago with a photo booth thought it was a great idea. Long story short, we got introduced by a mutual friend, my brother in law, and we kind of started it as a side hustle with the idea let's build a really cool photo booth rented out for for events to have really high quality charge a premium price point. And I think the for me and I think for them to at the time was was kind of jailbreaking from our day jobs. So it was you know if we could slowly but surely get a product out there and layer on sales, you know, and then just kind of figure it out as we go then, you know, we could phase out of our day jobs. So, you know, at the beginning I was the first one to jump ship, and then pat came on board. And we kind of had a full blown business with with Little to no revenue, but you know, a whole lot of potential that was going to be based in the wedding space and the corporate event space, doing photo booths. At the beginning, I joke with Alex, he said, You know what, what has changed? I said, one of the biggest things that has changed is that touchscreens are no longer squishy. So back when we started nine years ago, tablets, and phones, you know, there, they were not ubiquitous. And so we were hacking things together, using all kinds of technologies. And, you know, we bootstrapped it. And we organically, you know, just kind of chunked it up to about a half a million dollars in revenue over, you know, the first three years or so. And we're, you know, adding people adding photo booths, adding people adding photo booths growing and growing and growing. I think that that's kind of the approach we've always taken is like, you know, just like, just level up and level up and level up, and, and then along the way, you know, we we hit some pretty serious plateaus that we had to get across. So we've pivoted a couple times. And, you know, that's, that's kind of it, there's probably a lot you can layer in there. But nine years is a lot to say, yeah,

Alex McGlynn:

that's fair.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, like the, the way to fast forward through a lot of that, all those middle years, you know, and I think what's interesting now, as we know, we started out as two people, and between now, and then we have, you know, we've employed, you know, well over 100 people, and at times, our staff was, you know, if you look at full time, and part time, it was it was up near, you know, near above 30 people. And now we are, we're fundamentally back to having three kind of core people. So we've gotten very much Full Circle Circle, I think that, you know, probably what brings us to where we are now, which is, through the tried and true kind of just doing, you know, hundreds and hundreds of events, annually, we we started to build a base of a lot of business clients. But also, we just started to see a lot of scale. And in those two challenges, with trying to scale the the lack of the technology being as forward thinking as we thought it would be, and made it very expensive and very challenging to scale and very manual. And then for our business clients, we saw a lot of opportunities to take the photo ops that we were designing for them in their their public facing events, and to make the data that we were capturing on their behalf, able to do more for them by integrating it into their, you know, their CRM, or their databases or their email marketing platforms. So that is what inspired the whole second half of our existence. And I think that's probably more what we'll get into here. But But I think that there's probably though the beginning in the Middle Passage of what Pixilated has been like,

Alex McGlynn:

yeah. So I actually would like to maybe dive into the the first pivot that you made a little bit deeper. And just so our listeners know, the original photobooths, that Pixilated was using, we're on someone else's software, a lot of the hardware kind of had to be, as Nick said, hacked together. If you've ever been to the Pixilated office, you've probably seen the giant aluminum monstrosities that used to be our photo kiosks. They were very big and very heavy. Things have gotten technologies come a really long way. But kind of to that point about technology coming a long way. Where was the the aha moment that took you off from kind of just a photobooth vendor to also being a software company?

Patrick Rife:

God, I mean, I feel like it's, and like, I think we'll probably add color to every question, because we do. While there's a ton of similarities, we also see a lot of different points of view. I mean, there are so many inflection point that I think about, I mean, just in hearing you phrase that question. You know, I don't know that this is the aha moment. I remember pulling CSV files and sending them to big brands, and then not doing anything with it. I mean, frustrated. But I mean, we were just also, we were always so aggressive with trying to kick the tires and hear what people like thought. And one of the things that we did was, I think it was after I had after I had Emmet. And I wasn't able I wasn't trying to network at night as much and I started looking to try and figure how to network during the day and I found tech breakfast through that. And I went to one and saw what it was about, which is basically just people pitching business ideas. And at the end of the first one, I asked the organizer if like I could pitch like our you know, our data capture photo booth concept and he thought it was awesome. And then offered let me book and pitch it everyone that existed. So I just started going and like setting a photo booth out in front of a room of a bunch of investors and just being Like this, what we're doing, we're capturing email addresses, and I would get to the q&a. So they could start asking questions because it showed me what these people with bigger ideas were seeing and what we were bringing to, and I would come home from everyone and be like, yo, like, they asked this question and this question and this question, and it really gave us, you know, some validation with where we thought we saw things going. I mean,

