Changing the National Conversation About Money through Podcasting with Brian Bristol

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue, and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:00:21] <teaser sequence>

We need to destigmatize lending money to friends and family. That’s one of the first things Brian Bristol said to me in today’s interview. See, Brian is the co-founder of Pigeon Loans, a place where anyone can set up a private loan backed with tracking, interest, and a legally binding agreement. This ethos is as interesting as the approach Pigeon Loans takes to their content strategy—show people that everyone has a story about lending or borrowing money.

So today, we talk about Pigeon Loans, their content strategy, and the important role that their podcast, The Chirp, plays in destigmatizing money lending. Brian even gets me to tell a couple of stories about how I’ve lent money.

In Build Something More we talk about the incredible importance of talking to customers to make your products and services better. And I’ve got to say I was really shocked by this episode. I didn’t really know what to expect going in. I thought we were going to talk about money lending and why they started the podcast, but we ended up talking about money lending and starting a podcast as well as philosophy and technology. And it was just an all-around fantastic conversation.

Brian seems like a really genuine guy, and I’m really excited. Pigeon Loans is maybe the first online-based loan service that I don’t think is some sort of scam because of everything they set up as far as accountability goes. But we’ll talk about all of that in the episode, which is, by the way, brought to you by Ahrefs and Nexcess. And you can find out about them, as well as get all of the show notes over at streamlined.fm/259.

But for now, let’s get into the intro, and then the interview.

[00:02:15] <intro music>

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue, and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:03:01] <podcast begins>

Joe Casabona: Brian, how are you today?

Brian Bristol: I’m doing good. Can’t complain.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for being here. I’m excited to chat with you about kind of your content strategy. The goal for How I Built It in 2022 is to help small business owners and creators create more easily and find new revenue streams through content.

And from what I can see The Chirp podcast can fit into this because it doesn’t seem like you’re selling sponsorships on it. It’s really more about telling stories that help reinforce your brand. Is that accurate?

Brian Bristol: Yes, correct. So every time someone comes in The Chirp… I’ll give listeners an overview of what The Chirp is, it’s essentially this environment that we’ve created an audio format in which everyday people can come on to our platform and tell stories about loans or finance or any type of relationship, which you’ve had to make a transaction with someone you know and trust and it’s either gone wrong or it’s gone well, or you just had a cool story to tell about it.

So we’ve been doing that for some time now. A lot of the stories are to kind of reinforce this mantra that it’s okay to help people financially within your relationships. Like there’s this weird stigma, especially in American culture, where you kind of frown upon it.

People tell you, no, don’t give your friend $200 because they need to eat tomorrow. That doesn’t make any sense. Especially if we’re all humans, we’re all trying to live this race that is life. We’re trying to pretty much break down that stereotype and say, Look, this is something that can be positive for your communities. This is something that can be positive for your relationships. And we’re trying to put those stories in the forefront of people’s minds.

Joe Casabona: I love that. Just to give a little bit of extra background, Pigeon Loans is exactly that sort of platform, right? Where if one of my brothers needed money, I can send it to them through Pigeon Loans. Is that right?

Brian Bristol: Correct.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. And I like what you said: there’s a weird stigma. When I was in college, I freelanced all through college, so I had more money than the average college student, which is not a lot of money but it’s more than the average college student, which is a negative bank account. Right?

Brian Bristol: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: I had a friend who had double pneumonia and she needed medicine and she didn’t have insurance.

Brian Bristol: Oh, wow.

Joe Casabona: I think I lend her 300 bucks, I think, to pay for the medicine. One month, two months went by, several months. And I was a little bit nervous after a few months that I wasn’t going to get this money back. But before it came to a head, she paid me back and I wondered what I was all worked up about. She was my friend and I should have trusted that she paid me back.

So I think you’re right. There’s a weird stigma, about lending money to friends, about doing business with friends and family. That’s always like a common never do business, never let your friend hire you or whatever because it could strain the relationship. But it sounds like The Chirp tell stories to kind of help destigmatize that.

