How to Build Custom Business Software for $14 (No Coding Required)

00:00 Hey, what is up? Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Brian

00:06 Lofrumento, and we are all in for an absolute treat today because today's guest is the

00:12 real deal. I've been so excited about this conversation and very excited for all of us to learn from him. Let me

00:18 introduce you to James Edgell. James is a technology executive, entrepreneur, and founder of SoftEXIT with a career

00:25 spanning IBM, Motorola, Deloitte, and McDonald's. As a key technology leader

00:30 behind McDonald's mobile app and in restaurant kiosk initiatives, he helped

00:36 deliver digital platforms that have served literally millions of customers.

00:41 Throughout his career, James has built and scaled technology products, led global engineering teams, and helped

00:47 organizations turn complex business challenges into practical solutions. Today, he is developing SoftEXIT

00:54 Studio, which is an AI enabled platform that makes custom business software more

00:59 accessible and more affordable for small and midsize companies. I'm so excited

01:04 about this one. Let's dive straight into my interview with James Edgell.

01:14 [music]

01:20 All right, James, I am so very excited that you're here with us today. First things first, welcome to the show.

01:26 Thank you, Brian. It's an honor to be here. Heck yes. I'm so excited to talk about all the amazing things that you are up

01:32 to and we are definitely going to dive deep into the world of software. But before we get there, you've got to take us beyond the bio. Who's James? How'd

01:39 you start doing all these cool things? So, my career is basically technical.

01:44 Uh, I started out as a programmer, started working for various companies, really enjoyed it. Uh, got frustrated

01:50 with management uh, at the time way back. Uh, they really didn't have a handle on technology and I said, you

01:57 know, I think I could do this and I jumped into management and it was great. No, it wasn't. I was terrible. I was

02:02 terrible manager for first year and then I really learned how to manage from a mentor at Motorola. But then I've worked

02:09 for various companies delivering great incredible software and really enjoy the tech. I keep my hands in tech and now

02:17 I'm starting my own company and I'm really excited to be here. I know it sounds like a cliche but we've been working on this product for about a year

02:24 and a half and wow we are excited to release it. So great to be here, great to talk with you. Great to talk about

02:30 any of this. Heck yes. I love the energy to go along with it. James, you are one of those

02:35 people that I can very confidently say here on the air that your energy, your excitement totally matches the skills

02:42 and everything that you've put together in your professional career up to this point. So, James, I'm not going to stop you there. Introduce listeners to Soft

02:48 Exit Studio because I am equally excited at what it is that you guys are rolling out. All right. So, great. I' love to

02:55 talk about this. I'm not a professional speaker. I'm more of a tech guy. So, um not going to be very polished. But

03:01 SoftEXIT Studio is a platform. Uh it's not really a dedicated application. It's

03:07 a platform for building applications. Although we will start building applications on it and releasing it in

03:13 our app store. So essentially it's a no-code platform. It is you could do anything that a database can do. It's

03:19 got digital dashboards. It's got forms. It's got Kanban boards. It's got

03:24 everything there is. You could build a CRM in it. You could build an inventory platform. It's extremely easy to work

03:31 with. It's very pleasant on the eyes. It's got a nice modern look as well. It's got high performance. It's got the

03:37 security. It's got everything we always wanted to use in an application wherever I worked, but it was just simply never

03:43 available. It was either too complicated, too expensive. And that's the other thing. We're targeting

03:48 SoftEXIT Studio for companies that can't afford this enterprise platforms that are expensive and get more expensive

03:55 every day. We keep hearing complaints that, "Wow, I started with this platform. I really liked it, but they

04:00 they doubled the price over the last 2 years." And this is something we're not going to do. In fact, right now, we're

04:07 offering early adapters to get on board at 50% off at a lifetime price. And it's

04:14 really inexpensive. uh the the monthly price per user is only $14 a month

04:20 compared to like you know the big the big packages like Salesforce and and uh

04:26 Airtable, things like that. They're very expensive. This is affordable and we're targeting markets that really are

04:32 smaller to midsize companies that can't afford this enterprise type of software. Plus, you're not only limited, you can

04:39 build anything you want in this with the AI Architect. You literally just say, "Hey, you know what? I need an inventory

04:44 system that tracks POS and suppliers and the inventory and and it just builds it

04:50 for you. You wait about 10 minutes uh which is way faster than waiting on any