Nicolas China:

yeah, so I think, you know, it's it is it is a bit twofold. So there was, there was the potential and the discovery and all of that, that was happening with like, you know, what the customers were finding valuable, and you know, what we wanted to be able to deliver to them. But there was also a huge operational pain point of, you know, we had big, expensive, heavy equipment we had, at that time, I think, this is about 2017, we had, we had 24, photo booths of staff of event staff of 25 plus people. And each photo booth had its was was locally, you know, the software was local to each machine, right, so 24. So over the course of a weekend or week, if we did, you know, 20 events, then every, each one of those machines needed to get, you know, basically pulled apart, the files all had to get downloaded, the photos all had to get uploaded, the all the follow up to the customers, you know, was was happening manually. So we were, we were very people heavy, and we were needing more and more infrastructure. And it didn't make sense to us why the, the management of the photo booths couldn't be in the cloud. So we had this idea that if we built a photobooth management platform that was cloud based, then we could also dictate the features, the deliverables, all the all the different things that the customers were wanting, and we could, we could build it with an API so that the information was traveling in real time, so that the correspondence could, could happen without us having to have you know, people sending emails, or making phone calls. And, you know, we had multiple photobooth pecks, and their job was just like flipping these machines and getting them ready for the next event. And, you know, we would have problems out on site. And as you can imagine, you know, drunk people, knocking things over jamming printers. And the tech support got really difficult when you couldn't remote into a machine. So it was it kind of just all made sense. But for us to hire developer, and kind of go that route and make the company more scalable. We knew we had to raise money. So that, you know, at that time, that was when Pat started pitching tech for breakfast. And that was kind of the first foray into transitioning toward being more of a tech company that had a, you know, a service based deliverable, and it was kind of like, it was pretty organic, how it happened, because it was the same business we'd always been doing, but we just now had a much more powerful tool. And, you know, that ended up kind of saving us and we, the company went through a bunch more iterations even since then, since 2017, with COVID, and everything coming along recently, but um, I think we're going to get into that, too. So that's, that's kind of, you know, how, how I, you know, remember, pivot number one.

Alex McGlynn:

Fantastic. So I'm curious. When you all decide to kind of make this transition to put everything into the cloud was the initial idea kind of out of the gate to try and get big brands to use this for their activations? When did you ever have any kind of secondary thoughts about becoming like a vendor photobooth company other photo with companies?

Nicolas China:

We we kicked it around a little bit, but the market for that just seemed too, too small. It seemed like, you know, the we were looking at we were working with, for instance, the Baltimore Ravens, right. And we thought, Okay, well, you know, as as the photo as the big photobooth machines turned into, effectively tablets with with cameras tethered. We thought well, how can we, you know, deploy these kiosks as installations, for venues for stadiums, something that sponsors could activate through or that the brands could could use to aggregate consumer data. And so we were looking at you know, how can we get these installed in Raven stadium throughout all the suites? You know, how can we, you know, put these in concert venues and, you know, we started looking at it like, like a count, like an enterprise software platform that needed hardware to facilitate kind of the, the experience. And so we developed a SaaS model. And so we started, we, we stayed in the events business, and we were still very, very heavy in how that was working. But as the hardware was evolving, and the software was evolving, and, you know, the the ubiquity of the touchscreen, was was working in our favor, and Wi Fi being everywhere, you know, at the beginning, it's like, you know, we would go there was no Wi Fi at venues, yeah, nine years ago. So So, you know, we started looking at it like that, how can we, you know, as we had scaling problems with people, how could we keep the team tight and focused, and utilize the software and the things that we had built to, to kind of leverage that forward, and then, you know, we had some secondary and tertiary revenue streams that we were able to build on top of that core. I think

