[00:00:10.550] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:11.000] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:11.420] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:13.580] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:15.530] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses in the last seven days. And welcome back to those people who have been with us before. Lovely to have you here. We, last week, were saying that we might have a special guest with us this week, and unfortunately, our special guest is not available today. So it's not going to be today, but hopefully we will be able to bring our special guest on in a future episode.

[00:00:47.300] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:00:47.750] - Gordon
And hopefully we'll find a time when they're available.

[00:00:51.050] - Taylor
Due to logistics and kind of where people live and...

[00:00:53.270] - Gordon
Yeah, locations and times and schedules and everything else.

[00:00:57.000] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:57.800] - Gordon
So, let's get straight into our topics this week. Taylor, would you like to go first?

[00:01:03.560] - Taylor
Yeah, just before that, I was talking about my secret project.

[00:01:08.790] - Gordon
Oooh.

[00:01:09.290] - Taylor
And, yeah. Hopefully it will either be live or going live very very soon.

[00:01:17.040] - Gordon
Ok. So when you say soon, are we talking about sort of days, weeks, months?

[00:01:21.950] - Taylor
Beginning of the month, around that time is kind of my aim. So you know.

[00:01:26.780] - Gordon
OK, so the beginning of August.

[00:01:28.460] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:01:29.120] - Gordon
So that's a few days time then.

[00:01:30.260] - Taylor
So yeah. It will either be...

[00:01:31.290] - Gordon
How exciting.

[00:01:31.970] - Taylor
A couple of days after or um yeah, kind of.

[00:01:35.000] - Gordon
And so as soon as it's live will you tell us about it?

[00:01:37.640] - Taylor
I will do.

[00:01:38.630] - Gordon
OK. Well while we're on this subject, last week I talked about a website that I was building for another magician, and I've spoken with them and the site has now been launched.

[00:01:51.740] - Taylor
Yay!

[00:01:52.370] - Gordon
And he is more than happy for me to tell you what it is. So he goes under the name of "The Bowler Hatted Magician," and you can see his website at thebowlerhattedmagician.com. And he's got a very Art Deco style that is his brand. And that is what we brought to his website. So please go and have a look, and I hope you like and enjoy it.

[00:02:19.940] - Taylor
That sounds great.

[00:02:20.870] - Gordon
OK, so first topic, what would you like to talk about today?

[00:02:24.860] - Taylor
So I was approached about a week or two ago by a coach. This was someone that I'd met during one of my 'Cafecitos,' which is kind of like the call that you have, I have with people every week where I get matched with someone random and I just have a chat with them over a coffee. And he reached out to me because, you know, during our conversation a while ago, I said, you know, "if you ever need any website help, just feel free to, you know, message me, and I'll be happy to help." So he reached out to me and said, you know, "Taylor, would you be able to help with my website?" And he said, you know, "would you be interested in swapping services?" So he's a coach, so he said that he would be happy to swap services and give me a couple of sessions of coaching in return for me helping and doing some work on his website, which I thought was a, you know, a fair...

[00:03:17.870] - Gordon
It's going back to the old days where you used to barter things.

[00:03:20.930] - Taylor
Yeah. And it was quite nice the way that he approached the kind of, I guess, exchange, because he said, "I don't want to exchange it on a like for like monetary value, I want to make sure that you receive the kind of you receive a set, kind of those coaching sessions." And it's not like a, oh, you've done this many hours so I'll give you this many. He wanted to make sure I got a good experience, which I thought was really nice because, you know, it's not a time based you know, we're not swapping based on time or money, we're based, swapping based on value that we both bring. Which I thought was a very nice approach. And one of the sessions, we had our first initial call and then we had one of the sessions and he was talking to me about kind of where my priorities are at and putting some things in place to make sure that the stuff that needs doing gets done. So one of the things I said was that I would do you know a minimum of like five hours a day, maybe of work, but a maximum of maybe eight. And what I could do is I could schedule it during, at the beginning of the day around my schedule. Because my schedule was always changing and you know really different, it was very hard for me to stick to a routine schedule. So we kind of came up with the idea that if I schedule five hours at some point throughout the day, it doesn't have to be in one go but, you know, maybe two hours in the morning, then I can go out, I'm going out for the day and then three hours in the evening or something. As long as I get at least the five hours in then that means I'm going to be pushing forward and making progress. And that was something that was really interesting because I always thought, you know, "I can't stick to a schedule," whereas breaking it down and giving myself this kind of, saying "I have to do this minimum," still has that routine in place, but I'm not being strict with when that has to be, and I can be flexible around my schedule, which is what I've always struggled with.

