Building a Lean Studioin a Bloated Industry

0:31Janne Parri: Okay, Ben. So Shrink Studios website declares that development is bloated nowadays. What do you mean by that?

0:40Ben Hammond: Yeah, absolutely. It's an interesting one. Back in 2022, when I started this studio, something I saw and something that I still see now is that B2B companies at their growth stage are getting agency relationships that don't fit the moment that they're actually in. They're either developing stuff that's too slow for a team that's just raised. They're too generic for a product that needs precise precisioning, too dependent actually to hand over and run. You know, things like maintenance contracts that don't harbour any value, stuff like that. Think bloated is really a symptom of all of that traditional agency ways of working. I just found that I was sat in a meeting one day at an agency that I was working for and I just thought,

1:29Ben Hammond: Wow, this is really bloated. What if we could shrink this? So that was where the name came from. Yeah, quite a funny moment. I went home and it was all I could think about. But yeah, you're looking at like six figure custom builds, six month timelines, stacks marketing teams can't touch without filing a ticket with engineering teams, headless setups for content that's basically 20 pages in the blog. You know, you don't need that. Custom React front ends because someone on the engineering team thought Webflow was for designers. And now, you know, marketing leads can't change hero headings without a sprint planning meeting. So that's where I have seen there's a huge gap. When a Series A team has 18 months of runway.

2:17Ben Hammond: Taking six months to build a site that doesn't work, that math just doesn't add up. You're spending engineering cycles on a brochure site instead of the actual product itself. Becoming a Webflow partner helps us strip most of that out, you know, with a real CMS, a real CDN, proper publishing workflow. Client's team owns the site from day one. You know, the trade-off people imagine that you give up. Power for speeds mostly isn't real anymore. We're embedding React components inside of Webflow when we need to. We're hosting custom JS. We've got proper development workflows. Our GitHub is being deployed to every day. The platform's grown up. The agencies and the dev team selling it often haven't caught up, but I think that we are trying to push that.

3:05Ben Hammond: And the deeper version of bloated is just very cultural, like industry has trained clients to expect long timelines, big invoices, because that's how it's priced itself. Huge head counts, etc. And big offices that warrant those prices. AI has about is about to take a wrecking ball to all of that. And I'm glad that we came up just before that. Agencies still selling those bloated hours and stuff are going to feel ⁓ the crunch first... I think.

3:33Janne Parri: Totally. And I like the lean approach. Like even I, as a, one person team can see that sometimes we just spend way too much time on stuff but how does that lean approach reflect in shrink studios, processes, team, what does your team look like and does that approach reflect there anyway?

3:56Ben Hammond: Yeah, absolutely. So in first question in terms of team, we keep it really lean with only seniors. The reason for that is obviously because we're small. Can't, you know, at the moment hire juniors to pin things on, which is unfortunate because I would like to build an agency or a consultancy that can harbor development of junior. Team members, but right now because of our size and because of the current market, you know, we have three people on a project. They're all extremely senior. They're generally freelance. You know, they've got skin in the game. They've been in it for a long time. And yeah, can trust their output. It means that the stuff we come out with is just way, you know, way more structurally sound, I think.

4:43Ben Hammond: And we can really back up our ethos. In terms of services, we don't take the traditional approach of saying we do a hundred different things. We focus on three buckets. Those buckets are discovery, development, and optimization. Now, discovery, I worked in a product agency for a couple of years and without discovery, you start to gratuitously add features that just don't aid the end product whatsoever. So

5:17Ben Hammond: We have a pretty built out discovery process where we utilize a few frameworks to make sure that what we're deciding on to build is going to be the most valuable and provide the best outcome for the client. Don't get me wrong, there's still room for vanity features in the website and building a website isn't exactly rocket science, but when it comes to things like rebuilding lead generation flows and form flows and hub swaps thing like hub swap flows across like 60 different markets, which we've done for a recent client, know, discovery goes a long way. Make sure that we have

5:56Ben Hammond: A... A proper architectural plan that everybody's bought into from COO to our developers. So yeah, and then obviously development, just simple sprints, keep the sprints nice and simple, week at a time, develop off the backlog, no kind of complicated process, we just build, we build. And then optimization is all about CRO, AEO stuff, and just making sure that we can compound all of their efforts from the builds that we've just done. So everything's about value, everything's about making sure that there's no bloat to any of it, and stripping away the stuff that just doesn't matter, because these companies that we work with don't have time, you know? So, yeah, that's it.

6:49Ben Hammond: All the way through, hopefully there's some nice strands there.

6:52Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would love to like jump into every bucket, so to speak. But we have to do little intros before we forget. So you are listening to Webflow and friends podcast. And my name is Janne Parri. I'm your host. And my guest today is Ben Hammond. So Ben is the founder of Shrink Studio Shrink studio is a Webflow premium partner based in London. Ben helps venture-backed B2B teams evolve their websites in a lean mindset as we talked. But before Shrink, Ben worked at agencies like Hex Digital and Crowdform. He also founded Grizzly Bear Brighton, which is now a thing of the past. So Ben

7:38Janne Parri: If I remember correctly, Grizzly was more like a creative agency. How did you go from that to Shrink, which is now a bit more technical and webflow focused?

7:50Ben Hammond: Yeah, so I came up in a brand-led creative agency world in Brighton. I had a big focus on editorial design, typography, motion, craft. I loved that world, but I really kept noticing a gap. Brand-strong agencies couldn't ship websites fast. They hand over beautiful Figma designs. Six months would disappear into a death process. Meanwhile, dev-strong agencies ship sites really quickly, but they looked quite junior ⁓ or ⁓ quite juvenile. Typography, off motion, terrible brand sensibility, not very good. The gap was ⁓ the whole opening for the studio that I run now. But in between ⁓ Grizzly and what I do now, I worked for a

8:37Ben Hammond: Product agency that got acquired. So were building mobile apps, progressive web apps, internal tools for government organizations for highly funded scale ups. And then I went and worked for another agency doing as a product owner, leading sprints on their flagship project. And trying to implement agile process while they were shifting to becoming a product agency. So yeah, I think all of that has led to the opening of this new studio, or say new, we're now four years old. You know, in 2022, it was a pretty simple idea. My design background allows me to have sensibility on the design side.

9:23Ben Hammond: I know how to code now because I'm self-taught so I can execute on the development side. Webflow helped me bring all of that together. You know, there's nothing in between that doesn't earn its place. And betting on Webflow was a deliberate bet. It meant I could compress design to live timeline from like six months to six weeks without giving up anything in the craft... Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I think my early days being from the seaside and being from Brighton, I had a healthy aversion to bigger agency machinery. So the way that bigger agencies operate. Endless decks, account directors who couldn't actually do the work. Layers of process designed to justify a rate card. Know, our process now is deliberately the opposite. Small team, senior people on every project.

