Buidling Good Client Relationships with Ty Fujimura

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Ty Fujimura. Ty, how are you doing today?

Ty Fujimura: I am very good. That was excellent pronunciation.

Joe Casabona: Thank you very much! I got super nervous that I forgot already and I just asked this. Cool, so Ty, oh welcome to the show.

Ty Fujimura: Thank you for having me.

Joe Casabona: Normally this show has like specific product builders on it and things like that. I’m pretty excited to talk to you because you are part of an agency, you run this agency, is that right?

Ty Fujimura: Yeah, that’s right. We’re called Cantilever and we’ve kind of vacillated between three and five people for a long time since our inception which was 2011.

Joe Casabona: Cool, and so we’re going to talk about you working on this project that you did for one of your clients but also kind of the client relationship part of it which is not something that you know, we get to touch on a lot in this show. So why don’t we start with you know, just the normal intro, tell us a little about you and the project you worked on?

Ty Fujimura: Yeah, yeah, sure. I guess I can go back into the history a little bit. So I was a Math major at NYU and while I was doing that I tended to spend my time in the back of the class darken around with the computer and learning how to build things. You know, initially, I thought maybe I would get into some more like I don’t know Java or whatever see your kind of computer science C programming stuff. But I discovered design simultaneously and I was kind of playing around with different you know, branding and concepts and poster design and advertising things like that. And I thought that would be cool to get into but I realized that I would need a website in order to sell my design work and no one was coming along, who was gonna do that for me for free? So I decided to do it myself and then you know, for websites later I, you know actually launched something that I tried to get people to go to hire me to do work and I found that I actually really loved the website and things too so I kind of you know, stumbled into this freelance career while I was in college. And then later on I took a job at a startup for a brief period of time. And while I was there, I kind of maintain the freelance stuff on the side and decided that I wanted to kind of commit to it. So we formally founded a company in 2011 and that has sort of been doing since. So we do everything from branding to back end, you know, full-stack strategy through execution but you know, mainly focused around a web project. So if we’re doing, you know branding, it’s typically as an, you know additional element to a web project.

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. That’s great. And have you always been in the WordPress space or do you do…

Ty Fujimura: So yeah, we’ve had kind of two phases of involvement with WordPress. Initially, when I was getting started with web development, WordPress was the easy way for me to start building things on the CMS. And I remember learning through WordPress, I like while I was just starting out, I was, you know typing, making HTML files, and copying, and pasting headers and footers between these HTML pages and I was like, I couldn’t even come up with the words for what to Google to figure out how to not do that. I was like shortly on you know, nytimes.com they’re not pasting the damn header all over the place. And I remember WordPress being a really great way to learn about, you know, simple concepts of like loops and templates and, you know, relationships between variables. And you know, you can kind of start digging under the hood a little bit more once you discover that there’s this post variable that has all these, you know, things in it that you might not be able to access normally or that you can use WP_query or whatever to do fancier things. And that was a really great introduction to using a CMS. And then we kind of, for a brief period of time we’re focusing on the ExpressionEngine. I think there was like an inflection point where the ExpressionEngine was able to do some things prior to particularly some of the custom fields, stuff really taking off with WordPress where that was a good choice for client work. And we’ve actually been reverting lately to being WordPress-centric since ExpressionEngine has, you know, that there’s a new version that we are eager to dig into as well. But WordPress has been able to bolster the sort of client experience side within the CMS and so that’s become the tool of choice lately.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Yeah, absolutely. I mean I remember I got into WordPress in 2004 so it was like a baby. I think it was like a year old at that time.

Ty Fujimura: Right, right. One point X, yeah.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, and I remember writing like PHP page templates and then putting them in core so that I can…

Ty Fujimura: Oh My God!

Joe Casabona: Yeah, it was bad, bad I mean like that was like, you know, there wasn’t the formalized process that we have now but, whew!