Brian Bristol: Yeah, exactly. We’re basically picking at this massive wall piece by piece, story by story. So whether they be celebrities or just your neighbor across the street, or doctors or lawyers, or anyone of that sort, they all have a story. We’ve heard countless stories just in building this company alone.

So being able to document them and actually put them in one place and tell people, Look, you’re not the only one struggling with this weird problem that no one talks about. Everyone is struggling with it. I think that’s a very new and innovative space for us and we’re excited to continue to grow it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s also a really good point. I’m 36. So my parents are I guess boomers. I guess my parents are boomers. And we always kind of grew up don’t talk about money, don’t talk about money problems.

Again, I think that you think you’re struggling, and then especially with like influencer, marketing, and Instagram, it feels like you’re the only one struggling. But as we record this, we’re about a week out from our third kid being born, I’m self-employed. My wife is a nurse, but she’s going on leave soon, and I am freaking out about money.

We have savings but it’s something that I learned along the way. I think I talked about this on your podcast. It’s just I don’t really have a question here. I just think it’s really good to reinforce this.

Brian Bristol: Yeah, definitely.

Joe Casabona: What were you going to say?

Brian Bristol: No, I was going to say it’s shocking to me that it hasn’t happened before. But at the same time, other cultures around the world are doing this. And they’re basically not talking about in the forefront, but within their circles, they’re talking about it.

So being able to have that space now, especially in the United States of America I think is something that will be refreshing to people. They’ll take a step back and think the same way you just did and say, “Look, why are we really aren’t talking about this? While people are struggling, Instagram isn’t reality.” These are things that we need to discuss so that you can comfortably go about your life and support each other while you’re doing it.

Joe Casabona: You talked about other countries, other cultures do this within their community. I think community is something that’s making a bit of a comeback. It was like kind of a buzzword throughout 2020 and 2021 because people were more isolated so they formed these online communities.

My wife and I went on one of the few dates that we were able to go on over the last few years, just having small children and then a pandemic. And it was about an hour away. And our babysitter texted us that our ceiling started to leak.

Brian Bristol: Oh, wow.

Joe Casabona: My wife said, you know, she didn’t know what to do. So I said, “Why don’t we ask our neighbor to come over and shut off the water?” Because she didn’t know how to do it. And I’m like, “Isn’t it kind of weird asking our neighbor to do something?” And then I’m like, “Why do I think that’s weird?” This is just something that people would do even 20 years ago. “Do you have a cup of milk or a stick of butter or whatever?” But our ceiling was literally leaking and I was like, “Isn’t it weird to bother our neighbor?”

Brian Bristol: Exactly. Yeah, man, it definitely is weird.

Joe Casabona: So, let me ask you, how did you come up with the idea for Pigeon Loans? We talked about this destigmatizing. I guess wrapped in that question is how is it different from something like GoFundMe?

Brian Bristol: Pigeon Loans actually came about during the earlier days of the pandemic. There was a situation in which everyone was losing their job, everyone was trying to figure out how to get money, stock market was crashing, pigs were flying from the skies. It was just calamity, right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Brian Bristol: But in that same scenario, a lot of people were affected financially. And in my family was someone who was actually affected as well. It hit me in the same way it hit everyone else. So when I was talking to that family member of mine just during that time, they kind of approached me with that conversation, where it’s like, “Hey, look, I need a couple of bucks to make it to whatever this is going on. I don’t know if I can make it. If I can’t, I need to be able to sustain my current life or do what I need to get done.” So they came to me with that ask.

And fortunately enough I’m in the tech industry, and being a software engineer does have some income to it. So I was like, “All right, cool. Starting my new career, I got some cash on the side, I’ll be able to help you. How much do you need?” But then when I asked the “How much do you need?” question, the number was shocking. I was like, “Oh, well, let me figure this out.”

I’m still a new 24 years old trying to start my own career. And what I said was, “Hey, look, let’s just make a loan. Let’s get this money back to me at some point. I don’t care when. Hopefully within the year or something. But we know this pandemic is hurting everything, so let’s actually do something together that can help you.”

So what I did is I went online, I tried to find a service or an app, or some type of website that I could just quickly spin up a loan and keep track of that over time. And in searching Google and searching Yahoo, and searching the App Store, iOS, nothing.