Patrick Rife:

the other thing that's really true there, as well, as there have been times where we have, like, we, we are a photobooth company, so we do engage with the community in some capacity. But I think the, the idea that we saw that validated, building a platform was really like the value propositions of it for us were about like scale and data connectivity. And typically, if you're creating software that is really for like the, you know, direct to consumer, you know, photobooth industry, they're very focused on user facing, like, Windows features, if you will, and we really wanted to be focused on you know, like, business and, and, and data value kind of features. And then I think the other side of it is that we wanted to be able to use, like the newest of technology. So from the very jump, we were building on Android, and we were building with Sony mirrorless cameras, and neither of those two things exist inside of the photo booth marketplace. So for us to go in and to win photo booth companies, we would, you know, we will be asking them to basically take all of the hardware that they had already bought, and to throw it out, because they weren't gonna be able to use their DSLR camera, or they weren't gonna be able to use a PC, or they weren't gonna be able to use their traditional kiosks. So, you know, it was taking us off of the roadmap for where we wanted to go install a big opportunity being and there was just all of this kind of lock in that was there with a buyer set that doesn't have just, you know, like an untapped amounts of cash to be able to say, like, okay, like, I'm switching my whole system over it just, it wasn't really right for that.

Alex McGlynn:

That makes a ton of sense. I mean, yeah, if the, if any industry is lagging behind, and technology makes it very difficult to, to break in, especially when it's a very expensive hardware. So this is kind of a loaded question. But I'm genuinely curious. So obviously, you both had a good idea of what you are trying to accomplish and what you thought the market would would accept or what the market would be interested in. So what are some things that you were right about? Maybe what were some things you were wrong about? What have you learned along the way, as you kind of made that transition from traditional photobooth vendor to more of a photoactivation? data aggregation software company?

Patrick Rife:

Yeah, well, that's like, three different questions in there. I think what we were, I think what we were right about was recognizing that we were definitely right about putting the whole operational system in the cloud. That was definitively right. But that's not like, that's not a stretch, you know, like, everything should be cloud based, obviously. You know, like, I think where we were, you know, I don't know if it's fair to say we were wrong about it. But I do think that were some of our ideas that we thought could be the big anchor ideas for are still further out than the market has even traveled at this point. You know, like we have built integrations with our software platform, and Salesforce, and we have built integrations with our software platform, and MailChimp, and a handful of other platforms as well. And the use cases for those we thought that we could have them be very scaled up very quickly, we thought it would be like a very obvious value proposition. But the reality is, is when you're selling into a company that is using Salesforce, the you know the the people that are responsible, you know, there's a dozen of them who are responsible for the whole arc of data entry to how that data gets used. And finding the right person that that makes sense with, they can see it from an efficiency point of view. Like it's just much broader problem that is and then in, you know, at the same side, like that's a very coveted, coveted and delicate resource for them. So it's not slapdash. You know, like they're, they're not as quickly going to just choose to integrate it because it seems like a good idea. I think people validated the good idea. And it would they weren't able to do is say, okay, not only do I think this is a good idea, but I know all the stakeholders, I need to pull around and convince them as well. So that way we can scale it up.

Nicolas China:

Yeah, yeah. And I think on top of it, too, I think we, at least I had had this assumption that these these, like huge enterprises, had had a great handle on their data and how they were using their data, and how and like, I just assumed it was much more organized, and, and come to find out, like, you know, it's, the information in these big organizations is oftentimes all over the place. And, you know, you may talk to one person who sees it one way, and another person who sees it another way, but they're the same company or another, like massive company that you think has some great idea about how they're using their data, and they're coming to you like, I don't even know what to do with it,

Patrick Rife:

or we're broke, we put in the junk drawer like, yeah, I mean, we've been told by

Nicolas China:

my boss tells me I need to collect it, you know, like, so, you know, we were running into this, like, disconnect of what we thought versus what was actual. And I think I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's business in a nutshell. Solve someone's problem. And when you're trying to solve a problem that isn't like, the is like a secondary problem? Yeah, it becomes difficult. I think