04:56 developer and then it builds the platform. And the nice thing about this is it's not building code which you have

05:02 to debug and host and do all those things. It's configuring an application that's stable and proven and there are

05:08 no bugs. Essentially, it's a configuration. Then you have this application that you can customize and

05:14 you can extend it further on. You don't have to continuously accept what AI hands you. It's it's pretty amazing. It

05:21 it will take too long to describe it, so I'll cut myself off here and it's very easy for me to go on and on about this

05:26 product. James, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like there are four lanes that we need to address in this

05:33 conversation because I think that that is a key part of your differentiation. And those four lanes from my perspective are one, if I'm a business owner, I can

05:39 try to find software and finagle it so it hopefully fits my business, but as you already called out, I'm at the mercy

05:46 of those vendors and their pricing and their bugs and their feature updates and all that. Two, I could just forego that

05:53 technology and just not have it at my fingertips even though it's in my head already and even though I know it would

05:58 make my business and my workflows and everything better. Three, I could try to

06:03 be one of those people that hops on to YouTube University and tries desperately to figure out Claude Code or Codex even

06:09 though I have no development back background and have never coded in my life. Or for what you're talking about,

06:16 this is an important lane because it is part of your differentiation is that platform is that you guys are the tech

06:21 heads here. You guys are the developers. You have code that you know that works and is flexible for me to use it. Talk

06:28 to us about those four different channels and why it's that fourth one that you guys really sit in and why you

06:33 as someone who you've built software as a career. You you understand this stuff in and out. Why is this the best

06:39 approach moving forward for your average business owner? So, it's it's easy to use. That's the

06:46 first thing. Uh every time we work with stuff that is in the cloud, it's supposed to be no code. We find

06:52 ourselves scratching our heads saying, you know, where do I configure this? uh I got to be a you know a functional

06:57 consultant in order to build software on this thing. It can be done so much easier and I think being small really

07:05 helps us cuz we we give our each other feedback immediately and say you know what this this is terrible this is hard

07:11 to use. It's clunky and we go back and we make it so it's easy to use because we don't want to slow down our business

07:19 trying to figure out how to be a a functional consultant. So we made this extremely easy to use. We made it

07:25 affordable. We made it uh so that it's available to everyone that can't afford

07:31 like enterprise software and we run into this all the time. we see that's great software but you know I just can't

07:37 afford it and they end up dropping back to spreadsheets and a lot of companies do that and then when they start to grow

07:44 that kind of plateaus their success because now they're in all these spreadsheets up to their neck and none

07:50 of them work together and and they are outdated and they have different versions that are competing within the

07:55 company and we've constantly seen this pattern over and over and on top of that

08:01 building software as you you say we've built software ware so many times that we see patterns on things that are

08:07 requested all the time. It's always a data entry screen. It's always a dashboard, right? It's these are very

08:12 common tools and they're very powerful, but everybody builds them from scratch and they start over or they start a new

08:19 platform. We wanted to put this all in one package so that it was nicely put together so it's easy to use and people

08:26 stop thinking about the software and start focusing on their business. Yeah,

08:31 I love that. Speaking of focusing on our business, James, you called out a very real business pain already, which is

08:37 when we are building these things ad hoc or using spreadsheets, they don't talk to each other. And obviously business is

08:43 about integrations. Talk to us. I'm sure you guys have had deep thought and you've very much integrated this into

08:49 your solution, but what do integrations look like? Because that's a common business problem of tools not talking to

08:55 each other. [snorts] So everything can be done in this tool. you can build, you know, essentially any

09:01 type of data entry system. It'll all be in one platform. So, you don't have to go in integrate everything. Uh it's so

09:09 easy to work with that you'll be expanding into our product rather than trying to stitch 10 tools together

09:16 because it's really flexible. So, for example, let's say you go take an off-the-shelf uh cloud inventory system

09:23 and you wanted to talk to your CRM. Well, you could build both in these. It's so easy to do. And even if you

09:29 don't have the skills, you just ask AI, our AI Architect to do it for you. Then it builds the solution and then you just

09:36 incorporate that into the overall product that you're building itself. And since our menus don't have any

09:42 limitations like other other products, you can build a massive application in

09:47 this with a very easy to use pull down menu system that everyone's familiar with. And you could have a section for

09:53 accounting, you could have a section for sales, you can build all that out.