Nothing really popped up that was robust. Nothing that popped up that said, Hey, I want to create documentation. Hey, I want to make payments online. Hey, I want to track everything over time. Hey, I want to remind this person without texting them and being like, Yo, where’s my money? So all of that was something that I was missing. and I thought would be an easy solution that someone would have invented already.

What ended up happening was I took this kind of thought, sat down and mediated on and kind of tried to do some research and figure out how many people are struggling with the same problem. Like, is it just me? Am I the only one who wants to make loans to their friends, or it’s like everyone doing this?

Did some research and found out that in the United States alone, there’s $200 billion moved every single year as loans between friends, family, and loved ones. Now, when we think about the world at large its trillion dollars moves around the world as loans between friends, family, and loved ones. There’s a lot of money moving in this fashion that no one talks about, no one documents, and we all just kind of say, hey, hopefully it all goes well.

So with that being said, I ended up creating the first version of Pigeon Loans and put it out there. And we’ve been working on it ever since.

Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s incredible. It’s so funny, maybe it didn’t exist because of the stigma. When we talk about family needing money, I’ve always taken a position of, well, if I’m going to lend my brother’s money or lend my parents money, I’m not going to expect to get that paid back. But they have never asked for something that would seriously dent my savings.

I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve lent my family specifically money. But on the other hand, it’s probably something that friends and family want to do when they can because I think that you have to kind of go held in hand sometimes when you need to borrow money. You’re not scoring points against anybody, but you want to write the ship and show that this loan was done in good faith, and you want to keep that trust, I guess.

Brian Bristol: I agree. I was kind of weird in the scenario that I want to get paid back. We’ve been doing this for like a year and a half now. We’ve done a lot of statistics. We’ve talked to all of our customers. There’s 10,000 users on our platform now.

And when we found out is over the course of this 10,000 people, 90% of them in terms of who are lending money, have said, “Hey, look, we want to use your platform not because we want to get paid back, not because we need to track things and spreadsheet, because of reminders. We just want an easy way to help someone out without it being really awkward and uncomfortable.” And that was like, whoa, that’s super interesting.

So we’ve been really harping on that ethos, being able to provide people resources to help each other out when those scenarios come about. And it’s just icing on the top when you have the ability to get paid back or the ability to use a contract, the ability to do any other stuff.

Joe Casabona: That’s super interesting. And maybe in Build Something More, we could talk a little bit more about user and customer research because I think that’s something I certainly don’t do enough. I don’t think a lot of small business owners and freelancers do enough. So maybe if you’re up for that, we could chat about that in Build Something More.

Brian Bristol: Yeah, definitely.

Joe Casabona: And if you are not a member, you can sign up over at streamlined.fm/259. It’s just 50 bucks a year. That’s less than five bucks a month.

You kind of answered this without explicitly answering it. But how is it different from like GoFundMe? GoFundMe is just people asking for money, right? There’s no expectation that that money is going to get paid back.

Brian Bristol: So the primary difference is GoFundMe is a lot of people to one cause. For Pigeon Loans it’s one to one. So if I need a loan, I’m going to go ask another person, whether it be my brother, sister, whatever. So that’s the primary difference in terms of the mechanism itself.

But for Pigeon Loans, everything on our platform is actually legally binding. Like you could create a contract, just as strong as a promissory note from a bank. So Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Barclays. It doesn’t matter. You as an individual now have every power in your right to go through the same recourse that the institutions can.

So for Pigeon Loans, we can work amongst friends or family members. Most people don’t end up suing their friends or family member. But even just people you met, like a colleague or someone you trust and your business partner, you can come onto our platform, make a loan, and be very confident that at any point in time if this goes completely sour, I’ve got the recourse and resources to get what I need to get done.

Brian Bristol: Wow, that’s super interesting. So if, for example, let’s say my wife’s uncle wanted to give me a business loan and we didn’t want to go through a bank and all that, he just wanted to give me a business loan, this would be a way where he would be protected, and I would feel a lot better about him being protected?