Patrick Rife:

another mistake that we made early on in selling the software was really wanting it badly, to be turnkey, and to be SAS. And we, in an effort to do that, we took a ton of our firsthand knowledge out of the value that we were selling to our clients. And I think that if we hadn't done that, I think that like a consultative package would have one it would have, it would have made us more money. And two, it would have made all of our clients using the technology use it more effectively. But like we, we didn't realize how critical that was, we didn't realize how much we needed to be 100% on board. And instead, we really wanted to show them, like you've been using us for years, at 12 events a year. And we've now made this super easy. So you can manage it and run it yourself. And it's more affordable. So you can do it at 36 events a year. And we were very eager to get to that point, without realizing that, you know, a part of the reason that they brought us in for 12 events a year. You know, part of it was the product, but part of it was the insight and the understanding that we brought to make their event better. Like when we would work with GNC, they would listen to us full stock. And when we would say no, like, let's do this, let's stage it like this, like this should be the messaging and and I think that we underestimated how important that would be. And instead, we thought we got to a place where the tool was so simple, and that they knew what they were, I think Nick is really write about that to like the assumptions that you make about a real big company and how they're, I mean, I can remember pitching and being like, yeah, like, when we go to this kind of event for you, like we can tag all the people. So they look like this in your back end. And like when we go to this type of event, like we can tag it like that. And they would say, Man, that sounds really good. But like, just like to be honest with you, we're not organized like that, like we couldn't, like they're there, those wouldn't map in the back end for us, because like, we take all of our data, and we stick it in something we call the junk drawer, and we don't do anything with it. So

Nicolas China:

that's Yeah, I think, also, and this is the problem we've been trying to solve since our inception was the hardware, the hardware issue, you know, the hardware devices, you know, everything is always the technology is consistently changing, the operating systems are changing, you know, the, the physicalness of it, being able to break and, you know, and, you know, consistently trying to, to make sure that what we were doing was on the bleeding edge and, you know, staying ahead of the curve to, to be able to, you know, deploy our business model in as many in as many ways as possible with with the least amount of lift. And the hardware problem was something we have always come across. I think, even just just a couple of years ago when we were when we were doing our micro ventures raise, I mean, one of the whole ideas around us raising more money was so we could kind of build out this roadmap to eliminate hardware or make make our, our software and applications available on more types of hardware. And I mean, actually, it's it's what led us to which we're, I'm sure going to get to the COVID pivot. But our pivot that happened when everything went remote and virtual was was kind of a forcing our hand and saying, okay, maybe what you should do is just eliminate the hardware altogether. So we'll, we'll get into that. But I think the hardware problem is something is still unsolved. But

Alex McGlynn:

yeah, I agree. I think the hardware problem exists for pretty much any company that has that attached to its its software, I mean, hardware is advancing so quickly and so rapidly, that it's kind of just hard to stay ahead of the curve. And also to keep your, your your fleet of kiosks or whatever it might be vehicles, in some cases, ahead of that technology curve and making them stay relevant. I also for what it's worth as a as an outside perspective has not been in the game quite as long as you all have, I think you're spot on about maybe being just a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of kind of the idea of using a photo booth or anything like that, to try and capture consumer data by Do you think now that things like GDPR, and the new California laws, and probably the forthcoming kind of nationwide laws around spamming, and you're right to interact with folks is going to force a lot of companies to rethink the way that they are getting their consumers to opt in to communicate with them first. So I guess, to that point, where things are going, obviously, this isn't a secret for anyone. In mid March, the events industry got turned around on its head. And pretty much every events company that wanted to stay relevant had to make some pivot or another. So I would love to hear more about kind of both of your perspectives on what has shifted in the marketplace, and kind of how your day to day has changed. And what you think the impact has been up to this point.

Patrick Rife:

Going to go first.

Nicolas China:

Um, so I'll just I'll just kind of dive into the story of, you know, like, what, what, when COVID hit in March, and kind of, you know, what we went through? So, right, right off the jump. As you know, events started to cancel our entire operation turned into just like an administrative, like, how do we cancelled postponed refund? Like, what are our policies around this? How do we, you know, it was a bit of a nightmare. We weren't sure how we were going to make money. I mean, our revenues went completely to zero, and everybody went home, and we weren't sure how long was going to be before. So actually, we had, we even had had to lay Alex off for a couple of weeks until the PPP loan came through. And, you know, we were able to manage with some government assistance to kind of open the doors back up, but we changed the whole company around like, like, like everyone else at this juncture. But we were then at a point where we had no product to sell, right. And we had been considering the idea of, you know, to solve our hardware problem that I was talking about earlier, to run our application, our photobooth application in, in, in or on a web browser, which would make it available from any device that had the internet and web browser on it. So pretty much every device, so phones, computers, tablets, and we had thought if we could do that

Unknown:

back up, and

Patrick Rife:

a link could go out.