10:13Ben Hammond: No billing time for people who aren't actually delivering anything. You know, so yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I wouldn't change any of it for the world from, yeah, being designing menus for a local restaurant all the way through to now we're building some extremely technical lead generation flows for 50 million funded companies. Pretty, it's been pretty fun.

10:36Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, it sounds quite wild. ⁓ But how are your time spent like right now? How much do you do like design, Webflow work, management, meetings? ⁓ What does your day look like?

10:50Ben Hammond: Hmm. Yeah, I tend to be more of an architect now. So I'll do a lot of the technical architecture with our developer that we work with called Pree. Pree's based in London. He's fantastic. He's like a golden chicken. You'll never find another one like him. But

11:13Janne Parri: You

11:15Ben Hammond: Yeah, we... ⁓ My days are like spent doing a lot of sales stuff. ⁓ I do a lot of outreach and writing content, trying to keep us involved in the Webflow space and trying to build referral connections with other agencies who might be slightly bigger than us. We've got partnerships with other branding studios, copywriting studios, CRO studio. So yeah, my day can be very varied. Sometimes I jump back into design work. It really depends on how lean the project is. But I'm hoping over the next year that I'm probably not going to have to do that because firstly, there are people that we work with who are way better than me. So I want to utilize them and not be the bottleneck, which is what you become as

12:02Ben Hammond: A director.

12:03Janne Parri: Yeah, totally. And I'm kind of curious about that, cooperation working with people when you try to try to move fast and keep the process lean. What sort of things do you have to tackle? I would imagine that everybody has to be on the same page. Especially if you're like simultaneously working on the same project, do you have any, things that you you would like to highlight from that part of the process.

12:32Ben Hammond: Yeah, communication is absolutely key. Transparency between a team is absolutely key. I've worked with and at studios that, not to name names, but they haven't had that and there has been some in-fighting. So we keep everything transparent. We keep all the conversations true and make sure that everybody's on the same page while we're developing a site. Generally speaking, we've never had any problems thus far, I think, because of that approach. I think, yeah, just making sure that people have buy-in as well. We're working with freelancers at the end of the day who are on contract with us. They need as much buy-in as anything else because they might find a contract that comes along that they want to do more than work with

13:19Ben Hammond: Shrink. So, yeah, we try and make sure that they have buy-in and... Make sure that they feel like as much a part of this mission as they can. And I think, I like to think that's helped us build quite a nice core team of trusted people. And we act like a team, we behave like a team. We do the things that teams do. And yeah, we try to make sure that it feels like as much of that environment as possible while...

13:50Ben Hammond: You know, we're still at the stage of a business that doesn't want to hire in-house just yet.

13:55Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I totally get that. Teamwork makes the dream work and dream works makes movies or something like that.

14:02Ben Hammond: Well, absolutely.

14:05Janne Parri: But one very detailed question. Mentioned that, the client has the ownership of the project. So does that mean that you start the project in clients like webflow accounts and everybody's invited to there or how does that like specific part work?

14:21Ben Hammond: No, we build it in our space as we're an agency. We have obviously got the agency workspace. We build in our space, we set up all of our GitHub repos for their projects. Everything is linked through our setup. And then at the end of a project, what we'll do is we'll obviously transfer it and then we'll provide them the repository as well. If they don't want to host it themselves, we will host that for a small fee, which is usually not expensive because you don't have to do much maintenance to GSAP apart from update like the version.

15:00Ben Hammond: So yeah, we tend to do that. And then if they want to go on retainer, that's when we sell them the optimization piece. But the handover always goes into their workspace. So our workspace is just full of resources, and our own site, not full of client sites. We might duplicate a site every now and then if it has a feature that we really like that got taken away so that we can repurpose it and potentially put it on made in Webflow. But other than that, everything lives with the client because we want to give them maximum autonomy.

15:33Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, obviously that's cool. You mentioned the optimized ⁓ buckets ⁓ and the word bucket somehow stuck in my brain. But the first bucket was ⁓ the discovery. So does that like include the design? And then there was the middle one, the development or how do you structure the design?

15:52Ben Hammond: The design will go into the development bucket because it really is a time intensive part of the project and it all fits in simultaneously with the development. We categorized the discovery will have things like wireframing, information architecture, copywriting, anything that is structural and then if we're doing something like a lead generation flow for a client, the discovery will have a quick prototype of what that might look like and where it's going to feed the information. It won't be designed, it will be templated, it will just have like a field and we can say this has gone here, this has gone here. So yeah, that's how we kind of categorize that. I've got some notes actually here which are

16:36Ben Hammond: From the upgraded copy on our site, which is going to launch again next week. But yeah, it's more strategic briefs, stakeholder sessions, analysis, positioning. Then we might, depending on the project, we'll try and build like a prioritized roadmap for the client to say, okay, these are the features in your first V1, and then this is what V2, V3, and V4 could look like. Depending on what data you get, what's working, what's not working, what priority you need things, you know, anything from a careers section to a resources section to, you know, changing a footer.

17:15Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I'm always excited to talk about like processes and how people do basically the same things but differently. And you mentioned sprints. So I imagine that you kind of structure things around sprints. But are you like strict with the schedules? Or are you saying or communicating to the client that, okay, this will this will take X amount of time and we will see when we get to work on how long it will take.

17:47Ben Hammond: Yeah, so when we're deep in development, we will stick to sprint. We will stick to quite quick sprints, so they're weekly. And things will get deployed on a Tuesday. So we have a cut off day on a Monday where we can check things. And then we deploy on a Tuesday. If it is for very fast changes that we can do in a couple of minutes, generally we're extremely flexible. And that is a good thing about being a Webflow partner, right? So we can ⁓ make those changes extremely fast and we're not holding up anyone. We sit to sprints for bigger features because we need a QA process. The client needs a feedback, you know, a feedback process. We need to have that 20 minute call with them to say, actually, ⁓ you know, what do you think of this? Is this right? Or does it need to go back into the...

18:38Ben Hammond: The next sprint and come back out next week. But it just gives us that buffer so we eliminate a lot of risk with development. I've been bitten in the past by trying to do things too quickly and I think having this boundary is good for us, it's good for the client. It means that they can, if they have a click-up board and they have a form, when they put... Requests into their form, what happens is we generally pick it up in the time that we have in that sprint and we'll add it to the backlog and we'll just get it done because, like I say, building websites is not rocket science. So yeah, in answer to your question, we can be very flexible, but I try to add boundaries to eliminate any type of risk because it just helps maintain relationships and develop better products.

19:27Ben Hammond: And I don't... Yeah, I want people to be happy with us, not the opposite.

19:33Janne Parri: That's so true. Everybody wants the project to come along and get done at some point. What about the discovery stuff that you mentioned that the copywriting is there and all sorts of other things? Are you strict with those timelines?

