Motivation Driven Design™ for Building Startups

Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you'd like to apply to be a guest in the show, just sit on over to mission matters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today's guest is Brian Ferris and he's founder and president over at goldfish code. Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. All right, Brian. So we're going to get into a whole lot today. I want to go further into goldfish code, what you're doing there, how you're helping startups. We're going to go into motivation driven design, which you have trademarked, and we're going to go into that process and that methodology and a whole lot more. But before we do that, we'll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Brian at mission matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That's what we do, Brian, what mission matters to you? So when I was a child, my brother and I played Legos constantly. But in very different ways, he loved to play war with the Legos. In fact, he, he devised a game that sent Lego creations tumbling off the stairs to destruction. My personality was completely focused on building. Cool creations with the Legos without any directions. I never used the, like assemble, you know, step one, two, three directions. I just eat it. And I made stuff and left it there for him to destroy. For Godzilla. Yeah. For Godzilla, my brother, Sean, to destroy everything. And what I've. Realized reflecting on my career and, and my life is that I, what, the mission that really matters to me is, is building things later in life. I, I got my hands on code for the first time and I, I started making a website for my high school and yes, I'm old enough that they didn't have one already. So I was building things and then I actually formed my own business with a mentor guiding it and built a vocabulary training program. So ultimately what I've seen as a pattern through my life is that I really want to build companies, build products and do things that have some form of social benefit that give back to society. Or, you know apparently when I was a child provide, Entertainment for my younger brother. That makes sense. It's, and it sounds like you were, you were, I mean, you were hooked in tech kind of pretty early on, whether you were thinking about it at a tech or not, you were just building things, right. But you were kind of hooked early on. Yeah. Well, I can attribute that to my grandfather who bought me a. Computer, like one of those computers that was, you know, this, well, you probably can't see my arms in the video, but it was, you know, three feet tall, a foot wide east you know, maybe 40 pounds. But he bought that for me when I was four years old, five years old, and it only ran. MS DOS, so you had to type in commands in order to use it. I'm old enough. I remember those. Yeah. For the, for the other people that aren't old enough yet. Google it for our producer. Google it. It's okay. Go ahead. Yeah. So from very early on, I was experimenting with how to, you know, instruct those computers to do something, you know, whatever silly thing was on my mind there as a child, but I, I always enjoyed building and creating things and have, you know, really made my career all about that. Where did the entrepreneurial part come from? Was that also from grandpa or grandparents or parents or like, where'd that come from? That idea. Well, it's interesting. I mean, when I was a child, there's examples of me trying to do things, you know, go above and beyond with lemonade and stuff like that. But really one formative story was when I was in high school, I got hired by my girlfriend's dad. He, you know, showed up one day and handed me a bag of newspaper headlines that he had cut out and asked me if I wanted to make any money. And I was like, yes you know, I'm, I was 15 magic words, right? Keywords. Yes. So I started doing data entry at the very point of, of data entry, but he had this idea of building a vocabulary program that could educate. From early age to end of high school and basically teach you all the words that you needed to know. And his perspective was that there's a bunch of vocabulary programs out there that were very tailored to like SAT or something like that didn't really. Take into context, real life examples. And so a lot of time cutting out headlines from newspapers and he wanted to create a vocabulary program based on the advanced words and the examples that we had found in those headlines. So I was, and that's pretty early on. That was smart. Like that's ahead of his time back then. Yeah. Yeah. When you were in high school. So that's early. It was big, the beginning of when websites started coming out. Wow. And so. What we set out to do was to build the first, you know, fully kind of cloud web based vocabulary program. And that's it. That's prett

Mission Matters Innovation with Adam Torres