09:58 I I want to talk about that AI integration because as someone I definitely I'm a tinkerer and

10:03 experimentter. I've been a lifelong entrepreneur and I feel like that's part of what it means to be an entrepreneur is just to be playing with things and

10:09 pushing the envelope and expanding. And one thing that I find so I'll use the word funny, but I could equally use

10:15 frustrating about using AI is if you don't prompt it the exact same way. And I noticed this sometimes when I prompt

10:21 AI, I realize ah it is laser focusing on this one ingredient of what I typed, but

10:26 that is the smallest thing of exactly what I meant. It just AI seems to run with things in directions that maybe we

10:33 don't always intend for it to. Talk to us about your approach with AI because I know that it is so at the heart of the

10:39 way that you make this userfriendly. Do we have to be prompting experts? Do we have to do it a certain way? Talk to us

10:45 about how we get AI to assist us in what it is that we're actually imagining.

10:51 So the thing is is you're not starting from scratch, right? And when you go to AI and you say, "Hey, build me an

10:56 application." Uh, one, you can't say a simple sentence and it builds you something like a Salesforce. You can't

11:02 say, "Build me Salesforce. Wouldn't that be nice?" Right? then you could have anything. This is on a predefined

11:08 platform, so it's going to have very standard forms and very standard uh lists and very standard dashboards and

11:15 things like that. It's going to configure it. And that's what makes it really nice. It it basically you ask for

11:22 it to to solve a problem for you by saying, "Hey, here's a gap that we're not tracking and we need something where

11:28 people can enter things in and then we need to see what the results are." This is all very standard and it configures

11:35 it out for you. It saves you hours and hours and hours of work. So, and then once you have it, you're very familiar

11:41 already with the interface. The data entry forms all work the same. It's not going to be different every time you regen it. It's not going to be a

11:48 knowledge transfer issue every time you add new features because the AI decided

11:54 to do a new way of doing the user interface. It's going to be very consistent. And I think that's what we

12:00 really like about our AI platform is its configuration and not writing. So you're not getting new bugs and things of that

12:07 nature. The other thing I'd like to emphasize that I'm not sure uh it stands out with our product is we don't charge

12:14 for AI tokens. It's all part of the package. So if you want to build a system that's for whatever you're

12:21 building and you you generate it, you can generate it into the solution and that's kind of like your sandbox. And if

12:26 you don't like it, you regen it again or regen it again. Then once you get it the way you like, you can tweak it and

12:31 customize it. And then you could take that and merge it into your main core product. So that then you have a great

12:39 platform that's very consistent and doesn't go onto tangents as you say and and it's stable and it's already running

12:46 on proven code so you're not getting security issues or bugs. Yeah, I love that. James, I I also

12:52 appreciate that you called out about the AI token usage as one of your differentiators because a lot of people

12:58 are going to wonder, well, can't I just hop on AI Studio, Google AI Studio, and

13:03 I I'll fully confess, James, that when Google AI Studio launched, my dad is not technical in any way, but I got him

13:09 excited. I showed him, hey, the example that I used with him is you could create a Packers trivia game, and and this has

13:15 never been made before, and you can just create it with the AI studio in 5 minutes or less. and he started trying to use it to create things that were

13:21 actually of use to him like a portfolio tracker and other things before he quickly ran into James which I think

13:26 everybody runs into when they use a tool like Google AI Studio is that there's no backend. Sure, it can create really cool

13:32 looking pretty frontends but there's no underlying true software that powers

13:38 this thing. Obviously, not every listener is going to have a technical background. talk to us about the importance of front end and backend when

13:45 we're talking about softwares and really how you guys plug that gap even without anyone understanding what a front end or

13:52 a back end is. So that's you you touched on a very

13:57 important topic AI. AI does a really good job of coding and it replaces that element. But there's so much more to an

14:05 application than coding that uh newbies are not aware of. You're right. You have to host it. You have to worry about the

14:11 security. Not only do you have to host it in security, you have to worry about the uptime. What happens when it goes down at 4 in the morning? Are you going

14:18 to wake up and start tinkering with something you don't really fully understand? Do you really want to take

14:23 on all that burden? Cuz AI only solves really the coding issue. It's not doing

14:29 the hosting for you. It's not doing all the the the testing and the BA work that

14:34 is all done. Software development is a very complicated beast. uh AI makes it more reachable. It lowers the bar for

14:42 entry, but it doesn't solve a lot of the problems of running a professional system full-time. And yeah, you do have