19:50Ben Hammond: Yeah, it depends on what's what the priority for the client is really. I think a lot of the time we don't do some things and we do other things like the copyrighting we outsource to another partner. I say outsource, we are very transparent and we actually bring them in and we let them do their thing. They have a general timeline that can often depends on stakeholder involvement so obviously you know if they're trying to write copy from scratch for a whole site it could take another month so we might do the discovery to analyze the gap with the copywriting for them to then go away and do the copywriting and then they'll come back and do the dev after so yeah we're quite strict about not doing design without like an idea of content but we are

20:45Ben Hammond: Are also the drivers behind trying to structure the information architecture for the site anyway. Rather than just say to a client, right, go and do some content, you know, we'll just wait. We'll drive the conversations and try and get the wheels turning by saying, okay, actually we've assessed the mission of this site based on the discovery here is a... An idea of what the information architecture might look like to make your life easier when it comes to creating content for this site. So we try and do a lot of the legwork for them and I think that's what makes us a better kind dev shop or development agency.

21:25Janne Parri: Yeah, nice. And how much how much do you do like work outside of Webflow or yeah, like custom stuff and those lead flows and so on.

21:35Ben Hammond: Fair amount. We've done a couple of next.js sites with sanity backends. They were a bit larger, they were quite nice. I've done a little bit of Framer. I know that's the anti-webflow platform, but we have done a couple of Framer sites and we've had a couple of clients on Retainer for Framer. A lot of custom development work that lives in Webflow but isn't done with Webflow. You know, we build a lot of React bits and bobs. I think that the ultimate goal for us is to be not a Webflow studio, but to be a tech consultancy. And to do that, we need to be agnostic. It doesn't mean I haven't, you know, I'm not aware of the bet that I've taken on Webflow, it's...

22:21Ben Hammond: We're still keen to utilize other platforms at the same time, you know.

22:25Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. People are a bit scared or anxious with all the things that is happening with AI and well, webflow in general, is it like a bad,

22:37Ben Hammond: Mmm.

22:37Janne Parri: Idea to still keep doing just webflow stuff when there's all sorts of possibilities right next to next to it and so on. But then there's a lot of possibilities. Kind of it's a big

22:49Ben Hammond: Hmm

22:50Janne Parri: Jump to just like open your door, so to speak, and start doing all sorts of services and products with AI. So how do you see that thing?

22:56Ben Hammond: Yeah, absolutely. You have to be... Yeah, I mean, you've to be really intentional with the service lines that you're offering. Like, we're not gratuitously throwing out services for AI. We need to consider whether there's actually a value add and whether there's actually something that we can offer that's going to make a difference. And ultimately, the goal is a return on investment. I know that sounds like... Corporate talk, but if it's not making money, it's pointless. So we are very cautious about that. Now, when it comes to AI and its impact, I understand why people are both scared, but also optimistic. I think it's never happened at this scale before, but...

23:45Ben Hammond: The opportunities are endless. Think we're in a world at the moment where we can do a lot more and a lot quicker. I think we fall into the danger of potentially thinking that AI or treating AI as an efficiency tool when perhaps we need to start thinking of AI as something to be more effective with. So rather than just, we saved an hour because we didn't have to deploy this code in the same way. I think we need to have a look actually what are the business impacts of utilizing AI and how it can be more effective not just saving time. Like what does that look like? I don't have the answers for that but I've been thinking quite heavily on that topic recently and I think yeah it's going to be an interesting couple of years.

24:35Ben Hammond: That being said, I do feel like there's a bit of a bubble that's going to burst because the funding of these AI companies is dwindling and they're all being subsidized by certain governments. So, you're looking at an uncertainty of what's going to happen next. And I don't think anyone can, I don't think anyone really can see what's going to happen. So. Who knows? Who knows? I'm all for it. We're AI first or AI.

25:02Janne Parri: You

25:03Ben Hammond: I don't know how to, how would you say it? Not AI first, but like AI adoptive, you know, we utilize it every day. AI positive.

25:09Janne Parri: Yeah, AI positive or something.

25:12Ben Hammond: Yeah. We try and try and bring it into things intentionally. I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't say that it helps us with our code deployment and versioning and I was able to spin up a boilerplate or a couple of boilerplates on GitHub for projects within half an hour, you know, rather than what it would have taken me, which is like two days before. So yeah, I don't know, it helps. And that means I can start projects a lot quicker and we can get going a lot faster.

25:43Janne Parri: Totally, Webflow in itself. It is so like, ⁓ well, first of all, it's a beautiful tool and simple box to fitting. Like ⁓ I'll do ⁓ websites and marketing stuff. And ⁓ I think that shrink studios, like the H1 ⁓ like headline ⁓ is clear ⁓ and nice in a way that, okay, I land on the site and I immediately know. If it's for me, like if I'm a venture backed tech team B2B startup. So that's clear. That might be a way to proceed. Like ⁓ just thinking that who you, who you want to serve and think of it that way. Do you have any like concrete use cases or anything like that you'd like to apply AI in the future?

26:30Janne Parri: Out of the like efficiency stuff that you are like doing right now. Are there any anything that tickles

26:37Ben Hammond: Mmm.

26:38Janne Parri: Your brain?

26:39Ben Hammond: Yeah, I mean, at the moment it's working on a few internal tools. Just things to ultimately make our life easier internally. One of the things I'm working on is a scoping mechanism. So I used to scope projects, line items, we use a sheet that is like line items. That line item has team members. Attributed to it and then spits out costs for the client. It's uber transparent, so you know, people can see how much things cost in real time. That's one thing we try and do. But it became really hard to manage and it takes me ages to put a scope together. So what I've done is I've just turned that spreadsheet into a tool and that tool I can use to put together a scope for a project a lot quicker and it does all the formulas.

27:28Ben Hammond: I hate Google Sheets and Excel. Don't give

27:30Janne Parri: You

27:32Ben Hammond: Me formulas, I can't stand it. You know, being able to build stuff like that to be more efficient in that way. I know that if I am doing scoping a lot quicker, I'm closing deals a lot faster. I'm having those conversations with clients without delay, which, you know, delay is often... One of the reasons that people put a pause on projects because it's taken a while to get answers. So yeah, in stuff like that, I feel like that's a good use case. I'll feedback at the end of the year, at the end of the next financial year once I've sent them out, but it's going well so far. That in itself

28:06Ben Hammond: Is something I think is quite good.

28:09Janne Parri: Yeah. And since you talked about like offers and giving up some like pricing details, we could go towards like the business stuff and sales. First of all, like if you want to call it like niche, the venture backed B2B teams, how did you find that? You mentioned the gap that you saw with the agencies. Was that just a good fit for the gap or did you like stumble to it somehow?