Nicolas China:

Oh, yeah. So a link could go out that QR code that was clickable, and anybody from their phone or computer that work from home setup, could access, you know, the photobooth experience with kind of all the bells and whistles that we've we've always had with our stuff, you know, filters and graphic overlays the ability to share and send the photos to two phones. And we thought, Well, you know, if we do this, you know, how are we going to deploy it. You know, it takes a lot of the friction away because you don't have to download any kind of app. There's no external camera that has to be tied into it. And we figured if we could you know if we could find a In a market for it, then it would make our operation incredibly scalable. Because you know, all it is, is it's all on the power of a single link. And that goes out. And, you know, you don't need 100 people in a room, tapping on a screen sharing this one machine, which has fun and everything, but now, you know, it could go out to a global conference. And so we thought, Well, you know, the industry we know, is events, and that whole industry has just tanked. And that it was kind of rebirthing, as, you know, virtual events and virtual events became a thing virtual happy hours, sip and paint, his virtual summits and conferences, we thought, Well, if people are spending money in those spaces, like we know, those, those are our customers. So you know, we have a 10,000 contacts in our CRM, like, let's start there, and just start to back channel, like, Hey, would you guys be interested in this, like, we're coming up with this thing that we call PixiWeb, it's going to be a virtual photobooth. It's going to be all about, you know, in engagement, and, and, you know, keeping people excited and having fun through these hard times. And, you know, we saw that as kind of like the first line in and then, as we developed the, the product, we realized, there are so many more applications outside of the events industry, that, you know, are untapped. So we sit here today, after going through this, like massive pivot that was forced upon us. And I I know for me personally, it was it was scary, but totally invigorating. Now, we're like a complete software company that has a ton of potential and a whole lot of, you know, unchartered waters waters, again, to pioneer. And for me, and I know, for Pat, too, it's been, it's been really fun kind of getting back to work. And, you know, going back to square one, and like, becoming a new startup, you know, rising out of the ashes, Pat has that Phoenix tattooed on his arm. So there's a symbol.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah, I mean, so I think that like, just just to add on to that, and honestly, like, it's what I was gonna say all along, is what your last point is, and it ties back to like, things that we did wrong. And definitely something that we did wrong. From our very first dollar raised up until up until COVID. Up until March 1, was, we tried to do too much. And that is, that speaks to I think, Nick, and my ambition, and when really what we think is his potential out there. Like, I think that we've always had really, very, very strong aspirations for for what we could accomplish with Pixilated. But we also only knew what we knew. And what we didn't know enough of was when to just tell people No, including ourselves, no, and to do less. So. You know, like, we have, even though over the last five years, we have lessened and less than what we were focusing on, not at the scale that we should have done it. And what COVID did was, you know, like, for the last two years, we've dreamed about wanting to embrace, growing a technology company, and really being that company and the things that we're interested in from growth, strategy and philosophy, it all speaks to that specific thing. But we always had this staff services company that just kept us from being able to completely focus on what we wanted to do. And that was in large part because we were reliant on it, we needed the revenue from that to continue to help us power into the future. But the irony of it is that revenue was the number one thing that was holding us back from actually realizing what our potential was as a technology company. So when COVID hit, you know, like Nick mentioned, we had thought about PixiWeb, more as a digital marketing tool for PixiCloud for a long time, and definitely like a way to leave the hardware behind. But when, you know, when when March hit, and we kind of realized what was going to happen, like we knew that we were definitely in the ashes. And hopefully we were going to rise from we had a point of view, but even more so we could defacto say that our staff services weren't going to help us for a year or two. And with that being said, we just kind of drew a line in the sand. And we said, We're not going back into that, like from this point on, we're exclusively going to embrace this idea of being a technology company. And that has been just it's been tremendously freeing one because we have all of this like knowledge that we've been acquiring that we just, it didn't match the model, like our ideas that we wanted to try didn't match our business model. And now that we have really gone through the whole thing? It's given us like a tremendous lease on how to approach our business and what what to do?