14:49 to find a host, right? And even if you find a host, then they're going to charge you uh plus AI tokens can get

14:56 really expensive uh very quickly, especially with tweaks because it's rewriting an application from scratch

15:01 really every time. Even though you're adding a feature, you're really asking it to rewrite the whole thing. Uh you

15:07 also have challenges with AI hallucinations uh or what I call feature drift where

15:13 you had features that you worked on for a month and then you were working on another part of the application and it

15:18 rewrites the system and it pulls out features that you had stable because you haven't asked for them in a while and AI

15:24 prioritizes things. It figures well you know James hasn't asked me about inventory so I'm going to just remove

15:30 that and all of a sudden you go to use inventory and it's gone. That's the challenges with AI development today.

15:37 So, and then we host for you. We do the backups for you. It's everything. You just log in. It's very affordable. I I I

15:43 don't know why anyone would go the AI route for the type of platform that we're offering. They could use AI for

15:49 other exciting things, but for this, I think it's more economical and safer to

15:54 go with SoftEXIT Studio than it is to try and roll it your own if you're not in the business.

16:00 Yeah. That said, James, I will throw it out there that one of the reasons why I think most people won't dip their toes

16:07 into custom software is that they're limited by their imagination. And I think that's the very fun world that we

16:13 live in these days is if you can dream it. And who understands our businesses better than us, the founders? And we can

16:19 imagine a world where our business functions a heck of a lot better. If only we allowed ourselves to view it

16:25 through the lens of I don't have to fit into a box. I can actually have custom software that plugs that gap for me. And

16:31 so now we're in this world where if I can dream it, I can do it. That said, not everybody has practiced that line of

16:38 thought just yet, James. Not everybody thinks that way. So you've given some really good examples already in our

16:43 conversation. I'll call out inventory management, a CRM, which I would argue every single business on Earth needs a

16:48 CRM. So we already know that there are softwares that every business has or needs. What's your advice for listeners

16:55 who are tuning into today's episode saying, "James, I don't know what I would build custom software for. I can't

17:01 even imagine what that would look like and what that would be." How can you lead them to that path of uncovering

17:07 what those needs are in this totally new world where anything is possible?

17:12 So, I totally get that and I understand the creative foe sometimes can be the

17:18 blank sheet of paper. It's like, "Okay, now what?" Right? People can build on something that exists because they have

17:24 great ideas and extend it out. But when you're faced with a blank slate, it can be very intimidating. So we realized the

17:31 same thing when we started looking at applications. What are we going to build? And then we all looked at each other and go, you know what, we haven't

17:38 thought about that. So over time we realized that everyone else was going to face the same issue. So, what we did to

17:44 address this is we're building an we have already is an app store and we're

17:50 going to release applications and they're all going to be free from SoftEXIT. Uh they're they're going to have

17:56 like a basic CRM or a basic inventory or a basic different products that that meet uh business needs that are the

18:02 obvious ones, right? And then all they have to do is, you know, peruse a store and they pick something, they click it

18:08 and it installs and they have an existing application. So we're not just one platform. We're going to be many,

18:14 many applications that you can download and install into your system. So and

18:19 then once it's installed, it's not like it's code that you can't touch. It's all

18:25 configured. If you say, "Hey, you know what? Inventory doesn't have three fields that we really need for our

18:30 specific business or our vertical." You can just go in like a database, add the three fields, add them to the form, and

18:37 you're up and running. And you don't have to wait for a developer to test it out. Uh since it's all pre-ested and

18:43 proven code, you can do it live runtime right away. So manager calls you up and says, "You know what? We're we're we do

18:50 business in the UK and we're we're not tracking UK addresses properly." Somebody just goes in in 5 minutes,

18:56 updates it, and you're up and running. So there's no slowdown to your business.

19:02 James, I'm so curious to hear your answer to this next question because there's a lot of mainstream conversations about what is the future

19:08 of software. Are we in this era where every software for small businesses at least? Obviously, enterprise is a bit of

19:14 a different game, but where every small business has their own custom software at their fingertips and is that where

19:21 you think that we're moving? Are you fearful for the broader software industry as we've traditionally known

19:28 it? or what's your view of the the short-term future and the longer term future?