Brian Bristol: Yeah, exactly. And it works both ways.

Joe Casabona: No, no, go ahead. I was just agreeing.

Brian Bristol: I’m saying it works both ways. Because what ends up happening is you as the lender want to help someone out. But then as the borrower, if you need it for a big reason, like you said, starting a business, you need MO, evidence to be like, “I’m serious. This is something that I really want to do, and I’ll get it back to you.”

So it works backwards. People use Pigeon Loans and they’re like, “Hey, look, I know I asked for $5,000. I’m dead serious. I’m going to pay this back. Here’s this platform, we can start it on. I’ll give it back to you in the next 12 months.”

Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s such a great point. It’s not just like, “I have a ridiculous idea. Just give me money and I might blow it.” Which is if you think about it, that’s kind of Kickstarter, right? I’ve backed a lot of things on Kickstarter, usually from entities I already know, like, and trust. Probably entities that don’t really need Kickstarter, but they used it to fund this new idea and have a little bit more security.

I’ve heard horror stories of Kickstarter. There’s no legal protection. There’s like something in the terms of service but you know, if they’ve spent the money, they’ve spent it. Unless somebody wants to bring in a class-action lawsuit.

This is in a lot of ways… Gosh, the more I’m hearing about this the more I like it. It’s a way for both the lender and the borrower to be like, “Hey, this is real. This is not just some fly by night thing.” Something that made me a little bit sour on GoFundMe is because there are… there are legitimate needs for people on GoFundMe. Again, on your podcast, I talked about how, especially around the holidays, if I see somebody who’s struggling and they post like their kid’s Amazon wishlist I’ll buy gifts off of that.

But I’ve also seen people asking for money because they decided not to get that renter’s insurance and then something happened. Not for nothing, but like… not a kid either. People who are older than me who don’t have renter’s insurance. Guys, renter’s insurance is like $50 a year. It’s basically free on your car insurance. Just get it.

And then I’ve also seen people who are like, “Oh, we’re really struggling and want to take a family vacation.” I’m like, “I want to take a family vacation. I’m not going to give you money for your family vacation.” Again, there’s no accountability. I don’t know what they’re going to use that money for if I give it to them.

Brian Bristol: It’s true.

Joe Casabona: Thank you for letting me get on my soapbox there. So you mentioned that you are a software engineer. So I am also a software engineer. I have a master’s in software engineering. What’s your weapon of choice for programming?

Brian Bristol: Python.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Brian Bristol: Fluent Python. At this point, I picked up 12 or 13 programming languages, but I like the whole stack. So Pigeon Loans as you see out there, probably 90% of it I built, and then I had a bunch of UI/UX designers make it pretty clean and functional. But I like Python a lot, man. It’s super easy to read. And I don’t think about too many compilation things. I know that’s going to be kind of over the head of some listeners, but like how to basically keep memory and make sure that my pointers are certain way. I don’t like doing that. So Python is the way to go.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing I liked about Python is that Python forces you to format and tab the right way.

Brian Bristol: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So it’s not just a hot mess of like missing semi-colons or whatever. I’m PHP mostly. I taught a health informatics class where I had to teach Python to basically people in the health field, which was like its own other very hard thing. So I got to learn and play with Python, then. That’s really cool though.

Gosh, I love where the idea came from. I love that you decided to like take this ball and run with it. When you say “everything’s legally binding,” did you consult lawyers and you have like an agreement in place?

Brian Bristol: Yeah. That was the first question we asked ourselves. So it me and my co-founder, and we’re sitting here being like, “Oh, this is a cool idea. We might be able to do something with this.” And then we’re like, “Wait, this is legal? Is this the reason no one has really done this before?”

So we scoured every legal and law connection we had. Ended up finding lawyer family friends that kind of said, “Hey, look, this is interesting. You could go about creating this business as long as Pigeon Loans doesn’t take a part in the loan itself.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Because then you’re essentially a bank.

Brian Bristol: So for us, any loan on our platform, we’re like the Big Brother. We provide you the resources, you come to our platform, you agree on how big the loan is. So like a couple of thousand dollars, you agree on the term length, which is like 10 months, and then you agree on the interest rate. Because you have to set an interest rate so that you don’t comply with gift taxes and stuff like that.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha.