28:39Ben Hammond: Firstly, from a personal aspect, the tech world, or not even the tech world, the startup world is so fascinating to me. And I think there are so many amazing startups finding funding every single day. I have an RSS feeds that I get that pulls leads into my click up, which we can go over in a minute. I see funding going to like fantastic ventures and they're ventures that I personally want to support and work with and I think it leans into the business ethos. So it's where the diagnosis fits the cleanest basically. It's where our model works the best. A few things have to be true for our model to work.

29:24Ben Hammond: And they're all true for these teams. You know, we're looking for people who have just raised, whichever that looks like. It can be seeds, series A, series B. Those are kind of our three brackets. We prefer series A because they're a more fundamental time where seeds are probably a little bit smaller, probably don't have as much emphasis on their growth team just yet. Series A they have like a growth team or at least they're head of growth in place. They also have budget. All of these teams move fast because runway is finite, positioning shifts quarterly, pivoting happens all the time. Enterprise buyers and next round investors are reading the site so credibility is not optional. Marketing function within the companies is usually one to three people.

30:18Ben Hammond: Who need to ship without engineering. And that one is a killer. If you build a site for a team that they can't update themselves, you've actively made their job harder. You're losing their money. You look at their internal resource costs skyrocket if you do that. And yeah, we've worked with over 30 of these teams across SEED. Series A and Series B. The pattern is pretty consistent. It doesn't really change that much. CTO built the first site because it was the path of release resistance

30:55Ben Hammond: In a platform that they wanted. At 50 people with a marketing lead trying to ship a campaign every fortnight, that site is a bottleneck. Or there's a previous agency relationship that ran on consultant rates and never really properly handed over. So every change is an invoice, which you know, like I say, don't have the time or the, you know, the budget is the budget when you're this small, every penny is accounted for when you're this size. And yeah, I think the unsexy reality is that for most growth stage B2B businesses, the website is doing four jobs. It's credibility for enterprise sales, positioning for your next round of investment.

31:37Ben Hammond: It's demand gen for paid and organic and it's recruitment for the talent that you want to hire. You know, as you're growing, you're going to need to need to be hiring. So it needs to flex on all four of those things. It's not a static brochure site, but it doesn't need to be a massive custom built platform, a property, properly architected CMS build with the right integrations behind it. Great. That will do the job. And yeah, I think the common pain points that I see on like every intake call are the site looks junior next to the products that they've spent

32:11Janne Parri: Mmm.

32:12Ben Hammond: Years developing. Marketing can't update copy. None of the integrations are working properly because they're like duct taped together. So no one knows if the data is right. The performance scores are pretty embarrassing for companies that, you know, pitch themselves as leaders. And there's no clear way to add things without building from scratch. So we try and solve all of those problems. And yeah, like I say, it's pretty common thread through all of them. But, it's fun. Startups are fun.

32:40Janne Parri: Is it fun if you know that in six months you have to do it all over again? Do you ever get tired of the pace of change with those customers?

32:50Ben Hammond: No, actually funny you should say that. So I think like if you're a bootstraps company, you will probably pivot a lot quicker. We tend to avoid working with bootstraps companies because it's not our expertise. They need to change a lot faster. However, with a seeds or Series A business, the foundation that you've built will allow for a pivot quite easily. Quite quickly. So we will probably not have to do that much heavy lifting again for another two years, maybe three, which I think is the ideal timeline for a website anyway really. We just want them to come to us to help them compound growth, to revisit the website. The architecture and the way that we set everything up

33:37Ben Hammond: Allows for them to go and have like maximum consistency, maximum editability, I guess, over the site, with some guardrails obviously, so if they need to pivot they can.

33:48Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I want to get to the architecture and frameworks and such, but I mentioned the business side of things. So I need to ask you, where do you get those clients? Do you do like active sales or do you have a good referral network or how do you find the clients?

34:05Ben Hammond: Yeah, so years one to three, was mostly inbound. Referrals, word of mouth. Webflow directory for a couple of years. Some agencies wanting Webflow specialists. Referrals had been our strongest channel by quite a long way. You know, we worked with a lot of early stage founders who finished a project, raise their next round, recommends us to a friend, that compounded. So yeah, that's been a strong one for us. But I think over the last couple of months, what I've been doing is working on our financial year 27 planning. And in that is a lot of outbound. So we're trying to shift the percentages quite considerably. Over the last couple of months, what we've done is we've looked at

34:49Ben Hammond: Different APIs that we can connect to from databases where we can see how much funding companies have got, whether they match our ICP score, know, see whether their venture backs, you know, worked with a consultant before. It's an interesting territory. And then I have, like I said, an RSS feed. That I scrape all of the European tech news, basically all the funding news from all around the continent. And we pull that into a click up board. It gives an ICP score out of 100. And if it's less than 70, it won't go in. If it's higher than 70, it will go in. And over the last couple of weeks, I've got like 95 companies that I can reach out to. And now it's just

35:37Ben Hammond: Outbound. We're doing a lot of outbound. I've built some tools to help assess websites and see if they are AEO ready, see if their structure is sound, see if they're being found online, etc. It's hard, but I think all of that graft is going to pay off and it's already looking like it's, you know, three months into putting that into practice, it's starting to pay off. And now's the time that we're going to start doubling down on what's working. And yeah, it's interesting.

36:07Ben Hammond: We're actually actively hiring a sales development representative at the moment to help me with some outland.

36:15Janne Parri: Cool yeah and yeah it's hard but just imagine if you get the machine like working like if you put amount of effort into it you get amount of results that would be so cool. Referrals are like awesome and inbound stuff is great but if you want to like build and grow your company kind of need that kind of machine. But have you seen anything that is working? I have tried a couple of times to do some sort of outbound or cold emails or such, and I haven't gotten those to work. So have you seen anything that clearly works at this point?

36:57Ben Hammond: Yeah, yeah, it's hard. It's a hard one because at the moment you're seeing a lot of AI spray and pray and have outbound

37:04Janne Parri: Mmm.

37:05Ben Hammond: Happening. You know, even myself as an agency founder, I get ⁓ AI generated outbound sent to me every goddamn day. So what is working and I was talking to my mentor about this yesterday is the more human approach. Someone can tell if you're being human when you message them. And actually one of the calls that I've got locked in for next week was an introduction that I just said, hey dude, congrats on the funding. I've had a look at your site, absolutely love the mission. Here's where, here's a report that I have just spun up. No pressure. You know, keep up the good work.

37:44Ben Hammond: And he was like, can we chat? And that, you know, it's not going to work for everyone. Some people might be offended if you said, hey dude, but in that instance it worked and you know, it was something human. Was a different way of approaching it and being like, yo, look, we think what you're doing is really, really cool. Congrats on the round. And we found some gaps that we want to show you, or we want to show you how good your website is actually doing. Because that also happens. So, yeah.

38:11Janne Parri: And you mentioned the AEO stuff, like do you have a tool or something for that too? Obviously it's top of mind for many marketers and such. So do you have anything for that?