19:33 I think you're going to see different levels of it, right? You know, big corporations could say, "Hey, we could

19:38 save a lot of money by building hosting this ourselves. We do this all the time, so this is not very difficult." And they

19:44 may go that route. Uh I see challenges for us for trying to convince smaller companies who are not very technical to

19:51 go our route because they keep being told that they could build software themselves, but they don't realize what

19:56 they're signing up for. they're signing up for a lot. You know, the first security breach they have and they realize that, you know, they don't have

20:04 cyber security insurance or something like that, they're going to be in a lot of trouble. So, I think there's going to

20:09 be a phase of a learning experience of people are going to go down that path. And I I think that uh they're going to

20:15 be really surprised of what it takes to build and release software, the burden,

20:20 the legal burden, the uh the burden of supporting it and things like that. And

20:26 then and I do see, you know, a flood of probably terrible products that are

20:31 coming out that are going to be like quick builds and and you're going to get into it and the software looks

20:37 phenomenal but doesn't have any deft because it was quickly built with little thought. But I do also believe that

20:43 we're going to see some amazing products come out from smaller firms because it

20:48 really opens up the up the the door for building sophisticated systems with

20:53 smaller teams because of the ability of AI. So it's going to be a mishmash of a

21:00 lot of things and it's, you know, buyer beware. Be careful what you choose. do some research because it could be

21:06 something that really looks great but doesn't have any depth and then you're already involved uh with a long-term

21:12 contract or something like that. So, I I think it's going to be a while before the industry really settles down and we

21:18 start to figure this out, but it really is exciting because there's going to be a lot of cool stuff coming out. So, I'm

21:24 looking forward to it. So, I don't have a crystal ball on where that's going. All I know is that we have a product

21:30 offering we think that is the best of all worlds. Yeah, I love that. Let's talk about change agents because

21:36 everything that I've seen about SoftEXIT and the way that you guys are building this and rolling this out, it seems to me like companies will really

21:43 benefit from change agents or chief innovation officers. I don't know what the titles are going to look like in the

21:49 future, but it seems to me like there's someone who can really zoom out on a business and have an as objective of a

21:56 view as we could possibly have into our own businesses. And that's where we can identify and plug those gaps. I think

22:02 that even more so, we've always used that phrase in the entrepreneurial world of working in your business versus working on your business. I think it's

22:09 becoming even more important thanks to solutions like yours, James. So, what's your recommendation for business owners

22:15 who are looking at this saying, "I don't even have the time. I don't even have the capacity for it." Where are those

22:21 change agents? What's that process look like for us to start identifying these gaps and then plugging them?

22:27 Well, I think our our primary first customers that we're targeting are smaller to medium-sized businesses that

22:34 really need some sort of technology and have avoided it for whatever reason, right? Maybe it was intimidating. Maybe

22:40 it was too expensive. Maybe they're reached the the peak of what they can do

22:46 with a spreadsheet and multiple dueling spreadsheets. I think what we need to do

22:52 is we need to help identify those those individuals and those companies and make them feel comfortable with a shift to

22:58 technology. So, one of the companies I work for was 160 Driving Academy, the largest CDL school in the country, over

23:05 160 locations nationwide. And the founder of that company, Steve Gold, was

23:10 a genius. He he realized that this was an underserved market of people that were not comfortable with, you know,

23:17 with learning new things. And he created a system that was entry level for those

23:24 individuals and they came in and started to learn how to improve their lives through a new career and new training.

23:31 Well, I realized there's a whole market of underserved companies that technology is out of reach. And these are the

23:38 companies I'm trying to reach. I believe that our product is so obvious in cost

23:43 effectiveness and ease of use that the companies that use technologies will will it be we won't have to persuade

23:49 them to really sign up for this. I think they'll be like, "Wow, that's obvious. Let's give it a try." And then they'll

23:55 try it and they'll say, "This is so much better." The the real change agent that

24:00 I'm seeking is the company that has never really worked with technology that could really benefit from technology. I

24:07 mean, seriously. I mean, there are I've watched some of my friends who are in some of these type of businesses and

24:13 they have like 25 spreadsheets and and and I said, "How do you know that your formulas even work?" And they turn to me

24:20 and laugh. They go, "Well, they don't cuz they're constantly patching them and trying to fix them. They share a

24:26 spreadsheet with somebody else and then they make a change and they broke the spreadsheet and they have no idea." Uh

24:31 some of these spreadsheets are absolute Swiss Army knives of tabs and tabs and tabs of unrelated things. It's just

24:38 amazing. So I think the change agent we're looking for is that individual and it's going to be we have to work

24:46 carefully to make them feel really comfortable with technology. I mean people like you and I are really comfortable with it. But there's a lot

24:52 of organizations out there that it scares the hell out of them because it's something that's they're not core. it's

24:57 not their core knowledge base and they really want to focus on their business, not technology.