Brian Bristol: So, with all that being said, Pigeon Loans gives you these resources. We’ve added the contracts on our platform as promissory notes. And every promissory note is unsecured loan between you and the individual you agree with. So that way, every time you have a disagreement, or you don’t necessarily know where your money’s coming back from, you know it’s not like tied to your house or your car or whatever.

For us, we’ve gone through numerous process with lawyers. We have a whole lot team and everything to figure out, like, what are the avenues we need to understand. And we’ve now put out a contract that we’re pretty confident in that can work in the United States of America. And in the future, we’ll try to expand to other countries and talk to their lawyers as well so that we have that backing.

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Joe Casabona: I kind of broke one of Andrew Warner’s rules of like prompting you with the hard question before actually asking it. But how does Pigeon Loans make money? If I want to be a lender or a borrower do I have to pay a subscription fee or something like that?

Brian Bristol: There you go. There’s a subscription fee. So we don’t do any origination fees like you do in regulated industry. We don’t take a percentage of your loan. We don’t force interest rates. None of that.

Basically, the minute you agree to a loan on our platform and let’s say it’s for 10 months, we ask that the borrower of that loan pay a small subscription fee. Today is $4.29. Probably by the time this episode comes out, it’ll be $5.29. But every single one of those months, you pay us to manage your account so that you can have the ability to make payments, have the ability to download contracts, etc., etc.

And that’s only on the borrower’s side. The lender we say it’s free. We basically want to incentivize you to help out your community, help out your friends. Basically, if you have to choose between, well, “I’m not going to help someone out because it’s going to be complicated, and oh, I’m not going to help someone out because it’s cost something,” we want to make sure we take the cost away. So now it’s just like, “Well, I’ve got no other choice. I might as well just use it. It’s going to be better than not using it. So that’s what we’ve done for lenders and then for borrowers.

Joe Casabona: And that makes perfect sense. Because again, if you’re going through a bank, the bank is going to take some cut of that loan, or if you have like a managed mutual fund, the fees are a lot higher than that. And some are transactional, and some are percentages. It sounds like a no-brainer. For like one cup of Starbucks coffee a month, you can get the money that you need. Gosh, I love that.

I can talk about this all day. We haven’t talked about content yet really. We’ve talked about the podcast. So first of all, what made you want to start the podcast?

Brian Bristol: The impetus came from hearing everyone’s stories. As I was building Pigeon Loans, releasing it to friends and family, talking to investors, doing whatever we need to do, everyone start off being like, “Wow, man, this is a great idea.” And then they segue into their personal story. Being like, “Suzy May, I remember I gave her $700, she just ran off with this, my last $700. I wish I had this to get it back.” You’re like, “Yeah, man, that’s why we’re here. This is why we’ve created the platform.”

So in hearing all the stories, we were like, “All right, everyone has a story but no one is talking about it.” Like I’ve never heard these stories. Even from my own mother, she started telling me stories being like, “Yo, what? We’ve lived together for 24 years. How did you not tell me these stories prior?”

So I said, “Hey, there’s got to be a way to bring these stories to the forefront. One, they’re entertaining. I often was just laughing because they’re just insane stories. But two, it teaches people that it’s okay, like we kind of said in the beginning, to move your financial well-being within your relationships because everyone is doing it. No one is waking up at the age of 18 working in Wall Street, Goldman Sachs bringing in 200k without help from someone. They had to have gotten some help from someone.

And those are things that we brushed under the rug, posted on Instagram stories, posted on whatever social media platform and said, “Look, I did it all by myself.” And we all know that’s just not true.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. You’re telling stories that are relatable to people who are hearing them. This is one piece of kind of an overall content strategy. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the strategy overall? Is it more telling stories or is it, you know, five reasons why you should lend or five reasons why…? What kind of content are you creating?