38:24Ben Hammond: We've really lent into AEO. So we have a partner who offers AEO services. He will spin up reports with us. So we'll kind of sit down and just say, look, we've got five potential companies that we want to pitch this to, or just show them the importance of it. Sometimes we're just trying to give things without any return. You know, here's some value. See ya. So we try and send those out and yeah, we're trying to lean into it as much as possible because people are searching very differently now and we need to be at the forefront of what that looks like.

39:00Janne Parri: Yeah, that's interesting. What about your like outreach numbers? Because I would imagine that you are doing some quite detailed work and if you are like manually doing those things, the numbers are not as high as a totally automated system.

39:18Ben Hammond: I probably do about three every three days or every two days. Which are people that I've sat and had a look through the press releases. I look at where they're going to spend their funding because there's often a good indicator if they're growing certain teams, whether they're going to need like a website. I look at the mission. Does it align with what we want to do or is it just a company? That we can't really get behind because, you know, ultimately it makes the work better if we can align with it. And then look at the founders or the head of product or the head of marketing or whatever and, you know, try and align with them, see if they've put any content out on LinkedIn, try and be as warm as possible when we get there. And I think...

40:03Ben Hammond: Because of the prices that we charge, they're reasonable, but they're not expensive, they're not cheap. So they're like, you know, a reasonable level. So, you know, I only need one a week to say, yeah, let's have a chat. And I think that's good for me. I don't want to be spraying and praying for a hundred a week, because we're just going to end up with, you know. Rubbish and then we'll get blacklisted on LinkedIn, which I don't want to do. Because I'm one of those

40:32Janne Parri: Yeah, I did

40:33Ben Hammond: People that absolutely loves LinkedIn.

40:36Janne Parri: That's, I'm, it's my preferred, social media, but I do not love it. It's a weird place, but yeah,

40:44Ben Hammond: It can be, it absolutely can be.

40:49Janne Parri: Yeah, my like a business or sales nerd like rises up and I'm like getting excited. I should check out my own funnel again, but you mentioned to click up a couple of times. So you mentioned that it gets you the score like the, how good of a lead it would be for you. Does it help in any other way or how do you use the click up tool?

41:14Ben Hammond: Okay, yeah, so ClickUp is just our project management tool. It's basically the brain of our company. It's where I document the process. It's where we document our development process. It's just got a really nice interface. And then Claude and myself have built the connection to Claude. So it just uses the Claude API to funnel things in. So it's a Claude built like cron job, essentially that, you know, reads online and then pushes to click up and then creates a task. In that task, there is a assessment. They've done, it's basically, if it can find a URL for the website of that client or of that lead, sorry, it will run the assessment that we've set up in our tools.

42:00Ben Hammond: And then spit out a report for me to look at, which I can then decipher whether the answers are good enough. And then I can utilize that and send that to a potential lead as a way of a warm intro.

42:12Janne Parri: Yeah, that sounds exciting. And you mentioned that you will send an email, just a little bit of value and do with it whatever you want. But have you ever tried like recording a loom video or something like that to add to that?

42:27Ben Hammond: Yeah, tell you what does work actually is sometimes is voice notes. So.

42:32Janne Parri: How do you do those with email?

42:35Ben Hammond: Not on email, on LinkedIn, you can send voice notes and you can quickly grab people's attention, I think. My only thing with voice notes is like I personally hate sending them, but I do know I have seen some decent results and I think you can. Spin up something that's going to grab someone's attention very fast if you are speaking to them. You know, a lot of people you'll find they're quite curious and they'll want to open it. Yeah, in terms of loom.

43:00Janne Parri: Mm-hmm yeah I'll need to try those voice notes

43:04Ben Hammond: Yeah, I do. Do in terms of loom, I've done a couple of looms. Yeah, I think voice notes or just a direct message is the way to go.

43:13Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, the video is a bit much for a first email maybe. Like, it's a lot to expect someone to watch a full video, even though it's personal and such, but yeah, it might be quite much compared to a voice note.

43:27Ben Hammond: Definitely. Don't put blockers in your own way. Try and make it as easy as possible is my advice.

43:34Janne Parri: Yeah, Okay, anything about the sales topic or such or should we go towards the frameworks and all the Webflow stuff?

43:42Ben Hammond: Yeah, let's chat about frameworks. Yeah, let's do that, 100%.

43:47Janne Parri: Yeah, bring it on. What's your or what's Shrink's favorite framework? What do you use?

43:52Ben Hammond: Yeah, so we are, or I am personally, a die-hard MAST guy. ⁓ Because mast uses a dry approach... It's super light, right? So it's like generally, yeah, a lot easier to spin something up quite quickly as well. What I would say is that frameworks are definitely starting points, not religion. Which

44:16Janne Parri: You

44:17Ben Hammond: Is a very sticky point in the sphere. You can't knock what Finsweet have done. It's great. They were the first to do it. You've got the small, medium, large. You've got subtle. You've got Lumos, Mast. It lowered the barrier to entry having those, which is good. And it has allowed people to become better developers very quickly. But yeah, the risk is that you start designing around the conventions of the framework rather than the project needs. So rigid framework adherence also makes handovers worse because client's team has to learn the framework before they can edit anything. So with what we do is we have a boilerplate of mast, which we have reskinned to be a shrink cloneable.

45:02Ben Hammond: We set up every site from that. It links to our GitHub. Sorry, Corey, but I've taken all of the from your GitHub and put

45:12Janne Parri: You

45:13Ben Hammond: It into ours. But that's what open source is for. And yeah, we have a shrink boilerplate that works the same. It's been slightly developed on. And we utilize that and then change it depending on the client. And then... We use components first, which is harder when you're doing CMS pages, but that's fine because it's managed by the CMS. But we try and stick to component first because it is a lot easier to manage. And most of the time we will do closed components. It'll be a section and then a closed component. And then inside that is the MAST framework. So row, column.

45:51Ben Hammond: Content wrap, et cetera. And then we'll just, you know, we have a class system that we use ourselves, which is based off the back of Mast to add custom things, you know, like section underscore whatever it is, underscore wrapper. So yeah, that was the better way to go for us, I think. Because I noticed that like while it was very, very useful to have the boilerplate of rows and columns and et cetera and et cetera. Only one of our clients out of like 20 used the columns. They were like, this doesn't work for me.

46:25Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. That's, that like puzzles me a bit. Like I can see how everybody, including me is excited about the possibility of building with components, like the open components, but it is still hard. If you wanna want the client to actually use those, you have to like train them. You have to documentation and then a couple of months go by and they forget everything and they forget the documentation and they are asking how about those close components.