25:02 Yeah, James, listeners have had to hear throughout this year me on the air talking about that I moved this year and

25:09 so anytime you move, you need contractors for various things. And James, I think that there are millions

25:14 of small businesses out there in in trades and contractors that gosh, technology would change the game, not

25:21 only for these business owners, but for all of us as customers. And I think that technology plugs that gap because we all

25:26 have so much going on in our lives and in our businesses and the to get a gutter quote was the hardest thing that

25:33 I've ever done because they just won't reply and that blows my mind because I am a lead that is potential money for

25:38 them. And so plugging that gap into there and you've spelled out it's one it's not as hard as they probably think

25:45 and two there are solutions such as SoftEXIT Studio that are also making it accessible from a cost perspective and

25:52 gosh the ROI on that. I mean, one one job a month in pretty much any single business on Earth and already it's

25:58 massively ROI positive. So, James, I want to squeeze this question in though because I think you have such an interesting vantage point. Having worked

26:04 in big business, having worked with small and medium-sized businesses, some trends seem to go upstream where

26:11 entrepreneurs and small business owners, we have lower stakes. We can play with things first and figure them out and

26:17 then they make their way into big business. But some trends also come from downstream which big businesses figure

26:23 things out and we hope to rep replicate those solutions. We hope to have resources. Now you are very much

26:29 bridging that gap in that way. But with your big business hat on, what are some of those advantages that you see in the

26:35 big business world that you realize, hey, I want every small business owner to have that same advantage.

26:42 You know, I would say of I first, you know, interesting transition period for me. I worked for small companies and

26:48 then I used to write software and couldn't sell software to large companies really wanted to figure out what it was I was missing and then I

26:57 went and joined Motorola which it was at the time over 100,000 employees very large and I learned something that was

27:05 incredibly boring incredibly powerful and it's called process and it is absolutely amazing process is a

27:12 consistent way of doing something and that works and I think Small businesses

27:18 are trying to make up process as they go and they don't really benefit from large organizational experience. And I think

27:25 that's what I bring to the table for SoftEXIT Studio is you're getting a

27:30 really well-defined process especially if you accept one of the uh applications from the app store. It's already thought

27:37 out. We've already worked out the problems for you. But if it doesn't meet your needs specifically, you can customize that. So process is the big

27:45 thing. It's the thing that companies use because they can't micromanage a 100,000

27:50 employees. That that's what I learned because when I work for a small company, if something wasn't going right, I go

27:56 knock on somebody's door and say, "Hey, what's going on, man? You know, this isn't working. There's what can I do to help you?" Right? Can't do that in a

28:03 large corporation. The only way to solve those problems is through process. And process is something that's not readily

28:09 available to some of these smaller companies because these guys have worked their way up from say, you know, one truck or or one mechanic, right? And

28:16 then they got very successful building out. They got 100 people and they could still got they still have hands-on, but

28:22 then they start to find themselves overwhelmed and they plateau. This is where software and process kick in

28:29 because with software and a process you can use dashboards to focus on where the

28:34 issues are and leave the sections that are running running well alone. Right?

28:40 So now you you can focus your time where it needs to be focused and process is

28:45 the tool that tells you where to go. It's kind of like if your you have your dashboard in your car, right? If your

28:51 oil lights on, you don't have to worry about figuring out if you have enough gas. So that's what a corporate

28:56 dashboard will do. It'll tell you, hey, you need to focus on this department because things aren't operating at full

29:02 optimacy. Does that make sense? Yeah, it absolutely makes sense, James. I love that answer. And and really, it's

29:08 something that maybe I think all get advice meets this criteria. Maybe it's not the advice that we want to hear

29:14 process because all of us have our our businesses because we want to do whatever it is that we want. But gosh,

29:19 there's a reason why processes exist and it's because if we are serious about growth and scale and all these words

29:25 that we throw around, they are essential tools to get there. So, I love how readily available that answer was from

29:32 your experience, but I don't know how you're going to top all that to answer my final question, James, but I always ask this one and it is it's quite broad.