[00:05:17.250] - Gordon
OK, so are you breaking the jobs down into smaller chunks, as it were? And so you're making sure you get smaller things done, which obviously end up making the bigger things get done.

[00:05:29.550] - Taylor
Yeah, so it depends on obviously I have to check my email, so it depends on, you know, if things come in that day. But it's more about just setting out times that I can do work, and whatever that may be, I'm not being specific saying, "I'm going to do this website and I'm going to do this website." It's "I'm going to focus on work, client work only." And then obviously that gives me time to do my own personal projects, but doesn't take away from the client work that I need to do and means I don't get exhausted and I keep that, not element of fun, but sometimes client work can become monotonous because all websites are in some aspect the same. And so I think that's what I was finding, is that some of the client work was just becoming the same, and so there wasn't as high of a level of enthusiasm. You know, the quality of work was still there, but it was just for me enjoying it wasn't as high.

[00:06:18.210] - Gordon
You've got to this point where you've taken what used to be your interest and hobby, into a business.

[00:06:25.650] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:25.980] - Gordon
And it now, instead of wanting to do the work, you actually have to do the work now. And it's a phase that most people who change from a hobby to a business go through. I had exactly the same. I was doing magic as a hobby, you know, it was something I really enjoyed doing. And then I decided I wanted to become a full time professional. And after a very short period of time, it wasn't quite as fun as it used to be, because I knew I had to do it.

[00:06:59.220] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:59.760] - Gordon
But you get over that and then you get to the point again when it becomes really fun and you feel really grateful that you're able to do a job you love doing as a job. And it earns you money.

[00:07:13.440] - Taylor
Yes. So, I mean, that was what was happening is that I had my personal projects, which I was absolutely loving and enjoying so much. But because there was, that wasn't, there wasn't that challenge with some of my client projects, not because, you know, it's just because I'd done those types of sites before. And so I was just, you know, doing another site. You know, they're all unique and things like that, but they all have, they follow the same steps, the same processes. So I was still having fun, but it was just sometimes it was just the same stuff that I wasn't enjoying as much. But one thing that I did find that, again when I was talking to him, is that when I have my project management tool and I use my to do list properly, things become a lot easier, and a lot of the kind of stress of "oh, what have I got to do?" gets taken away completely. And it's getting back into that, which is part of the routine that I want to get back, or I want to get into, that's part of the routine that will help.

[00:08:11.490] - Gordon
Yeah, it is difficult when you hit that wall as, you know, it's the bread and butter work really. It's the work that allows you to earn a living, but may not be as interesting as some other work.

[00:08:27.030] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:08:27.900] - Gordon
But it's something that, if you decided this is what you want to do as a business, it's something you have to do and you have to do it to the best of your ability as well.

[00:08:36.780] - Taylor
And I found that, you know, just trying to find the fun in everything I do will help a lot with that monotonous, because I'm always going to be finding new things and just trying to keep my brain ticking along, really, which, you know, in turn, then, you know, sorts out that issue.

[00:08:52.890] - Gordon
Very good. And something you touched on there, will be a subject for me in the future, maybe even next week. And that is letting your emails dictate how you work. That's a really good subject to talk about, which I will cover next week. I'll make a note.

[00:09:11.160] - Taylor
Ok.

[00:09:11.160] - Gordon
Make a note. So, is that everything you want to say?