Ty Fujimura: Right, right, right. And you have to try that, so. You have to try it to learn why an alternative is needed, you know. And it goes to that effect and kind of segueing into the rustic project in particular. WordPress is fantastic and the CMS experience is unparalleled I think for content authors, and we mentioned you know, I’m in client services. A big way that I provide value to my clients is giving them away to change their content that is sensible, that not only they can learn initially but that they can have someone else join their team and actually jump in and be able to edit the website is like is a massive massive plus. And that sounds simplistic but it’s actually, I find like the majority of the time if you just deliver a CMS experience that physically works but isn’t intuitive and doesn’t have you know, some of those niceties that ACF for instance advanced custom fields provides. It doesn’t get used as much and then the client kind of ends up hiring you to work within the CMS that you built for them. And so WordPress for that reason has really excelled. But on the template side, on the actual building, the website side, I think WordPress leaves a lot to be desired if you’re going to build something that’s really huge and not even huge but anything of a decent scale. So this project with one of our clients ‘Rustic Pathways’ we had built a very large WordPress site for them initially that was kind of, for their core business area of student travel. Their company sends teenagers on amazing trips around the world, and their other divisions are group travel and gap year travel. So the group is for entire classes of high schoolers who go to a particular place for a particular class in their school. And then the gap year programs are for students who want to take a, you know, four-month journey that’s you know, gonna give them some experiences to get them ready for college. And so they had other sites for those divisions and what we wanted to do was kind of consolidate that all into a single codebase and we thought WordPress would be perfect because of the multi-site. But we also realized that if we approached it with the traditional WordPress architecture where we’re like building a theme that it was going to get really hairy really fast. And so we needed to look for some alternative architectures that led us to something based on the WordPress API.

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s awesome. So before we get into the nuts and bolts of that right, let’s talk about kind of some of your decision-making. I’d love to hear kind of your approach to client acquisition which makes it sound very impersonal.

Ty Fujimura: Pick him off the shelf.

Joe Casabona: Yeah., it’s just like. And then the research you did to come to the conclusion that multi multi-site with the rest API would be a good choice.

Ty Fujimura: Sure, sure. Yeah, so on the client acquisition side, our philosophy is to do a really good job as much as possible and be nice. And we find in general that, that leads to people giving your name to someone else and they give your name to someone else and so on. And then the secret on the client-side is that I think that this is very speculative but, my sense is that most people who hire for web development and web design are broadly unhappy and kind of scared of what they’re going to get because they don’t necessarily know where to look, like if you, it’s not the kind of thing that’s very easily googleable ’cause if you just Google-like web design New York or whatever there might be two or three really good firms in that list but it’s really hard to tell what, you know, first of all, who they are and second of all how to determine which of the 10 or 15 that you’re seeing are the good ones. And so, you know, part of the client relationship-building process is just sort of taking away their or alleviating their fear that they’re going to get ripped off or that they’re not going to get something built properly or you know, maybe if they’ve had a bad experience in the past and the more that you can kind of be communicative early on in the project. And you know give the client a sense that you’re a straight shooter and that you’re actually going to get this done by the date that you say under the amount that you say. I find like just doing those basic things really really helps like turn those references or leads into an actual business.

Joe Casabona: Nice. And I mean that makes perfect sense. I think when I was doing freelance work like full-time and a large amount of my part-time work, maybe half of my clients were people who came to me and said “Yeah, my last guy disappeared and I don’t know what to do. I just want you to get it done and like do it right and like not disappear on me.”

Ty Fujimura: Yeah, it’s shocking how many stories like that you’ve heard and you know, so there is a real what’s. The term is like an information gap I think between buyers and sellers in the webspace. So I think a lot of the companies that are doing a really good job are doing some part to bridge that gap. And you know when a client goes to their website it’s not just you know, talking about like the stuff that we would talk about on this show, kind of the technical side of the behind the scenes side but it’s giving people a sense of like why are you paying for this? what it is actually going to do for you? And then when you look at their case studies saying it’s providing evidence, those claims that’s something weird actually quite poor on the web and are working on right now, figuring out a better way to communicate those things through our site. But I think you know that there are a lot of good agencies out there that are making a strong case to clients that they can be trusted and that they kind of have the solidity and reliability that you need when you’re investing a great deal of money in ephemeral digital code thing.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, awesome. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So with that in mind you know, what kind of research did you do for this project to kind of present the client with the solution we came up with?