29:38 You can take it in any direction you want, not just with your technologist hat on, but especially with your founder

29:44 hat on. And that question quite simply is, what's your best piece of advice for listeners knowing that we're being

29:49 listened to by both entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs at all different stages of their growth journeys. And knowing that

29:54 you're one of us, you're a fellow entrepreneur. What's that one thing you want to leave them with today?

30:00 I would say this is the most exciting time for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are usually they starting out smaller

30:06 and and they're going to grow into something really big and successful. This is a really exciting time. I'm sure

30:12 they've heard the generic statement that AI is a real enabler. It it really is.

30:17 It's it's AI can be your co-founder. I mean, you finally have somebody you can bounce ideas off of that knows

30:23 everything, right? And what's the ideal founder is someone who has skills and knowledge that you don't have. Well, AI

30:30 has got a lot of that, right? And you could work with that and and build a business plan. And then what I recommend

30:36 is if you're doing that, AI has a tendency to want to please you. just tell it to be brutally honest and to

30:42 attack your ideas. That's what you want from a co-founder and then you'll be able to argue with it and then defend

30:48 your position and if it's indefensible then you know you're improving your approach. So right now being an

30:55 entrepreneur is exciting because you can build more things with less people. So

31:01 it's it's it's not a question of letting people go with AI is you're creating opportunities with AI with these new

31:07 companies. And so I believe that all of these uh people that are are starting to

31:13 look for new careers and new challenges in their lives, they can take advantage of this time where AI is affordable,

31:19 within reach, and can help you build great and exciting things. I I think this is the time that we're going to see

31:26 more small business billionaires and trillionaires than we've ever had

31:32 before. And I think everything will be traced back to these days. And and that's the advice. get out there and try

31:38 it and do it. Either do it on the side and start to build up to it or or jump into it both feet. But this is the time

31:45 where bootstrapping actually makes sense. You don't need private equity to build a very powerful business these

31:51 days. We're completely bootstrapped and privately funded. So, we don't have to listen to someone telling us to raise

31:58 our prices to milk our customers. We're going to provide a great service to a lot of companies at an affordable price

32:05 for our entire existence. Uh I think other people can do the same and I think

32:10 these companies will start working together and it'll be really really exciting to see what the small companies can do. So get out there, do it.

32:18 [snorts] Yes. I love that advice and that call to action for all of our listeners across

32:24 the world. James, I'm also very excited because this should just be the beginning of their journey when it comes

32:30 to custom software and deploying these things in their businesses because SoftEXIT Studio out there. And

32:35 James, rather than people listening to you and I talk about it, I'd rather them go forth and actually see it. You've got

32:41 a button there for people to get early access. So for listeners who want to find you and all this cool stuff online,

32:46 drop those links on us. So where should listeners go from here? So softexit.com softexit.com

32:54 is the place to go. Um we're just live. Uh we're we don't have apps on our app

33:00 store, but those are coming. They'll come very fast. Uh take a look at it. Take a look at the website. You know, if

33:07 uh we're very small. We're even accepting, you know, feedback. If somebody wants to send us a note, we're

33:13 it even says in our contact section, you know, just send us a note about anything if you want to talk, right? we're still

33:19 very accessible. So take a look at it there. Um look at the SoftEXIT Studio

33:24 itself. Uh if you jump in, we do provide professional services in also we also

33:30 provide if you have if you sign up with five users or more we will provide a

33:36 portion of free professional services because we know we could set you up fast. It's not going to be a big burden

33:41 on us. So we would look forward to working with uh future people in that aspect as well. But, uh, definitely

33:47 softexit.com is where it's at. We we post everything there. We're going to post things on LinkedIn and Facebook.

33:54 Um, the the links for those will be at softexit.com. Go there, check us out. If

34:00 it's if it looks like it fits your needs, we'd love to do business with you. We'd love to have you as a client.

34:05 Yes. And listeners, you already know we're making it as easy as possible for you to find softexit.com

34:10 down below in the show notes, no matter where it is that you're tuning into today's episode. So, if you're driving, if you're at the gym, if you're in the

34:16 shower, wherever it is that you're listening to James and I, have no fear. You can click through directly from the

34:21 show notes. Otherwise, James, on behalf of myself and all the listeners worldwide, thanks so much for coming on

34:27 the show today. Brian, it's been great. Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun. It's

34:32 great talking with you. [snorts]