[00:09:15.420] - Taylor
That's everything.

[00:09:16.020] - Gordon
Ok. So I would like to talk about a new piece of SAAS 'Software As A Service,' S-A-A-S, that I've recently purchased called "Woxo," and that's W-O-X-O. I'm assuming that's how you say it.

[00:09:35.580] - Taylor
Ok.

[00:09:36.060] - Gordon
I don't know for sure. It's, I'm just, in the UK we have Oxo cubes and it's got a W in front of it, so I've just made it woxo, so I'm guessing that's how it is.

[00:09:47.010] - Taylor
Makes sense.

[00:09:47.010] - Gordon
And it's a very interesting tool which I haven't really managed to wrap my head around entirely yet. It has two main functions. One is that it will create social media videos for you, and it can make them in bulk. So what it's doing is it's creating videos from spreadsheets.

[00:10:10.750] - Taylor
Ok.

[00:10:11.560] - Gordon
So you have a spreadsheet, and in this spreadsheet, for example, you might have the URL to an image, you will then have a title and some text and then you'll have another URL to another image and then another title and some more text, and you can basically bulk create these. So if you want to change some words or you want to change some pictures, you can just do that, and it's all in one spreadsheet. And then you basically bring that spreadsheet into Woxo and it creates all of the videos for you automatically.

[00:10:49.620] - Taylor
That's very good.

[00:10:49.620] - Gordon
So you can, if you want, create thousands of videos in one go, very, very quickly. And if, for example, you've got a database of people and you want to create a video specifically for them and personalize it, you can export the names of all the people that you have in your database, and in the spreadsheet you can basically copy a cell and then sort of merge in a field that you've got already and create a unique cell with their name in it and then send that to Woxo, and it will create all of the videos for you, which is great. However... Oh, let me talk about the other feature before I tell you "however." So the other feature it has is it does widgets, which is very weird because this is very, very different to the creation of bulk videos.

[00:11:43.390] - Taylor
Yep.

[00:11:43.390] - Gordon
But it has widgets that you can create, which allow you to display your social media on your website, just using a few lines of code. So you basically connect up Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, whatever it happens to be, and you can create a widget which will basically allow you to style it in, you know a little bit, and you can take that code, put it on your website, and it will then display that social media and all the posts, in that widget for you. Which is very different to the video creation. It's like it seems like they're two different tools to me. I don't know quite why they're together. They don't feel like they should be together. However, the reason I purchased it is because I had a discussion with the team who are building it, and I wanted to create dynamic videos using a URL, ok. So, instead of having a spreadsheet, I wanted to have a video that I had created with, say, for example, three different images, some text that goes over each image and a piece of music in the background. But on the first, on the first slide if you like, I want to be able to specify what that text says every time I go to that page, and I want to do it using "params" or parameters, which is part of the URL for the page. So if, for example, we went to xyz.com/home/? and the question mark is meaning that it's now got some params, it's a query string. And then you put 'name = Taylor,' it, what I wanted it to do is to, if the video was on that page, it would look at the URL and go, "right, this video I'm creating for someone called Taylor." And then it would put that name in the video.

[00:13:52.680] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:53.520] - Gordon
Because I, as an entertainer, want to be able to send emails out that will effectively send them to a page that has a personalized video for them. Now, it's not going to be personalized as in the audio or, you know, a voiceover or person on the video talking; it's going to be personalized in the fact that there's going to be some text that is shown as part of the video that can change. And I wanted to be able to do that so that I could automate it using my 'Online Booking Assistant,' so it sends out an email saying, you know, "Happy birthday. I've created a video for you. Click here." And it would send them to exactly the same page, every single one, but by having their name after the '?name=' and put their name in there, it would appear to be a personalized video and it would actually regenerate and create that video on the fly whenever somebody went to look at it.