Ty Fujimura: Right. Yes, and you had asked about multi-site so that and that’s all kind of tight together. The project, we did our original project with Rustic Pathways summer of 2014 and at that time we were like “OK” well the next thing is going to be tackling these other aspects of the business and building something to accommodate those. and so for a while, we had ideas you know, floating around about how we would approach it. And then I think it was 2015 that the WordPress API really took flight and some of the methods got integrated into the core, I can’t remember exactly but around that time frame. And so it was kind of a good confluence of things where we realized that we had this potential project that would require an architecture that separated the front end and the back end namely because otherwise building the site would be a little bit, it would be complicated and we were afraid of some of the performance ramifications of running everything through the traditional WordPress template engine. And we don’t rely on. We tend not to rely on a lot of like front end side plugins, we use a lot of plugins that modify the content entry experience. But for the most part, we want to control the front end entirely like it’s very rare that we include WP head and WP foot for instance. So we’re really like, we’re really trying to build our own codebase within WordPress anyway. And we realized that if we use the API and we built some custom routes to give us asynchronous access to data that would enable us to separate out the front end and build something that made the entire development process a little bit easier.

Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s awesome. And one thing that you said that I kind of want to parse out a little bit is that you did work for them before. So you knew a little bit about their business already right, you had that domain knowledge.

Ty Fujimura: Exactly, yeah. And particularly we had this existing good relationship and they’re amazing clients. They’re, everyone we work with, they’re really, you know, friendly and talented but also kind of knows what they’re talking about, the balance that you really want. And so going into this project we knew that they were going to trust us to make the right decision and I think they were more comfortable with the direction that we proposed because they knew that we weren’t just in it to you know, make the best hourly we could on this project and move on that we were vested in the relationship and that we really were making decisions for the long term and not just of this project in particular but for their business. So like the architecture is a perfect microcosm of that because the way that we set everything out is not just to build the two sites that the codebase currently contains. It’s to build an unlimited number of sites utilizing that multisite methodology. And so we’ve kind of collaborated towards a product design and a product structure that works for the client and thereby for us because we know that we’re going to be the ones who are building those additional sites. So it’s kind of you know, that trust and mutual, you know goal setting and kind of careful decision making in collaboration leads to products that I think are better suited to long-term success.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. And that’s so great to hear like you developed this very technical, so you’re like a three to five-person shop, you developed this very technical solution for a client that implicitly trusts you. So if we can kind of walk this back a little bit, I like to ask about mastermind groups, but in this case, I think I’d rather ask about how you talked to your client? How you communicated with your team and then relayed that to the client and relayed kind of the requirements back to your team? because sure that position is a very tough one being like the kind of the person that takes the business requirements and converts them into technical requirements and vice versa.

Ty Fujimura: Well, yeah, I mean it is tough and what’s tougher is actually making the crazy multi-site thing. And you know, I’ll talk about you know, the guys who kind of put that together in a second. But yeah to speak to that layer between the client and the product, our initial discussions with the client where we’re very blue sky, very like very open about what we could potentially put together. So we were just talking initially about, you know, abstract goals for the websites and what we wanted, some things, some competitive things that we wanted to address in terms of aspects of competitors’ websites that we wanted to counter or sort of use as inspiration or whatever. So we kind of did this brainstorming time with the client over a month or two to give everyone kind of a grounded sense of what we’re actually trying to accomplish. And then you know, as I mentioned, we had this more trusting relationship with the client. So we were able to kind of collaborate almost on what the scope’s going to be like, what are we actually going to try to build and how much is it going to cost and go back and forth on different options there. So as opposed to like an initial business process where you’re going to write this monolithic proposal and hope they say yes, it was a little bit more collaborative. And I think we landed on a scope that makes more sense for everyone.

And then yeah, so going into actually building the thing in this case, I didn’t write a great deal of code. Actually, we hired a guy named TJ Draper who works under the Moniker Buzzing Pixel and he’s an absolute wizard with PHP stuff, and also on the front end and he was building a lot of the front end work. And our developer, Andrew Hines who works with us was doing the back end. And as I mentioned, I guess maybe I can back up and explain like what the WordPress API would do for you in a case like this. So essentially the way the website is constructed is there’s a WordPress application, and all that WordPress application does, it doesn’t have a theme it just has this plugin that we developed that lets you request specific information from that WordPress installation. And it kind of stitches it together into these clean JSON objects that it then delivers to you. So you can ask that WordPress installation to give you the JSON representation of a given page and it’ll send that to you very quickly and everything is you know, cashed intelligently and all that. And nothing ever processes through the template layer so it’s actually like really really fast.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So like just a quick analogy probably that lets me know if this works, I think it works for me.

Ty Fujimura: Sure.