47:02Ben Hammond: I think a lot of the time as well when you've got the, you should always assess the use case of what a client is, you know, using the website for. The majority of the time, if you're using it as like a huge growth engine or a content engine, you're doing lead generation forms, which you can do via the CMS. Success pages, which you can do via the CMS. Campaign pages, CMS. You can see where I'm going with this, right? And then you can spin up landing pages, which you can do with a template. And you can help them sort out their A/B testing. So a lot of the time, they're not using the entire component batch that you've created for them. They're using the fields in the CMS to spin up.

47:43Ben Hammond: Really quick pages for, yeah, like I say, like forms, which they can UTM track because the UTMs are in the CMS. So, you know, we just lean quite heavily on that. And I think with the next-gen CMS rollout, like, it's going to be even more powerful. So I'm excited for that to see the impact. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

48:06Janne Parri: The CMS, that's great too, but obviously it's more visual to use those components if you are in the CMS part of the ⁓ Webflow. You have all the fields there and then you have the canvas editing, ⁓ but you can get like mixed or puzzled with those two. And ⁓ I'm like thinking the CMS, might right now be easier to use as you like mentioned. Yeah, go on.

48:34Ben Hammond: Absolutely and it depends on the client as well, right? If you've got a marketing executive who's relatively new, they're going to want to fill in fields and make it really easy for themselves. They're not a designer and they don't want to be a designer. So that's why they need it as easy as humanly possible. And we have the tools to give that to them. And need to remember that we need to make it as easy as humanly possible for them to build what they need.

49:09Janne Parri: And the, all the AI stuff like connectors and MCPs work really well with MC, not MCP, CMS right now already. So that's a, that's a handed thing, but I'm just wondering if the build mode or the editing with components could be somehow easier. So that if there was a good robust open component system that it would be actually usable for the client who is not that tech savvy or hasn't

49:40Ben Hammond: Mmm.

49:40Janne Parri: Used Webflow so much. Do you see that could be a possibility in the future if the build mode was somehow revamped?

49:49Ben Hammond: Yeah, without a shadow of doubt. So the best example of this is Alessia from Code & Wander. Very good friend of mine. She has developed Blocks, which is the framework that she uses. That is the most client friendly framework for the build modes that I've seen. If you haven't, for anybody who's going to listen to this, if you haven't used it, do go and check it out. Entire mindset with that was like, can I make this easier for the user, not the developer, like, you know, we know how to build Webflow, ⁓ like we know how to dev sites, we need the client to have easy handover. And that's what blocks does. So yeah, that is a good example of exactly, ⁓ exactly that.

50:32Janne Parri: Yeah, the framework or the components and all the naming around it and all that logic around it is one thing, but I'm like thinking a step ahead, like if like Webflow itself could like redesign the build mode somehow. I do not know how it

50:48Ben Hammond: I see what you mean.

50:49Janne Parri: Looks like, but what if there would be more like a dedicated UI? For the build mode, like the legacy editor in a sense, but

50:58Ben Hammond: Mmm.

51:00Janne Parri: Build around components. Do you see that? Could that happen?

51:04Ben Hammond: Potentially, I do wonder, think, you know, if you go to WordPress and you look at any of the builders, like say like the Divi builder or

51:16Janne Parri: Hmm.

51:17Ben Hammond: I can't remember what the other one was called.

51:19Janne Parri: Elementor.

51:20Ben Hammond: That's the one, Elementor. They're all done in the builder in the same view. So I don't know, I couldn't imagine what that would look like. Unless they span up like a completely different tool for it, but I'm not sure they're going to do that after basically bringing build modes into the designer quite recently. So yeah, wonder. It's an interesting, that would be an interesting prospect to think about because you know, what's their mission is to give marketing teams and everyone development superpowers. So who knows, maybe they are working on something.

51:49Janne Parri: Maybe, or there will be a absolutely bongorous AI feature that can use components and you will just prompt it to use those components. That would be awesome too.

51:59Ben Hammond: Well, yeah, the MCP obviously can use components now. I haven't used it, but I use the MCP every day for other things. Apparently it can use components to build pages now if you train it properly.

52:13Janne Parri: I should take

52:14Ben Hammond: That's interesting.

52:15Janne Parri: Another look at the MCP. I tried it a couple of months ago. So now there's updates and yeah, everybody should take another look. But yeah,

52:24Ben Hammond: Mmm.

52:24Janne Parri: You're right. They are probably not gonna redesign it, but maybe with a little bit of like features and logic, if we could like, declare or say that this component slot will only take these components or something like that. So there would be more guardrails. Maybe something like that could make it easier and more usable.

52:48Ben Hammond: Definitely. ⁓ mean, I believe in the Webflow get a lot of slack online. I believe in Alan and I believe in his team and I believe in their mission ⁓ and Rachel, you know, as the CPO. I believe in what they're doing. I think that they know what they're doing. I would just trust them. You know, there's workarounds for everything, which, you know. I expect this platform to do everything under the sun. It is already allowing us to build websites that are beyond anything that any of us could ever imagine before, right? So we're already winning. Like, don't knock

53:24Ben Hammond: It. Don't knock it while you have, you literally have like the best thing with you.

53:29Janne Parri: Yeah, and I'm hopeful too. Have talked with some Webflow folks. Latest was Nathan from Webflow. He had lots of good takes. People were excited about that episode. And yeah, I'm hopeful there will be proper AI. I'm sure of that. And there are stuff that Webflow can do that these web coding platforms cannot do. But that's the thing, like, they are like approaching things differently. Like, obviously, Webflow is great for marketing sites, but with lovable and such, you can do a marketing site, but you can do all sorts of other things. And I'm not like, again, sure.

54:12Janne Parri: If the world is totally open and you can do whatever you want, that's a big product to build around. So.

54:19Ben Hammond: Yeah, part of me thinks, yeah, part of me thinks like, just because you can build a product doesn't mean you should. Like, just because you can build an app builder doesn't mean you should. You know, I'm sympathetic towards vibe coding. I think the label of vibe coding is dismissive. The underlying shift is very real. But the bar of can build software has significantly dropped. So feature not a problem, but it is like, you know, it is a real thing. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's an interesting shift. It's a very interesting shift. It's the

54:59Ben Hammond: Most interesting thing happening in the industry right now, let's be honest. Like it is, yeah, it is a huge shift.

55:07Janne Parri: Are you going to build products or software for clients with all those tools or are you already doing that?

55:16Ben Hammond: We've already done a couple of things. We built a campaign dashboard for UTM tracking for a client. It was very simple. Again, it's just about being intentional with it, like, you know, not just doing it for the sake of doing it. I think that's where Webflow have actually been quite good is they're not building AI features for the sake of AI features. They've like... The new AEO staff that's coming to Enterprise. Yes, I know that's going to Enterprise first, but it will eventually come to everyone else. That is a huge, amazing way of utilising AI and leaning into the AEO playground as well. So intentional, stay intentional.