[00:14:56.570] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:14:57.240] - Gordon
And as of this week, that has now become possible. It's a little bit clunky at the moment, but it does work. And I need the video quality to be a, bigger because at the moment we're limited to I think it's 270 by 480, which is quite a small image for a video. And I realize why they do that, because they're doing it on the fly and therefore a larger quality video is going to take a lot longer to render.

[00:15:26.910] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:15:27.930] - Gordon
But hopefully that will come in time. But it does work. And we found some Java, we created some JavaScript that changed the call to the video depending on what was in the URL. Now I realize this is actually quite technical, but hopefully you'll take from this the fact that it's another automation to give something that's personal to my customers, in this respect. And I can create many, many videos. You know, we could do a 'Happy Birthday' one; I could do a, you know, a magic trick that people could learn; I could do a 'Happy Easter;' I could do a 'Happy Christmas;' I could do anything that I want, really, because I have control over the images and the text. So I can pretty much make as many videos as I like. And the package I'm on at the moment allows me to have I think it's 70,000 dynamic videos per month.

[00:16:36.360] - Taylor
That's good.

[00:16:36.750] - Gordon
And then it resets again. So if I use up all 70,000, then the next month I get another 70,000. And I found out that if you go to sort of Name = Paul for example, and someone else also went to Name = Paul, that counts as one video, not two.

[00:16:55.020] - Taylor
Ok.

[00:16:55.770] - Gordon
So it's not regenerating it again because it's already done it once.

[00:16:59.190] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:17:00.780] - Gordon
I believe that's the case. So again, it means that any duplicates are not going to be counted; it's only unique dynamic videos. So, yeah, that is really exciting. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, and this is a really good start because it allows me to put the text overlaid, as it were, on the images or the video. It doesn't allow me to actually put the text within the video, which is what I would really want to do. But that's, I mean there's a lot more processing that goes on with that. So I can understand why.

[00:17:33.960] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:17:34.440] - Gordon
But, you know, at this point, I'm actually really happy. I'm quite pleased with how it's progressing and it's quite a new tool. So I have a feeling it's going to get better and better and better.

[00:17:45.450] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:17:46.680] - Gordon
So we'll put a link to that in the show notes if you are interested in having a look at Woxo. At the time of recording, sorry, time of streaming this video to you, it is currently available on App Sumo as a lifetime deal, although they're not there for very long, so if you're watching this in the future, it may not be available anymore. But they have plans that you can subscribe to and then you can see if it's something that would be of interest to you and your business.

[00:18:16.890] - Taylor
Yeah. Sounds good.

[00:18:19.390] - Gordon
Is that everything from you?

[00:18:20.680] - Taylor
I think so.

[00:18:21.400] - Gordon
Ok, well, on a personal note, just before we finish, two days ago, a very good friend of mine died. And so I would like to dedicate this episode of This Week With to my friend Barry Murray. He was a lovely man, he used to come round here a lot. We had several projects on the go, in fact, I'm not entirely sure what happens to these projects because there's some that are still outstanding. So I don't know quite where we're going to go with that. But he died from cancer of the liver, which is very sad. And he was someone I really liked, he used to have lots of great ideas. He was a magical consultant for "The Paul Daniels Show," in fact the last living magical consultant, so now he's gone, they've all gone now, including Paul Daniels, in fact. So, yeah, I would like to dedicate this video to him. He will be sorely missed. I will miss my chats with him and my visits when he comes to talk about projects. We hardly got any work done when he came over. We spent most of the time just chatting and catching up and yeah, just, you know, talking really, and that's probably what I'm going to miss the most. So, Barry, rest in peace. You will be missed by many people, and this is my way of thanking you for being my friend. Yeah. So, on a more lighter note, thank you for watching. If you have enjoyed this, then we can be found on YouTube and on Facebook, please like, share and subscribe.

[00:20:10.120] - Taylor
You can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk and go through and watch all of our past episodes and also search for them.

[00:20:17.200] - Gordon
Yes, which is working really well now. So that's it. We will see you next week, 1pm on a Friday. Until then, my name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:20:28.720] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:20:31.030] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:20:31.760] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes