Building the Perfect Journalism Platform with Sean Blanda

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Now, on to today’s episode, it’s with my good friend Sean Blanda. He and I met in 2008 on the Internet when he was running a great website called CollegeV2. I absolutely loved it. And I worked with him to improve the design. We finally met in real life earlier this year. Sean is a journalism guy like a pure journalism guy. It’s absolutely great to read his writings and hear what he has to say.

And in this episode, we’re talking not about a tool that already exists but a tool that he wants to exist. A full stack platform for independent publishers because he sees the writing on the wall. He sees the changes that are happening in journalism and news and mass and he has a few ideas on how to fix it. So sit back and have a listen. And if you’re feeling ambitious, go ahead and build the system that Sean’s talking about. It’s absolute great one and I think it’s one that we definitely need. And now, on with the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today my guest is my good friend Sean Blanda. Sean, how are you?

Sean Blanda: I am awesome. So glad to be here.

Joe Casabona: I’m glad to have you. A fun story about Sean and I. We’ve known each other technically for about 11 years and just met for the first time a week ago from this recording. So it’ll come out you know, when it’s out it’ll be a few months since the first time we met each other. But, first time we met in real life after 11 years of like corresponding via the Internet. And then we met ‘because of your website, CollegeV2. I was in college at the time I really enjoyed it and then you needed some redesign work which I happily did.

Sean Blanda: which I appreciate to this day. And looking back on it, it was I think, you know, it’s hundreds of dollars would say, you know, you did me a great service.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. It was one of those things where you know it was a website I really liked to read and I like wanted to kind of like contribute in my own way. So it was, I was glad and I know you ended up selling that website later so I’m glad that it worked out well for you as well.

Sean Blanda: Thank you.

Joe Casabona: So today it’s gonna be a little bit different, right? Because Sean will get into his background in a minute here but it’s going to be different because we’re not talking about a product that’s already built. It’s just kind of in your head. Is that right?

Sean Blanda: Yes, I think. It’s safe to say.

Joe Casabona: Cool. So all of the developers out there listening make sure to take notes and maybe build with what Sean’s talking about. So let’s get into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and how you came up with this idea ?

Sean Blanda: So right now, my day job is I am editor in chief of two websites published by Burmese safety who’s a New York Times bestselling author. One is called ‘GrowthLab’ so that it caters to entrepreneurs helping people build businesses. The second is called ‘I will Teach You To Be Rich’ which sounds scammy, swear to God it’s not. Before that I ran a site called ‘99U’ so that was a website that helps creative people make their ideas happen. There was a conference and a book series in a magazine along with that, that I also ramp. And then before that I founded a tech blog in Philadelphia called Technical.ly Philly which today is now in five different cities. They have 25 employees but I stopped day-to-day operations there around 2012.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Yeah, so that was super intriguing to me. If you could take like 30 seconds to talk about what it was like starting that, when you started it ’cause I was like a full blown company you started, right?

Sean Blanda: Yeah. I’ve been starting that way. So basically I graduated college with a degree in magazine journalism in 2008 which is the best time in the world to graduate with a degree in journalism. Things were looking so good honestly. And me and two of my classmates Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink are freelancing and struggling to get paid every week, wasn’t doing too well financially. We said why are we struggling for other people? We might as well struggle for ourselves. We noticed the Neeson tech community in Philadelphia so we just started covering the heck out of it ’cause we were as only 3, 23 year olds with no time on their hands or all the time in the world on their hands can. And from there we realized we started reflecting this very large robust community that was just waiting for a platform to pay attention. And it kind of grew from there.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s awesome. So take control of your own destiny. I’m all about that. I love that. So tell us a little bit about this idea that you have?

Sean Blanda: What prompted in my other not disdain but I feel very fatalistic about the current news environment in our society which I think a lot of people do. But the easiest way I could say is I think the underpinnings of the news environment and content environment online are just fundamentally broken. So the only way sites can make money is to cater to someone who’s not their reader. So in the case of most websites that means advertising or sponsored content and that involves some sort of, you know, look great deception or almost that their news outlet is mortgaging the credibility they’ve had with the community in order to profit. Now this kind of worked well OK in the past. But now when you put platforms on top of this such as Facebook and Twitter news outlets aren’t really in control over how they make money and how their content is read. So it puts them in this kind of race for the bottom for not only clicks in attention but in order to gather the most emotional reaction out of readers. And this kind of leads to our current state of discourse and I would say our current politics as well.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And what prompted me to reach out to you about this was this excellent newsletter that you run. It’s every, so often I don’t think it’s on like a set schedule but every time you put it out it’s I’ve got to say it’s top quality content

Sean Blanda: Awesome. It’s tinyletter/blanda and I publish it every other month. Pretty much when I get angry enough to write something.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Well I will link that in the show notes. I strongly recommend everybody subscribe because it is infrequent enough to not be annoying and it’s like I said it’s always top quality content. And to add more to your point there, you mentioned like kind of like you know those clickbait headlines and we also have these ad networks right where you put an ad out there and it gets put to this ad network and then you’re not really sure what sites it’s it’s going on right there was the whole drama with Breitbart a little while ago where big brands were getting in trouble for advertising on Breitbart and they didn’t really know that they were advertising on Breitbart right?

Sean Blanda: Right. And then the other thing that happened is Chase. So the New York Times approached Chase and said you have 400,000 ads across all these sites. A lot of you don’t know where they are ending up so chase as an experiment cut them down to 5000 and they notice the same exact results. So the ad landscape I heard someone refer to it as it’s kind of our subprime mortgage crisis of our time. There’s clearly a lot of bots gaming the system, there’s a lot of publishers gaming the system with information that’s only meant to emotionally rage people and the intensification of someone making a website that runs are in content is not to be truthful, is not to be accurate. It is to not to build a community is to get as many people pist off as possible.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And then that coupled with the fact that a lot of consumers at least are around our age and younger are getting wise to being able to kind of ignore those ads, right? So gone is the golden age of advertising where you could just put out a TV commercial and or an ad on a website, I guess and people will immediately connect with that content, right? They have to be able to connect to a company, I feel for you to really be able to sell the thing that you’re slinging, right? And I feel like that’s a, Chase is a really good example of that.

Sean Blanda: Right. And it’s not just, you know, it’s such an old man with a thing to say that advertising is ruining x and y. It’s not advertising as a concept. It’s a deep way that business is conducted right now where there’s a million middle men, a million bots. A lot of people who are not don’t have the best intentions and then you have legitimate outlets trying to caught in the middle where they’re forced to play this game just a ferrous game and it’s eroding their trust, right? You can see it in something like I think the Washington Post is a good example which is one lots of Pulitzer Prize and continues to do great reporting work. But they have this whole other arm of the Washington Post where there’s kind of cranking out emotional clickbaity stuff for Twitter and ’cause they have to do that. And if you were to ask them they don’t want to do that but they have to do that to survive. And I think until the fundamental underpinnings of this change we’re just going to keep getting worse and worse quality news outlets.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And I mean we see evidence of that every day. I read a great book called Contagious where in order to get shares and he’s not writing this nefariously, it’s actually one of the best business books I’ve ever read, but in order to get shares you need to connect with the people who are sharing on an emotional level. And having a matter of fact headline is not gonna garner that emotional response.

Sean Blanda: Yeah. And it says weird indirect business model that kills this. So I wrote this in an essay published on medium called medium and the reason you hate the news and pretty much if your Ford and you make a car and the car is good and safe and people like it you make more money ’cause they buy it. But if you’re, in the example I used was Mother Jones they did a huge exposay into prison abuse at records island in New York City that resulted in substantial overhauls of the prison. And now they’re closing it in part as a result of the things revealed by Mother Jones, right? That’s a win, that’s what the thing supposed to exist they don’t make anymore money from that. In fact I think they said they made $5000 from that story and it cost some hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the incentives are disconnected with the product incentives are disconnected from the financial incentives and it’s causing the worst kinds of actors to appear.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we sat at the time of this recording like James Comey was just fired and this is the summary of what I’m seeing on Twitter is a statement from a senator. And if the senator hates Donald Trump, they don’t agree with the decision. And if the senator likes Donald Trump or supports for any other reason, you know, they are for that decision. Very different from the things that we’re seeing in October when the tables returned and you know,James Comey may have affected people are saying the election. So we have that political climate. We have the media more or less feeding into that because they need to not necessarily because they want to. And we are where we are now. So why don’t you tell us about this idea that you have?

Sean Blanda: So the best I can describe it is kind of what I would call a full stack for independent publishers. So the thing holding back independent content creators right now even if I hated let’s say the Washington Post and they cover things that I would start my own site, I would have to play this advertising sponsored content game to make money because people aren’t really paying for general news. And if they do it through these things like events or subscriptions or online courses are something that apply this to news but applies to other niches. And as it’s really hard to set up that ecosystem of things to make that system work right now.

My business Technical.ly Philly was built by hosting events and sponsorships and selling them on events. And I had to connect, you know, Google Docs to with fat pray with this pro. This Philly started called ticket leave with my WordPress, with my bank and I had to learn that on the fly. And I did it very crappily and it wasn’t the best experience for anybody and but through the grace of God did it work. And I wish it was easier for independent publishers to monetize without this constellation of things. So think about some like Shopify, right? For things like Shopify, if you wanted to have an online business you had to figure out and install the cart, either figure out the payment processing, you have to figure out where you’re hosting your side, you know, everything with its own little battle and now it’s not. And we’ve seen this explosion of you know, many online stores and I think the same is ready for independent publishers.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, gotcha. So there are a lot of independent publishers on let’s say medium that’s a really good example, right? And they’re doing things to maybe try to help monetize their platform but hopefully help publishers monetize their articles. What’s the feature set that you would want to see in this? Is it similar to what mediums doing? Is it vastly different?

Sean Blanda: So, I think it’s different ’cause I would say it’s the difference between an individual brand. And medium seems to be running more to the individual aspect where they’re willing to pay out of pocket for people to publish articles and also give them the ability to charge subscriptions like that’s fine. But most news outlets if you look for most content now it says news is just a subset of it. It was content out, let’s figure out your favorite techblog, right? They need to either use advertising, sponsor content which is “Hey, I’m letting GE write a post in my voice on my site” or ”I’m writing a post for GE on my site.” That’s how place and BuzzFeedmake all their money. You can do events which is how smaller communities make money. You could do courses and online learning and then you could do just direct reader payments. Those are the entire ecosystem of whatever where help people can make money over concept. And each one of those requires its own set of features for sure. But as a publisher I would love to be able to give my reader one set of credentials or one set of things to carry to all my platforms that would automatically make sure that the customer can engage with me, work on whatever platform I’m choosing.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So you would imagine you and I want to go off and start a centrist news outlet. Let’s say I feel like maybe we’re wearing kind of a line maybe around the center. And so this platform would give us the ability to, what? Maybe control the ads or selling, easily set up sponsored content and events and things like that? Or do you want to like turn it on its head and so how would we make money from your platform?

Sean Blanda: if we were starting?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Sean Blanda: I was doing centrist news. I think you could maybe do an occasional event like national news ’cause the problem is no one to figure out how to monetize national general news really except through direct reader subscription. That’s all we got. That’s all we got people. So I mean that’s the answer and that’s why no one is starting those businesses ’cause they don’t pay.

Joe Casabona: Right. Exactly. Nobody wants to read how well you know if we look at this logically.

Sean Blanda: No. signing in it then they didn’t know who wants to read it. It doesn’t monetize.

Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah, yeah. It yeah. So we’re getting clicks but we’re not getting, we’re not connecting with the people who are clicking enough to want to pay for more.

Sean Blanda: Right. Because it’s two are intended to play into the tribalism of readers so our stuff gets shared at a disproportionate rate, right?

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. So OK. So do you think it’s…I guess my next question is do you think this platform would help people write better content or would it, or it would help them disseminate content more places in hopes of being able to monetize them?

Sean Blanda: I would say not disseminate. Would say write more. I would say that the individual person, where is my hope that when all these like VCs would enter the content game and had all this money that 1000 flowers would bloom, right? We have a thousand kinds of experimentation but that’s not what we have, right? We have these large branches sucking up all the air and resting on venture capital money and not some of them are experimenting, some of them aren’t. And what I would want to do is enable the individuals or the small editorial team to experiment as much as possible with the combination of all the revenue models I explain to you.