Brian Bristol: It’s a mix of both. Often when we were inceptualizing, the podcast, I was getting pushback being like, “We need to promote Pigeon Loans more. We have to promote Pigeon Loans more.” And I’m like, “No, this is truly an avenue to break the stigma.” Because in order for Pigeon Loans to be successful, 5, 7, 10 years from now, we have to convince the United States and pretty much the whole world that it’s okay to do these types of transactions and to do them frequently. To like ask your community for money or lend within your community.

So being able to come from the perspective of not necessarily a company trying to convince you to use their platform. But instead say, here are people that are already doing this without our platform’s influence. And now the platform is giving the audience that is necessary to listen about these stories. That’s a different dynamic.

And it does a lot for us in terms of intent in brand exposure. We wanted to be able to have anyone who’s searching ideas or having struggles or trying to understand the whole process of a loan with a friend or family member, if they’re going on Google and they’re going on Yahoo, and they’re trying to find out more information about that process, Pigeon Loans things that pop up is like the number one number two resource.

So we’re obviously doing work on SEO and technical stuff and writing articles to get to that point from a keyword ranking aspect. But once you’ve read through those articles, and you aren’t necessarily comfortable yet with the concept, you need some type of trust or antidote that’ll push you over the edge that is like, “Oh, wow, this guy used Pigeon Loans or this person did a loan but now it’s decided they want to use Pigeon Loans in the future.”

Those are the types of stories that we can bring to The Chirp kind of analogously. So it’s a two-part system in which we’re able to really bring in content as a whole and add trust to it as well.

Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s such a great strategy. I mean, it sounds like this is not just content to promote a business. It’s content to promote a movement. I try not to sound like I’m gushing or anything, but you’re really blowing my mind.

You know, every year I donate to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and a few other things, and I generally keep my donations anonymous because it feels like flaunting it. But now I’m thinking, why should I be ashamed that I’m helping like kids with cancer? There’s nothing shameful about that. And if I have the means to do it, you know, it’s better than me buying like another iPhone, or whatever. I’m just using that money for good.

Brian Bristol: You’re more likely to post that you bought the iPhone 13 or 14 than you were to be like, “Hey, I just gave a starving kid $10 because they just won’t to ask for it.” That’s so wild to me.

Joe Casabona: God, that’s a great sound. I’m going to write down the timestamp here. And that’s going to be the audiogram and it’s going to be great. I see on your LinkedIn profile that along with computer science, you studied philosophy. I was excited to flex some of my Jesuit education on your show. I never bring up a lot of it but I think on The Chirp I brought up St. Ignatius and Cura Personalis, and I brought up Socrates.

So Cura Personalis is something I think about a lot here. And I’m just curious, did you studying philosophy… What kind of parts did that play in creating Pigeon Loans, if any?

Brian Bristol: So I didn’t study it purposely. It’s funny, right? It’s going through my time at Bowdoin—and Bowdoin is a small liberal arts school in Maine for people who don’t know that—I knew I wanted to study computer science. I’ve always been good at computers from a kid. Unfortunately, I went to pretty bad high schools. Didn’t have a lot of money. So it wasn’t until college that I actually got to study computer science.

So when I was there, I was like, “Oh, this is awesome. I’m doing well.” But liberal arts schools force you/challenge you to do other courses so you can kind of broaden your horizon. In my freshman year, I took a philosophy class by the professor, a woman named Kristi Olson. It was one of my favorite classes ever. And in taking that class, I was just like, “Whoa, there’s so many people thinking on such deeper levels than what I see in my day to day. I just really like this whole school of thought. I think I can study this.”

So the next four years, I didn’t really minor or major in it, I just took so many philosophy courses that if I had declared it, I actually would have gotten like [inaudible 00:35:30]. And I just enjoyed learning about these strange concepts like utilitarianism and transcendentalism, and all these ideas as to how the world works.

And you can kind of see it bleeding a little bit through Pigeon Loans, where it’s like we’ve created this platform that has a lot of awesome use cases in the tech world, has some pretty cool economics as well. But the entire ethos is utilitarian—it’s to help as many people as possible.

Because right now there’s this big gap, especially in American society, where a lot of people with a lot of money and a lot of people with no money, but the gap in between those two is widening every single day. So Pigeon Loans, we can help with that gap.