55:55Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, Webflow is going big. Yeah, Webflow is going big on the AEO stuff. And I think that's good move. Every marketer is almost like panicking right now. What is going on with the search results and traffic and so on. But as in the last episode I did with amazing Paul, like hate SEO already because it's so fuzzy and now AEO like firstly like where do we even get the data on how much

56:29Ben Hammond: Huh.

56:29Janne Parri: Like traffic comes from which questions and which answers and so on so how do you cope with the AEO fuzziness or the landscape shifting

56:41Ben Hammond: Personally, I lean into every single change. I'm really like really progressive when it comes to that. Don't have much skepticism when it comes to, we call it naivety, right? But I'm not massively skeptical. I only see the opportunity. That might be a negative in some aspects, but I see it as a... As an interesting and an amazing tool to lean into. Think the landscape's changed already hugely and will continue to change. And it's something that we need to be ready for. And I keep going back to this word intentional, but intentional about how we serve the industry, you know, with AI and in a post-AI world.

57:30Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And do clients like ask about the AEO stuff? You mentioned that's kind of a part of the optimized bucket. Am I right? Yeah, that was the bucket.

57:40Ben Hammond: Yeah, a little bit. We've had a few who have brought it up. It's not on a lot of people's radar. I think they're like, I want to be seen on ChatGPT, but I don't understand. And we're not ready to invest in that just yet. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. We will pitch them and say, you know, what do you think about this? You're not being found online in these places. You've got no citations or credits over here and they'll take their way and think about it and it's food for thought but for a lot of people getting the buy in from the people that hold the wallet is a lot harder at the moment so we're doing what we can but yeah it's a mixed bag

58:24Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. Obviously, the people who see that they're like, SEO rankings are shrinking, they might be onto it and like trying to find new, new traffic sources. But yeah, it's kind of like, marketers know that's a thing, but there are not too much of those best practices yet. So

58:45Ben Hammond: Yeah, definitely.

58:45Janne Parri: Hopefully, something will form in the future.

58:48Ben Hammond: We're building a boilerplate for how to implement best AEO practices from the beginning of a site build. And honestly, at the moment, it's just doing things like LLM.txt files, proper schema, FAQs, making sure the content is answering the questions that people are asking with natural language now, that kind of stuff. But who knows, we don't really know what it looks like yet. It's again, it's just a really interesting, fun thing to do.

59:20Janne Parri: Totally. And since you mentioned the boilerplate again, I want to take us back to the framework stuff and all

59:28Ben Hammond: Mmm.

59:29Janne Parri: Those things. I forgot to ask you, like, you have your own version of MAST and what sort of things have you added there? Are there like page templates or something content wise and something maybe technical? You mentioned some utility classes. What's there that... Most clonable in itself doesn't have.

59:49Ben Hammond: Yeah, absolutely. So we've added some new components. They're things from validated forms. So we have form validation built into the framework that we give to clients. That's because of spam issues and bot issues, obviously. So we built that in. It's quite advanced. And we've got page transitions. So Essentially we have

1:00:15Janne Parri: Ooh, nice.

1:00:16Ben Hammond: A way to ⁓ create a page transition. It has a certain way of writing the JavaScript before you put it back into the bundle to allow for the page transitions to properly work. ⁓ We have ⁓ some of Finsweet's or we've repurposed some of Finsweet's open source JavaScript. So things like copy to clipboard, like we've turned

1:00:40Janne Parri: Mmm.

1:00:40Ben Hammond: That into a button. Right so you know because I worked out that a lot of email links weren't opening on people's devices because they've got ad blockers so we did copy to clipboard instead because it's a safer way of getting emails from websites. What else? We've done a few other things, tables of contents that's like of standards that comes with our sites. Yeah, just useful things that come up all the time. They're just really simple things that you wouldn't think off the top of your head until you hit that page. But we try and use all of them. If they're not used, obviously we just remove them from the bundle. There's also a JavaScript's

1:01:26Ben Hammond: Snippet that we put in so that you don't have to set the visibility on a CMS page. So it will automatically hide a section if the content is empty because sometimes we get clients who forget to do that. Yeah, we've done that as well. Although the new visibility settings on Webflow are fantastic, we might rework that one. But yeah, there's a few things, cookie consent, know, stuff like that. Lists,

1:01:56Ben Hammond: Filtering, blah.

1:01:59Janne Parri: Do you have some CMS collections there already, like blogs and such?

1:02:04Ben Hammond: Yeah, we keep a blog one and then a blog categories and that's it and then we just build everything else from scratch.

1:02:12Janne Parri: Yeah, there's always the balance that you kind of want to add to it but then if you end up deleting a bunch of stuff oftentimes like where's the golden balance or golden road whatever

1:02:23Ben Hammond: Yeah, I think as well. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think as well. We build in UTM tracking sometimes from scratch. So we have a boilerplate again, or a template, I guess, for how a CMS collection should look for UTM tracking. So if a client is going to do that, they'll be able to do that. Yeah, it's working. Really well just means there's less set up time to get going and it means that we can deliver like real links to a client a lot quicker for them to see the website that

1:02:58Ben Hammond: Is being built for them gives them more confidence makes them happier makes me happier

1:03:03Janne Parri: You've mentioned the UTM tracking a couple of times. So walk me through how does that work? Do you have some sort of automation that it automatically provides the links that has those parameters in the link or what does it do?

1:03:17Ben Hammond: Yeah, essentially what we do is obviously we'll have a of clients out there, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. And we use post hog as well, which is for internal use so that we can keep an eye on like how things are working. Essentially, what we do is we create a collection called UTM campaigns. That collection in it has a data source, it has a medium, it has a couple of other bits. In it and the client can go in and create their campaign. They can go in and they can put the medium, they can put where it's coming from, they can put like is it from a QR code or a link on a site. Then what they do is they go on their dashboard which we built and on the dashboard they can copy the URL. It uses some clever JS, it's just nice simple two snippets to copy a URL, put that in your

1:04:09Ben Hammond: Put that into your URL bar and it will take you to the correct UTM page which they can then use wherever they go. Yeah it's a nice simple one but it just means that you know you can do tracking and measurements straight off the bat especially when you've got like a Greenfield site like brand new website that's never done anything like this before it's really helpful. And, you know, we pin our successful websites and our process on being able to deliver real data. So not doing that would go against, you know, going against that. So, clients love it. They're happy.

1:04:47Janne Parri: Yeah, since we're on the topic of data, you must love like all the cookie regulations and pop-ups and such. So how

1:04:58Ben Hammond: You

1:04:58Janne Parri: Do you manage those? And do you have to explain that? Okay, this is not the full picture. Or do you have a workaround something server-side or anything about those?