And there’s probably other ones that we haven’t thought of yet but I think the Internet where much were in your 30 of the Internet I kind of feel like we hit the end of the road but maybe we did not. I don’t know, but I want to make it as easy as possible for someone that goes. I am really into covering, you know, Philadelphia sports and I want to monetize that and make it easy for them as possible.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And with that one specifically you could actually have a pretty easy content templating where it just says team lost.

Sean Blanda: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So I’m a New York, you know, I’m a New York sports guy.

Sean Blanda: Not everyone’s perfect.

Joe Casabona: OK so this is great. So two things you mentioned here, right? All these VC’s are entering the game and you’ve got these bigger companies resting on the laurels of VC money, and you also kind of hinted at this before. It’s we’re almost facing like .com bubble burst of content creation, right? ‘Cause we have all these websites that are taking in lots and lots of money and not necessarily making that money back or or finding, you know, finding a good way to properly monetize it without being smart. So really if it’s you and I are starting centrist news whatever, and we’re not technical and we don’t want to spend the hours and hours needed to put it together incorrectly or we don’t want to go out and take VC money to hire a developer to put this together, this this platform idea would do it for us. Like you said, like Squarespace or Shopify or something like that.

Sean Blanda: Yeah. I kind of wish it in my perfect world. There’s like some company that does detect solutions and has the kind of publisher advising saying “Oh, you don’t want to do events for this model. You want to do courses” or whatever. But I think so many sites that publish content publisher writing make money by accident, right? They figured it out by accident or they figured it out by luck. And I think when we did technically fill up the great example where we made money, if we sort ourselves have never do advertising could we just knew we went into the scale and it would be interruptive. And we knew we were confined to a local geographic area we’re covering technology in Philadelphia so we thought what are, what’s the benefit of doing that. It’s event ’cause everyone is right in this limited geographical space. And that’s how we end up making money, right? So it takes a little bit of knowledge to know what are the options and what are your unique advantages depending on your niche.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And to that point with this platform if you wanna start an event instead of having to go out to meetup.com and signing up for meetup.com and paying for meetup.com this platform would assist you in doing something like that. So ’cause event planning is not easy. I did it in college. I do it a little. You know I planned well at WordCamp a couple years ago and there’s a lot of things that you need to think about.

Sean Blanda: And there’s also a serum component of this. But would be great right is that I did life literally independent publishers or email lists. And right now there’s no easy way for me to tie who’s gone to an event, who’s read what article, who’s both one product for me, who’s emailed me in the past. And if you’re building a community which is what you do an independent publisher building outside in the community you want to know as much as you can about your community. And right now independent publishers are kind of surrendering this information to facebooks and twitters and all these other actors who don’t have their best interests at heart and don’t care about them. And it’s time I think the publishers have the tool set to reclaim a lot of this and the ones that are building it in-house.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And that makes perfect sense, right? ‘Cause if we’re trying to, you know, if we’re trying to build the email list and connect it right now, we need to use integrations like Zapier which is another service that we need to learn how to use and that we need to connect our events manager to our news manager and tracking cookies and things like that. And if you miss one step you’ve got bad information, right?

Chris Love Actually talked about that on an earlier episode of How I Built It. he set up all these things with Agile, CMS, CRM, and Zapier and then he missed a step. And emails were going to the wrong person or something like that. So that component especially would be very helpful because again it’s saving people time and potentially money to build the thing that they absolutely need which is their email address.

Sean Blanda: Yeah. And I know maybe some people listen, maybe some people listen to go like of course like some dude wants a magic tech solution to solve all of the problems. And if I don’t think it would solve all the problems, I just think we should lower the barrier entry in as many ways as possible. To this to me it is like a very important thing we need to figure out. This society, how do we monetize content and news especially?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And that makes sense. And so this conversation is reminding me of I don’t know if you listen to shop talk show with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert but they in February they had an episode called news publishing with Rebekah Monson. I don’t know if you recognize any of those names but she started a company. It started off as just a newsletter called WhereBy.Us that was basically local news for I believe the Miami area.

Sean Blanda: Yep. Yep.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And I was like pretty energized by that episode ’cause it was very refreshing hearing her talk about just kind of like what Technical.ly Philly did like mobilizing a local community, putting out great content about that local community and then essentially how she built it on top of WordPress. And now they’re expanding to other areas like Technical.ly Philly did. So a solution like this would be amazing and I know that you’ve dabbled in WordPress a bit. You know HTML and CSS is that right?