Unknown:

Yeah, yeah, I mean,

Nicolas China:

in April, when we decided to, you know, put the strategy together to come back to work in some capacity and develop PixiWeb and move to, like, hey, what can we do remotely and start cranking out content like this podcast, you know, we knew that we had to basically build it up from from nothing, that we knew, you know, basic math that we had till October to get it figured out. And here we sit on October 9, and not that it's all figured out, but it's, we have, we've built more runway onto the end of that through revenue revenue, all produced by the new product. And the early signs are that, you know, the trajectory we're on is, is is, is the path we need to keep? And I think, you know, it's part of me is kicking myself, like, why didn't we just rip the band aid off and, you know, change the whole business, but like it, you know, it's really difficult to do that, you know, but, but, you know, once once the business gets killed by an external factor, you know, luckily, we had, we had enough time and resources to keep something afloat, and, you know, now it's climbing back up, and the revenue from PixiWeb is nearly doubling each month. And, you know, it doesn't, like Aleksey said the other day, it doesn't seem a lot like a lot when it's 100 bucks to 200 bucks to 400 bucks, but when it's going 6000 to 12,000, to 24,000, then, you know, all of a sudden, it's like, wow, if we can keep this going, and then start to layer in other models of how we can how we can make money, not just through event instance, instances, but through, you know, long term, you know, investing in websites and, and, and building more features onto the platform for other engagement tool, not just, I know, you guys talk about it in other podcasts a ton, but you know, like, the ability to offer other engaging things, and then, you know, trying to not be too foolish that like Cove is not gonna be here forever. So like, what comes next? And how do we how do we move past into the next phase, whether it's hybrid events, or becoming more of a, having a web tool offering widget, you know, iframe so so people can use this tool for portfolios on their website. You know, one thing we're good at is building things to be very simple and easy to use. And I think that products today, especially technology, tends to be over complicated at first, I think, with our experience, doing that kind of stuff, and being agile along the way, is going to set us up to be in a really good position. I think, you know, you know, six months from now, I think we'll be looking back at COVID saying that, you know, while it was, you know, it's terrible, like the pandemic side of it, but for for our business, you know, it was the kick in the ass that we needed to turn things around.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah, yeah,

Alex McGlynn:

you know, it's funny, you know, we You talk a lot about the things that maybe you got wrong or that you didn't expect, you didn't see coming. But it's interesting to me that the core principle of what Pixi cloud was supposed to be still remains true. Using photos and shared memories, and online photo galleries to bring people together and get in get data collected for large brands and get brands engaging with their customers in a meaningful way. Yeah, is still true. So maybe the hardware side was a little bit more of complication than initially anticipated. But again, the basic concepts still holds true. And I think a rise out of the ashes of COVID. Post the, or the events industry after kind of COVID went into full swing is a testament to that fact that the core strategy still holds true. And we just had to take a slightly different tack to get there.

Patrick Rife:

What we got right was, was not being like this is what our businesses because if we had never been on this, I mean, like we've been searching for here for years and years and years to find where we deliver Pixilated to like a broader opportunity. And you know, like it, we're not there yet, like, and we've blown it a lot along the way. But if we had never said, we can do something bigger than this, then where we would be right now. And I and I mean no derogatory ness at all, whether I'm talking about photo with companies or just event companies that are services based in the industry altogether, but like, we were incredibly lucky to have something to talk about and have something to say, Okay, what are we building our next phase upon? And there are literally thousands of companies out there, that they didn't take that perspective. And, you know, like, hopefully all of them are going to make it through hopefully, when the events industry powers back up, and they're back to their, their being able to serve live without products. You know, like, they'll still be afloat. But for us, if that had been our situation, we would be out of business. Like we would definitely be out of business. Yeah.

Alex McGlynn:

So you said earlier that you viewed at least Well, during the transition period, you viewed Pixilated as a photo with company, do you still think Pixilated is loaded with dotnet? No,