1:05:09Ben Hammond: Yeah, we're in the middle of building something a bit more substantial for this. I've used services in the past and like the Finsweet option. So yeah, generally what we'll do is we'll get them to use something like cookie Yes out the box because I just know that if it's out the box, nothing's going to be wrong with it. And I, you know, we're not going to have to take any liability for things not working. And cookie, yes, has always been our best option, but in situations where they need something more custom, we're looking at building something that we can just use out the box ourselves. So hopefully in the next year we'll have that, fingers crossed.

1:05:52Janne Parri: Like, do you mean like your own cookie solution or something?

1:05:56Ben Hammond: Our own cookie solution with how to of how to set it up in GTM and make sure that, you know, it's completely above board and legit.

1:06:05Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. I gotta say this might turn into a rant, but the cookie consent stuff is, the part of my work that I hate the most. Like I hate the fact that we have to do a pop-up for every site. Like that is not in no way, like a good way to handle the consents and such so there must be

1:06:29Ben Hammond: No.

1:06:30Janne Parri: A better way somehow but just for the regulation it is what it is right now and hopefully someday we will get something better and the time of cookie consent pop-ups will be in the past hopefully

1:06:42Ben Hammond: Yeah, mean, yeah, sucks for us being European. Although they have to use it in

1:06:47Janne Parri: Bye!

1:06:50Ben Hammond: California as well. California has cookie consent.

1:06:55Janne Parri: And just imagine if you are in the States and you are not used to building those pop-ups and then one client needs to have it because they have a huge audience in Europe. So that would be quite painful too. So I don't know. Yeah, that's just a gripe of mine.

1:07:16Ben Hammond: Yeah, no, I'm with you. They're fun things that we need to find workarounds for. The quicker we can develop something that we can just plug in and play, the better.

1:07:28Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, at some point I need to let you go, but we could visit quickly the topic of Webflow community before we end. Are you an active part of your local community? I know that London has quite active community. Have you been into the meetups?

1:07:48Ben Hammond: Yeah, I like to think I'm an active part of the community. I go to every month, the London meetup. I've been to, I think, four Webflow comps now. I have spent a significant portion of my time trying to build relationships with people in the space who, to be honest with you, have become friends of mine outside of work now. So they're like friends of mine outside of Webflow. I can speak very highly of Dan Foster from MakeBuild and Alessia Sannazzaro from Code & Wander who have become two of my close friends. We do a lot of stuff outside of work. We go to the pub a fair amount and they're

1:08:32Ben Hammond: A great support network for me. I've got Joe Murray from Funk who's become a really good pal. Speak to lot of the American guys, Jordan from Crew, big legend. So yeah, it's paid off being a part of it. Doesn't directly correlate to getting work. It's just a great community to be a part of where you're surrounded by knowledge and just amazing people. Most of the people that I've met have just been

1:09:03Ben Hammond: Bloody wonderful. I feel very, very, very fortunate to be a part of that and to be building an agency within that community and that space is very special.

1:09:11Janne Parri: Yeah, I'm a bit envious because you guys have like, was it like monthly meetup in London? So that's awesome. I have seen that you also live streamed the talk. That's great too. But yeah.

1:09:25Ben Hammond: You'll have to come over. It's good fun.

1:09:28Janne Parri: Yeah, I'll try to try to leave my little country at some point. I'm

1:09:32Ben Hammond: You

1:09:33Janne Parri: Not able to make it to Webflow Conf but I have been thinking that I should get to some events like there's also a event I guess it just happened but Uros Mikish the Flow Ninja guys

1:09:47Ben Hammond: Mmm

1:09:48Janne Parri: Have the... What was it? FlowConf,

1:09:50Ben Hammond: Slow comps. Yeah.

1:09:53Janne Parri: In Serbia. That's one ad.

1:09:56Ben Hammond: Trying to get a last minute ticket to that, I think. I love those guys over in Central Europe. They're all doing wicked things. And I bumped into a lot of them in new York and we had some nice, interesting conversations and obviously shared over a beer, which was lovely. So keen to get to it. If I can make my way over to Serbia. In May I will. You might see me there.

1:10:22Janne Parri: It always, it likes, it takes time and you're wondering before you go that should I spend my time and money to this, but afterwards it's always like, I need to do this more often. Like it's so rewarding. So, so cool.

1:10:34Ben Hammond: Yeah, absolutely. It's so rewarding. It's so rewarding. And people are just great, you know. We're so lucky to have such a global community, you know. I can't think of many other industries where they get to share this amazing international world. And yeah, it's quite brilliant.

1:10:56Janne Parri: Totally, Okay, there's one last section at the end, but before that, if people wanna check you out, follow you, maybe even contact you, where should they go?

1:11:05Ben Hammond: Yeah, absolutely. Like I mentioned earlier on, I love LinkedIn. So please hit me up there. You can find me just under Ben Hammond. Find us at shrink.studio. That's the domain. You'll see lots of improvements coming to our website over the next few weeks, thanks to our little CRO sprint that we've done internally. And yeah, just keep an eye out. We're trying to build a better relationship with Webflow now we've spent a few years in the space. I want to start being more of an active community provider rather than a passive member, I think. So we're going to try and think of ways that we can maybe host some events and do some other bits.

1:11:43Ben Hammond: So yeah, just to me up, I love meeting everyone. It gives me an opportunity to travel and, you know, hook up with people at all the different events that we go to. Yeah, go find me. Go find me on LinkedIn.

1:11:54Janne Parri: Nice. And I will obviously put all the links in the description. But yeah, the last section for the dedicated listeners. Do you have any idea what it is about?

1:12:04Ben Hammond: I haven't. Let's go.

1:12:06Janne Parri: Beautiful. So this is a funny little and maybe a bit weird Finnish section at the end. So what follows is that I will give you a Finnish saying. I will translate that to English and your job is to guess what it is about and what it means basically. So are you ready for your saying?

1:12:28Ben Hammond: Yeah, let's do it.

1:12:29Janne Parri: So firstly in Finnish it is suksikuuseen and straight translation word to word is go ski into a spruce like spruce as a tree. So what does it mean if I say to you go ski into a spruce?

1:12:49Ben Hammond: Go ski into a tree. Wow. Something about, I guess like, I don't know, just go head first into your ambitions.

1:13:01Janne Parri: That's beautifully positive way to look at this. No,

1:13:04Ben Hammond: No.

1:13:07Janne Parri: It's not to correct this context. So yeah, do you want-

1:13:17Ben Hammond: You know, I said, you know, you know, I said I'm not a skeptic. That's where that came from.

1:13:22Janne Parri: Yeah, that's true. Yeah, this is quite simple. It just means go away. You could like translate that like maybe fuck off or something like that. Not with any swear words, but similar meaning. So just go ski into spruce.

1:13:36Ben Hammond: I got you. That's amazing. That's amazing.

1:13:45Janne Parri: Okay, Ben, this has been a blast, thanks so much for being a guest and for all the listeners and watchers, we will see you in the next one. Bye!

1:13:54Ben Hammond: Thank you so much.