Joe Casabona: But I’m not sure. You know, if you have a house full of people who want to order food from some restaurant, instead of the delivery person going to the house to take everybody’s order, you send one person to the restaurant with everybody’s order, right? So the restaurant does not deal with the house at all but they’re still getting the information.

Ty Fujimura: Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it. And then there are the benefits of that kind of approach is that WordPress installation, all it has to do is make awesome JSON. And so our developer Andrew, when he’s working on that project, can just focus on getting to that. He sort of agreed upon the point where that product is going to eventually find its way into some other applications somewhere but he doesn’t really have to think about that.

And then conversely on the front end side, we built a separate application, it’s actually PHP-based. You could also build a JavaScript-based application or you know, any number of other methodologies behind how you could do it. But in this case, it’s a PHP app that uses the twig template language we really wanted to use. And all that does is it grabs the JSON and it doesn’t have to think about where that’s coming from or how it’s constructed or whatever. It just grabs it and uses that to construct its pages. And so during development that becomes a big benefit because the team or people who are working on the front end application, can use dummy data that isn’t actually coming from the API but looks exactly like what the API is going to produce. And they can build their entire front end with this dummy data pretending that it’s actually coming from the API. And the API team can be focusing on constructing the plug-in such that it meets the specification of that dummy data so it lets you build a larger application in parallel which especially for a small team is a big deal.

The project took like six months or so, start to finish, and even longer to launch the second site. And so you know I can’t imagine how much longer that we could have spent. It was kind of a necessity to split the work in that manner to keep things sensible.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, that’s awesome. It’s a very modular approach. I mean you are separating out all of the concerns of the site and then putting them together later which is a great way to develop.

Ty Fujimura: Right, yeah. And it, I think there’s a tool for every situation and I think like there’s just as much danger of overcomplicating something as there is of you know, not building enough infrastructure or having enough strategy around what you do. So I think you have to be really careful with those kinds of decisions. But like I said, you know the fact that we had that strong client relationship, we knew that we did that we were going to do this, that gave us time to experiment and play with different architectures internally, you know working on some you know, sample projects and learning a lot, and doing a lot of research to give us the justification that this is what we need to do.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, that’s great. And so we have a little bit less than 10 minutes left and we’ve talked about the technical side. And so for the last bit of this show, I wanna ask you about the banner question, how did you build that in regards to building client relations, right? ’cause we can all think about are the good client, right? The one that just takes everything that we say and does it and pays this on time and stuff but it’s not like that. It’s not a good relationship like that, right? there’s gonna be conflicts and things like that. So sure, yeah how do you kind of keep that all together and cultivate a good relationship with clients to keep coming back to you?

Ty Fujimura: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think openness and humanity make a big difference. And I think a lot of the time, you know we talked about some of those bad situations in the past. I think one of the bad situations I hear about our folks who are maybe have been manipulated by a firm or by a freelancer where there’s a set of information that they’re provided and then there’s reality. And I think you know, not doing that first of all is important. But also communicating to the client that you know, maybe that you’re a human being and that you actually care about the outcome of the project, being strong when you’re dealing with other people in a business context it’s like, it’s actually shockingly uncommon for there to be that, that mutual understanding of just you know, being people and being regular human beings. You think of each other as a name in your harvest to count or whatever and it could become, especially for us or we’re mostly a remote company that can be a really easy trap to fall into is to start forgetting that there’s actually a person on the other end of the line. I think that’s something that really helps you know build strong long term relationships. And work through some of those challenges just say “I was disappointed in this” or you know “We’re sorry that this happened” even if it wasn’t your fault just to express that you wish that it hadn’t happened that way and these are the things that we’re going to do to make it better next time. Just like simple little things like that just like in you know, marriage or any other relationship can make a huge difference. And you know, we’re always trying to improve and get better at that.

The one trick that I have found with working with clients in that way is just emailing a lot. Emailing too much almost like just anytime you can think of something that they might want to know, just sending them a quick note and to the point of even being pestering at times. Then especially when it comes to things like budgets or delays you know, the second you know about a delay just send an email. It’s always going to be better to do it now than to do it later.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. That’s great and there’s I mean, there was a lot of great information in there. So starting from like the most recent, right, over-communication is much better than under communication, right?

Ty Fujimura: Right.

Joe Casabona: ‘Cause again you don’t want your client to feel like you disappeared on them. You know, you don’t wanna say “All right, I’ve got the requirements” and disappear for six months and then not hear from you, right?