Patrick Rife:

no, but only just and that hasn't, you know, so much of this, I think, you know, it's, it's very relevant to say that you can't discount the eye of the beholder in the moment, you know, like, sometimes you just can't see what you can't see. And the value really, when we started Pixilated, the value proposition that we started on was we were very, very early in the opener, photobooth movement, we were very, very early in the use of DSLR, that is set up properly and you understand it, and is using, like an alien be set top, you know, like studio quality flash, like that color at the beginning, we were a quality product inside of that space. And it's that was a long thing to forget, right. And then like, eight years later, we're like, if we can just run it on a tablet and use like the device camera. And from a selling proposition like that, it messes with your head a bit. Despite the fact that like, you know, tablet cameras are awesome now, and they can do really, really tremendous things. But it's, the reality of the technology is not always what it means inside of the marketing and the branding for a company. So for me, it was just very hard to let it go, even though I mean, I feel like for seven years, we were always punching above our weight and having people tell us like, God, like I just wish the thing that you guys sold was something I could buy more frequently. Like, I just went and like we didn't hear that and think to ourselves, like we need to, we need to like re jigger our offerings. So like, you know, when we thought about rejiggering, we were like, well launch a whole marketing company, which is what we should have done. And we should have just figured out how to be bigger for them and to be a little bit less singular and how we were presenting ourselves. But, you know, I don't So to answer your question. No, I don't think of us as a photobooth company anymore. At all.

Alex McGlynn:

So let's focus on the the singularity, and not when computers, Eclipse humans. But like the singularity of the product, that we were, that you were kind of pushing ahead where we are now. So for those of you who don't know, we have two different sides of our business here at Pixilated. So we have our virtual engagement tools. And then we also have shippable, photo kiosks that can be sent pretty much anywhere in North America, and are great for you know, in person events when they come back, where you want to be able to have a photo kiosk set up without having all of the other things tied to typical photo with experience. And they can be installed in venues, restaurants, museums, things of that nature. And they all kind of work. They're also cloud based. So again, two different sides of the business that are both pretty healthy considering everything that's happening with COVID. So I'm curious, what do you think is the future of those two product lines? And where do you see things going from here? In terms of expanding our offerings to our clients?

Nicolas China:

Yeah. So the first thing that I think about, you know, after many, many years of, you know, having a hairball of an operation is you know, how, how can we hit our criteria or like now, when as we evolve, like, how do we scale it? How many people need to be involved in scaling it? Right? And then like, you know, how self service are set it and forget it, can we make it so like the photo booths that we rent now. And then we have two versions, one with a really great camera, one with a camera not quite as good. They get shipped out, they get ordered through e commerce, they get shipped out out the door with pre paid shipping. The there's, there's not like a whole lot of variables, right? So it's a very simple operation. You know, not a ton of customization. It's like, you know, if somebody wants it, it's a couple of clicks away. And on the operation on our side for fulfillment, it's just like any shipping facility, we print out shipping labels, put it in the box, make sure it's cleaned and charged. And then it comes back to us say a week later. So we can bring the price point way down, so that it opens up to a whole lot more events, and even some These smaller events that are happening now, with COVID, we're able to service them with photo booths that are $200 for a day, you know, where they're not gonna, they're not gonna buy what we used to sell the high quality with the attendant on site, everything custom props, I mean, all that stuff kind of, you know, has gone by the wayside for now. Um, so, you know, I like to think of it as you know, the way that I broke it out. And our accounting system is like, we have like photobooth rental services, which is all the old business and basically does zero sales now. And then self service products, which is split into the shipper bowls and into software offerings. And so it has to fit in those lanes, I think, you know, with the shippable product, I don't think, you know, as, as the technology evolves, you know, it may change a little. But the idea with that operation is to kind of set it and forget it, and let it grow on its own, which it has been doing, just based on us growing our web traffic and presence. But I think that all of the all of the innovation to come, all of the pushing into the future is going to be happening on the software side, you know, developing PixiWeb from a tool or an application into a more of a built out platform, and figuring out how we can how Pixilated can use that platform to power all different types of interactive web experiences.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah, I mean, I agree, I think it's the biggest challenge and opportunity is going to be taking, taking PixiCloud, which is our first software platform, if you will, and, and taking PixiWeb, which is our which is our new the same platform, but it's our new product, and really figuring out how they complement one another. You know, like, I think that anyone that listens to this podcast is heard you and I say ad nauseum you know, like virtual events are not going away, you know, they will turn into hybrid events. But I think that there's going to be a virtual portal for ever. And I think that one of the greatest challenges, aside from event organizers, large companies, whoever is responsible for the event, not capturing the appropriate data and putting it in the appropriate place, which again, is still a huge, huge, huge problem that they don't know how to fix for one. So I think that this whole thing opens them up to be able to more easily say we don't know what we don't know. And you guys know what you know, and tell us, which I think is going to make everyone happier and more successful for it. But I think figuring out how we we pulled together a better cocktail of products that will allow our clients to work with one provider who is is deploying all their engagement, like experiences, and they're able to do that in both of their environments. I think that that is where we see it going. I think that our kiosks will continue to get cooler and better. And But still, I think they'll stay nimble and small and lightweight. But again, I think that the value that our hardware and our shippers are going to be bringing, you know, like I mentioned before, where's like we tend not be like experience feature focus and instead look it up value explorer love value feature focus, I think the same will be true, I think we will look for a way to continue to make our online and offline tools, completely simpatico with one another so that way we can help bridge that gap between like virtual and in real life event spaces.