Sean Blanda: I do but I’m very bad at PHP, but yeah.

Joe Casabona: Depending on who you talk to, they’ll tell you all PHP is very bad, PHP as they go and write like a WordPressplugin. So I think you know a platform like WordPress somewhere in the future right? ‘Cause WordPress might be a good platform for this. We’re seeing more WordPress developers moved to software as a service or something like something completely headless, a term where basically your service doesn’t rely on a single technology. And PR is a good example of that. Your content essentially goes to like a single API and then publishes out to a bunch of different platforms. But I can definitely see at least proof of concept, get built on top of WordPress. And I’m not saying, I’m totally not advocating for it. Yeah, well OK. So get WordPress and then install events by Modern Tribe and Jetpack to share and you know, Restrict Content Pro to do content like that. That’s yeah. You can totally do that like today using the tools I just said. But I think that putting some time and effort and thought into architecting it a good structure like this would be great and fairly easy to do on top of WordPress. And then using WordPress lots of people 27ish percent of the Internet uses it. And with the WordPress API you can probably eventually go headless or not necessarily depend on WordPress for something like this.

Sean Blanda: Yeah. I think a lot of their plugins and features that get developed for WordPress are usually cater to some kind of corporate websites or corporate clients. And then that makes sense ’cause they’re paying web, WordPress firms to build these plugins for them. And then the WordPress community is very grateful to share them. But I do think there’s this kind of smaller, more independent niche publisher vertical that’s more ignored more often. And maybe because there’s not as much money there and that would be a fair criticism. But I think it’s tremendously important and I think that we need to see more experimentation on this audience and on this kind of publisher.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that there’s a much bigger shift now in the web design and web development world towards its content first. I just thought I just spoke to James Rose recently who released a product called Content Snare in there which basically forces your clients to put together contents before you build the website.

Sean Blanda: That’s clever.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. Which is fantastic. So you know, focusing on the content and then building features around that to help content creators like you’ve been saying, like we’ve been talking this whole time is important. So I think that’s those of you out there listening who have the, either the time or the money to get in touch.

Sean Blanda: Or you’re just angry like news that says that’s how bad our discourse has gotten as a result of bad news.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Scratch your own itch, right? That’s been a mantra of How I Built it. So I will, so we didn’t really follow the regular format for this interview and time is absolutely flown by anyway. I will ask you the last question before we get to the Fast Five. I will ask you the last question I like to ask, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?

Sean Blanda: Trade secrets? My job, my day job is as an editor in chief and I think that the longer I am in charge of content outlets and content platforms, I realize there’s just two main pillars that you need to get right and everything else tends to fall in line. One is the brand so would you stand for who you are, and how are you different. And then two is know exactly who you’re talking to. And I think a lot of news outlets, a lot of marketing, a lot of writing they’re just writing for writing sake just trying to throw stuff out there. And the best brands, the ones you read all the time know exactly who they are. And I think my test is if you were to cover, if you’re going to do the CSS naked test, right? Remove all the CSS from a site and just read it or read it in pocket. Do you know what type this is from, and the answer needs to be yes, every time.

Joe Casabona: I love that. And that is, I mean it’s something that developers talk about all the time. You’re building a product, know your niche market. But it’s absolutely the same for content you are. You want certain people who will get the most value out of what you’re writing to read it. So that’s fantastic.

Sean Blanda: Yeah. My boss likes to say like the world wants you to be vanilla, right? So you’re getting a lot of feedback where people are going to say “Oh, you know you wait too long or too short. I don’t like it for the language.” or whatever. And the reality is the moment you start listening to that and you start to fall in line to be like anyone else and you become part of the crowd and then everyone leaves you.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. The perfect blog posts are this 450 to 600 words. I don’t think I’ve ever written A blog post of that length ’cause I, you know, it’s not ’cause I ramble on but because what I’m trying to say is going to take more than 600 words.

Sean Blanda: Right. And the act of finding that is hard and it takes forever and you want to punch yourself in the face as you do it. But once you figure out your niche and your audience, you need to do that first before building any kind of tech stack right?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely.