We can basically be that bridge and say, “Look, someone has money, someone doesn’t have money, we’ll create the mechanism to connect those two, we’ll allow you to come on our platform, do the things you need to do so you’re comfortable with it. So at the end of the day everyone is a more equitable society.” So you can see it bleed through but you really have to think through the layers to get to that point.

Joe Casabona: I love what you said there. I think it’s so funny that you mentioned… The University of Scranton is my alma mater. They’re a liberal arts school as well. So I had to take minimum of two religion classes and three philosophy classes. And the professor can really make or break that, right? I shamefully now, now that I’m 36, and I look back and I realize that I could have expanded my school of thinking even more at a younger age, I took the easy philosophy teacher.

And now I’m going back and I’m actually reading stuff that I probably should have read in college about the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius. Someone that I’m thinking of now is Heidegger. I had a lot of philosophy majors so I got to hear a lot of it.

But Heidegger was kind of this guy who, if I recall correctly, was not a fan of technology and talked about kind of problems… Gosh, if there are philosophy majors listening to this, or somebody who’s familiar with Heidegger, they’re like, “Casabona is butchering this.” But I believe it was Heidegger who was strongly concerned with technology. But you’re kind of showing that technology…

You know, we have Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going to space. Well, Michael Strahan most recently as we record this going to space. But altruism is also a big part of the online space. And I think that’s really cool.

Brian Bristol: Yeah, a lot of technology has good and bad. I think it started off as being a tool that people use to make their lives better. But now the tool is becoming our lives. And I think we need to take a step back and really just reel it in, figure out what aspects of technology we want to keep so that we can continue to improve the society. And then the stuff that we don’t necessarily need, we can actually kind of just put to the side a little bit and continue to move forward.

Joe Casabona: I agree wholeheartedly with that. Again, I feel like we have similar let’s say passions, I guess. I knew from a young age that I wanted to get into computers and computer science. I went to a Catholic school, so we didn’t have a strong computer science. We didn’t have any computer science program. But I was also fortunate enough that my dad saw that and helped nurture it. My parents helped nurture that. So I had a little bit of a background going into college.

But now that I have kids, my daughter has said multiple times that she doesn’t want to go outside. She just wants to watch the iPad and that hurts me. That hurts me a little bit. So I’m sure it’s just the age she’s like really tired after school because she just started school. That’s something that weighs heavily on my mind. I always had a Gameboy on me and I turned out fine. But it is something that I really think about.

Brian Bristol: Yeah, definitely. We can talk about tech all day. But yeah, that’s true.

Joe Casabona: That’s true. But we have been talking for almost 40 minutes now and I want to be mindful of your time. Again, I just want to reinforce this. I think the impetus for the podcast and your general content strategy is a really good one. You’re using it to change mind. You’re looking at the long game. Is Pigeon Loans your full-time gig now? If I have your information correct, you started doing this full-time in late 2021?

Brian Bristol: Yeah. I was a special case. I worked into it as a software engineer prior, had the idea while I was into it, and the pandemic was happening. So I was like, “Huh, I’m still like into it. I’m learning a lot of things here. It’s awesome culture. It’s good company.” So if you ever do get into it, definitely consider that.

But I just had this conviction about Pigeon Loans. I was like, “You know what, I’m not going to sleep, I’m not going to eat, I’m not going to do my regular life, I’m just going to dedicate my time to Pigeon Loans and into it. I did that for a year and a half. I do not recommend it to anyone. You forget to eat so often, it’s not healthy.

Joe Casabona: That’s a young man’s game right there. I did the same thing when I was 24. And now that I have kids, I’m like, “I just want to work for eight hours and then go to sleep.”

Brian Bristol: Exactly. Do not do that. But when I finally got to the point where it was a good stopping place financially with intuit and career-wise, and I feel like I had learned enough stuff to continue on my own, that’s when I switched over to Pigeon Loans just full time.