Alex McGlynn:

Yeah, that's interesting. So I think that I think you're spot on there I think that being able to use you know the actual hardware and kiosks at the in person component of an event and can junction with the the virtual aspect of PixiWeb and having that shared experience across both types of attendees whether virtual or in person is I think that's a transition a lot of vendors are going to have to try and figure out we have been lucky enough to maybe have an early head start on that but i think that that's kind of where the the event marketplace is moving as a whole Yep, yep. So any we've talked about a lot but are there any recovered any any closing thoughts or stories or you're not

Patrick Rife:

gonna be on here for another hundred episodes?

Unknown:

Yeah, you guys are never gonna

Patrick Rife:

be back Episode 1000 won't be a high

Nicolas China:

water I mean, I just while I'm here, you know, I commend these guys they they've cranked out 99 episodes prior to this one. I'm not usually one that's thrilled to be on camera so I'm I'm fine with that. But they've been killing it. I mean, the amount of work that goes into this podcast, not just the recordings but producing it and and and you know, doing all that The all the legwork for transcriptions and making sure it's getting up on the blog and hitting all the podcast outlets. You know, I just want to say, you know, Thanks for your hard work on it, because I think that this is probably a relevant place to say that and that you know, I hope that that everybody who has been listening or watching continues to do so and that I see you in another hundred episodes and that and that our sales continue to double like they have been and that we're you know, off to the races what they say compound, Albert Einstein said compounding is the eighth wonder. Right and, and, you know, it doesn't seem like a lot. When it's, it's, it's when it's not, but we've gone through it before. And, you know, it's exciting to see to feel like we're on the fringe of blowing up again. And so

Alex McGlynn:

getting good way blowing up and your wedding actually

Nicolas China:

tanking. So, you know, for me, I just, you know, thanks for having me on, guys.

Patrick Rife:

Yeah. You know, I would just say, you know, only half of both Nick and I and Alex to everybody that's out there that is listening, watching. You know, to to Mike Kenny and flavor and though the original crew at Delia Foley's you know, like the whole Catonsville ecosystem, like all of our clients, all of the ED use in Baltimore, all of the startup and entrepreneurial community, the startup story, people, like all of our wives, our wives, like our children, our employees, our family, you know, like, everyone that has played a role, you know, if you've been to James Street, and you've been to one of our crazy ass parties on the edge of town, like all of you have played a definitive role in, in helping us get to where we are, I mean, this this, like, story of Pixilated could go on for days, I mean, the amount of stories and memories that we have that we've, we've prided ourselves on trying to continue to fold all of that into our story and really carry it forward. And I just want us you know, I said, Thank you, and I appreciate your support, and we see you.

Alex McGlynn:

Awesome, well, my big takeaway from this, this interview as all the entrepreneurs out there, keep grinding, keep pushing, and keep chasing your dreams and be flexible when things don't go the exact way you want them to and know when to make a good pivot. We are again, we survived the events, Apocalypse, and we are hopefully coming out stronger on the other side. So again, this is a happy story. There might have some dark times along the way. But again, if you think you have a really good idea, and people keep telling you, it's a really good idea. keep plugging away and eventually you'll figure out how to bring that to market. Yeah. So I really appreciate everyone's time today. Thanks for for tuning in and learning a little bit more about Pixilated. We are going to take the weekend off. So we will be back Monday with our next episode. So before you go, don't forget to rate review and subscribe. It lets you know when we release new episodes and it helps other listeners find things that might be interesting to them. So have a wonderful weekend, everyone and thanks for joining us on this special 100 edition of The Pixilated Podcast and thanks again to Nic China for being a pecial guest. Thank you