Sean Blanda: That is my trade secret.

Joe Casabona: I love it!

Sean Blanda: ‘Cause you we’re building a community, act like it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. You know, it’s not something they could teach you in school. You can’t major in writing content but it takes time just like learning how to program, just like building a house or whatever. So it’s probably the only time you’ll ever hear writing content being compared to building a house.

Sean Blanda: I’ve never built a house so I don’t know.

Joe Casabona: Maybe, there I’ve built IKEA furniture and it’s got horribly wrong. So we are less. So I’m still trying to find my sea legs with this Fast Five. It is new for Season Three. I’m going to ask you five questions, the first four I would like your gut reaction on. And the last one you could put a little bit more thought into. Sounds good? What’s your favorite book?

Sean Blanda: Brand new world.

Joe Casabona: Brand new World, nice. Follow up, what’s the one that you most recently finished reading?

Sean Blanda: I just finished reading Shattered. The Hillary Clinton campaign exposay and two hours I didn’t finish it ’cause I found it very, this happened, and this happened, and this happened, this happened, and I was that into at a time

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Who, did somebody close to the campaign, right? Here it wasn’t like somebody else.

Sean Blanda: It was a journalist who was promised access in favor of not revealing any names and then publishing it months after.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Makes sense. What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Sean Blanda: [inaudible 30.27.2] Blues kick so I’ve been listening to a lot of Robert Johnson and Son House and Taj Mahal is a new guy I just discovered. And then otherwise I listen to a lot of Drake.

Joe Casabona: Nice, very nice.

Sean Blanda: More or like I’ve been listening [inaudible 30.42.7]

Joe Casabona: He does speak the truth a lot of times. Started from the bottom and now we’re here,

Sean Blanda: And now he’s here

Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. What’s your favorite food

Sean Blanda: Mexican food. So like burritos, tacos, that’s all. So…

Joe Casabona: Nice. I guess I could have guessed that from when we met up. Who is, I think I know the answer to this one. Who’s your favorite sports team?

Sean Blanda: I mean it’s one of the Philadelphia, was probably 76ers.

Joe Casabona: 70s I was gonna guess the Sixers. Very nice.

And here’s the last one again you could put a little bit more thought into this. It’s kind of open-ended. So I want you to pick something that you know very well and tell us how you learned it.

Sean Blanda: So I, one thing I’m really good at this point is planning a trip for a vacation. And the reason I know this is ’cause I just got done five about trip around the globe with my wife from October to March of 2016 into 2017. And at first, I was really bad at planning a trip ’cause I would just show up the things than figure it out. But after doing it time and time again with another human expecting to have a great time, I had really good at it. So that is what I would say I’m really good at now.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. So you learn from experience there. Is that right?

Sean Blanda: Yeah. The carious balance of over planning and under planning, right? If you underplan too much you just walk around bored. If you over plan too much you’re running from tour to tour and spending lots of money. I think I finally found the right balance now.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, that’s excellent. I can vouch for that. Usually when I, so usually my vacation is to Disney World so I already know exactly what I’m doing all the time. But we hired a travel agent for our two week honeymoon to Italy and I am eternally grateful for that because she had like the right mix of tourist and traveler in there. And the thing that I love the most is we didn’t have to worry at all about transportation anywhere. So usually what I will do when I get to a place off of the main part of transportation whether that’s a train or an airplane are or whatever is I’ll think how do I get to my hotel from here. I never had that planned out and Uber has made it easier but it’s still you know, if you’re in a place where Uber is not very good or Lift or whatever you know, I’m at least left in the lurch ’cause I’m like, I don’t know how to get to my hotel in cab I guess. Cool.

Well Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a great conversation as usual.

Sean Blanda: Likewise. Thank you very much for having me. And if anyone wants to know about news or content, I am @seanbalanda on Twitter. Happy to chat about that.

Joe Casabona: Excellent. And I will have all of Sean’s links and all the links that we talked about in the show notes. It’ll be a lengthy show notes for this one so be sure to check it out at How I Built It.

Just a fantastic conversation with Sean. I always enjoy talking to him. I really like his insight in a field that frankly I don’t know too much about aside from just kind of consuming the news. So it’s always great to get a different perspective.

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