I wish I could say I gained more time back. But no, Pigeon Loans encompasses even more of my life from beforehand. But it’s good because it means the company is growing. Like I mentioned before, we’re at 10,000 users. We’ve created I think 1,500 loans as of today.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Brian Bristol: And then in November 2020, we did 150k in loan volume alone. So we’re growing every single month. We’ve only been around for 13 months. And come next year/2022, it’s going to be huge. I genuinely think you’ll start hearing about us on the News, New York Times, CNBC, all that good stuff.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. Again, the company has a great ethos and a great mission. I mean, this is not crowdfunding. But of all the crowdfunding in the internet, microloans, and things like that, I really think that this is… this feels like the best model for me. And I’m not just saying that. I had reservations about using Kickstarter and GoFundMe. I feel like this adds accountability to both of those things. And that’s really great.

Brian Bristol: Yeah, definitely.

Joe Casabona: All right. I usually like to end the show by asking if you have any trade secrets for us. As a young guy who’s starting a good company, I would like to ask you, instead of that is, what do you do to prevent burnout?

Brian Bristol: I like to run really fast for like endless amounts of time and then I’ll shut off. I literally will not talk to you. I won’t party. I won’t do anything. I will literally just sit in my house for 48 hours and just watch TV, eat ice cream and chill out. So that’s how I kind of operate.

But in terms of actually preventing burnout, I genuinely think it’s good to one have people in your life that remind you that you’re working too hard. And then two, figure out the things that actually recover you. For me, it’s like 7-Elevens, Slurpees… This is not a sponsorship for 7-Eleven but I like 7-Eleven and Slurpees.

Joe Casabona: If you’re listening and you want to reach out.

Brian Bristol: 7-Eleven, Pigeon Loans. But 7-Elevens, Slurpees is something that I just… If I really am in it, I just got to take a break and go do that. Going to the movies. It’s harder with the pandemic now. But activities like that where it’s just like, Hey, let’s just take a break for an hour, two hours, reorient, come back to it. That’s a good way for me to recharge.

And for everyone is different. You may need to take a week-long vacation. You may need to just disappear. I don’t know what you need to do but being able to do that when that body/mind is telling you to do that I think that is super important. And then it’s okay to come right back into it.

Joe Casabona: I think that’s great. I’m jealous that you are good at running really fast for a long time because I’m not good at running for any amount of time. But shutting off is really important. Having people in your life telling you work too much, I think that that is… My wife doesn’t even need to say it anymore. She just like… I don’t know if she realizes she does it, but her face changes, and I’m like, “I can stop working now.”

And finding something that really energizes you. For me, it’s the drums. I try to play the drums for about 30 to 40 minutes every day. And it helps you reset. You’ll be able to relate to this as a coder. I realized the value of that when I spent likes six hours probably trying to figure out this thing in school. And I couldn’t do it.

And then I had to go to an event. And it was like a live music event that I was helping organize. And I was just sitting watching the guy play guitar and the solution came. I literally wrote the solution on the back of a napkin, I guess. And as soon as I left, it worked and I couldn’t believe it. So like shutting off is the best thing that you can do to solve problems sometimes.

Brian Bristol: Yeah. Some of my best features in Pigeon Loans has just been like I gave up and then I went to go do something else. I was in the club being like, “Oh, shoot, this is the answer.”

Joe Casabona: That’s amazing. Brian, this has been such a delightful conversation. We got to talk about a lot of things I wasn’t expecting us to talk about. But it was really fun. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?

Brian Bristol: I’m Brian Bristol. Obviously, I want you to learn about Pigeon Loans. So if you go to our website, it’s www.pigeonloans.io, that’s our pretty much open door to anything Pigeon Loans-related. You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook at Pigeon Loans.

For me personally, sent Pigeon Loans an email, or you can email me at bbritol@pigeonloans.io and I will see it. I see everything that comes to that. Yeah, I’m excited.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link to all of that and everything we talked about including my episode of The Chirp, as well as Heidegger, I’ll double-check that that’s the right philosophy, in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/259. Brian, thanks so much for joining us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Brian Bristol: Thank you. I really appreciate it. It’s awesome.

Joe Casabona: And for everybody listening out there. Thanks so much. I appreciate you and your time. And until next time, get out there and build something.