Ty Fujimura: Right. And that’s a really hard thing to do. And that’s a huge challenge for me because you know, I’m a very hands-on person that you know, even though I’m doing most of the, you know, client discussion within our firm, I’m involved in most of our projects writing code or doing design or whatever. And so my temptation certainly is as soon as the project is settled and we’ve agreed to do something, I want to get it done and I want to get my hands dirty. And so I have to kind of remind myself to come up and interact with the outside world a little bit. But yeah, I totally understand how that could be, how that could be difficult. But I felt like making a deliberate effort to do that has dramatically changed the way that our client relationships go. And the amount of clients were able to turn into real like long-term allies and partners, it’s a big benefit.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. And then the other thing that you said which you hinted at the beginning of the show too was that you guys have a vested interest in the, it’s not just another job for you, right? And that’s a big deal, right? Those people who even a full-timer goes to their job, they hate it, they get there exactly when they need to, they leave exactly when they like as soon as they can. They don’t care about it, otherwise, you know that that doesn’t make for a, I’m not saying overwork. I’m not saying like work crazy hours but care about your job. And that’s what your clients hope when they hire you, right? That you have as much of an interest in the success of the project as they do.

Ty Fujimura: Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I think success is a very hard thing to define of course. One area I think in which you can really excel if you’re a builder of things, the manner in which you built something has so much to do with its long-term value to whoever you built it for. Weather and you know, this is particularly relevant in client relationship where they don’t actually have much visibility into what you made for them, you know, they can see the surface, they can go to the website and it comes up and it looks correct but they don’t necessarily know, see all those you know nested recursive wild functions that they’re undocumented and unnamed that you kind of lazily slapped in there at the last minute or whatever. Not that I’ve ever done that.

Joe Casabona: No, I don’t think any coder has done that.

Ty Fujimura: No, no, of course not. So when you’re in a client relationship they are really trusting you to build something that is solid and that is not going to just, you know, break for some reason someday. And so I think that’s one really special responsibility that you have as a person who is a freelancer or as a part of an agency is to sort of reward that trust that the client put in your work by building things that you intend to last. That you know taking those extra steps to write the readme’s and add those comments and refactor stuff, and try to do everything you can to make sure that under the hood the product is just as good as it is to the outside world. But you know again, very very hard to do and you have to. I guess one aspect of that is you have to build into your process that you need time to do that ’cause there’s the time that it takes to get something done and then there’s the time that it takes to really write software. And that’s something we’ve totally fallen into in the past is like yeah, I know I can get it done in four weeks or whatever but I can’t necessarily get it done well in four weeks. So going from the start you know, budgeting that extra time and you know, including that in your proposals or plans or whatever is critical so that you don’t leave the client with something that’s not maintainable and ends up costing them more than the extra week or two down the line.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, again, that’s great advice. Definitely account for that time and an account for a good amount too, you know, it’s like measure twice, cut once right?

Ty Fujimura: Right.

Joe Casabona: Plan and then code. So well we are at time and I wanna ask you, you’ve given us a lot of great advice but, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Ty Fujimura: Yeah, oh man I love this question. And I thought of a lot of possibilities. I have one that has to do particularly with client relationships which are around proposals. We have written a fair few proposals in our day and one comment that we often get from people who say yes to the proposals is that we wrote details about what we were actually going to do in the project. I mean that other firms did and I think this is a really easy way especially if you’re just starting out as a freelancer or agency or whatever to distinguish yourself among the, you know three or four other options that they have. You know, they might even have another option at your price range but if you’re saying we’re gonna build a multi-site installation with a certain architecture and front-end methodology, and the design goals are going to be XY and Z and the competing proposal just says we’re going to build you the latest and greatest product that without actually going into any significant detail on what that is, that really helps you stand out like that even if the client doesn’t understand what you’re saying, the fact that you read their whole, you know requirements list or really paid attention during the meeting and took a lot of notes and spent time personally to think through what a reasonable technical approach to something would be or a strong design approach or aesthetic that is you know, surprisingly rare and it’s a really easy way to distinguish yourself.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, great advice. It shows that you have invested interest in the project right from the very beginning.

Ty Fujimura: Absolutely.

Joe Casabona: Like you thought about it. Well, Ty thank you so much for joining me today.

Ty Fujimura: Thank you, it was really fun. Thanks for having me.

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And finally, until next week, get out there and build something.