#299 John Chan is building on his learning superpower

Episode Transcript
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John Chan (00:00):
You ask your employees or new hires, and you
ask them hey, you know what didyou play?
What sport did you play, growit up?
Do you play music?
Do you play video games?
Do you play chess?
And they're going to be like,yeah, I played, wow, I was a
guild leader.
And you're like, well, how doesthat relate to the way the
program, how does it rate?
And they're going to be able totell you all kinds of
interesting things.
And what's interesting aboutthat is a lot of people,

(00:21):
especially in the career,doesn't even know that part of
the brain exists.
And so when you use that andyou uncover that on their behalf
, for them, next thing, you knowyou're developing all these
unique things out of thatemployee that you otherwise
would not have.
Right, that also applies toproducts.
You look at products that havegreat stories to tell what was
their Genesis story and why didthey start that specific company
in their version.
And next thing, you know youhave unique marketing angles

(00:44):
that you could tell because,guess why we started this
company is because they solvedthis problem, because they had
these obscure things that theycame across.
And now you're like that makesa lot of sense.
That's why you have a betterproduct and now you've got a
messaging angle that you canlead with.
That's just crushing on themarketing campaigns.

Tim Bourguignon (00:58):
Hello and welcome to Devilpuss Journey,
the podcast bringing you themaking of stories of successful
software developers to help youon your upcoming journey.
I'm your host, tim Bollinger.
On this episode I receive JohnChan.
John is an entrepreneurrenowned for his web and UX
design and digital marketingexpertise.

(01:18):
John dropped out of university,obviously, to start his web
design consultancy called 2X or2X agency, an agency
specializing in helpinge-commerce and DTC brands grow
and scale with paid ads and adda creative development.
Oh, and he's just a black beltand take window, and he has
represented the country TeamCanada, I think three times

(01:40):
internationally.
So not just a brain, damn it,john.
A warm welcome to DevilpussJourney, tim.
Thank you for having me Excitedto be here.
Oh, I'm thrilled and we've beenlaughing for half an hour
already.
This is going to be a great show.
I know it's going to be a riot,but before we come to your
story, I want to thank theterrific listeners who support

(02:01):
the show.
Every month you are keeping theDevilpuss Journey lights up.
If you would like to join thisfine crew and help me spend more
time on finding phenomenalguests than editing audio tracks
, please go to our website,devilpussjourneyinfo and click
on the support me on Patreonbutton.
Even the smallest contributionsare giant steps toward a

(02:25):
sustainable Devilpuss Journeyjourney.
Thank you, and now back totoday's guest.
So, john, as you know, the showexists to help listeners
understand what your storylooked like and imagine how to
shape their own future.
So, as a customer on the show,let's go back to your beginnings
.
Where would you place the startof your Devilpuss Journey?

John Chan (02:44):
High school.
So high school, and so what'sinteresting is that there are
certain things that you knowwhen you play out in your career
and you look back you know youdidn't plan it a certain way.
I wanted to be an animatedgrowing up but I got into like
web and development and tech,sort of by accident, but also

(03:05):
not by accident at the same time, because we mentioned earlier
about you know, growing up asthe youngest of three children
and my two older brothersthey're both engineers, but I
was closer to my second brotherwho at the time was doing all
sorts of things, all sorts oftinkering.
So the two older brothersinfluenced me in very important

(03:27):
ways where they got an earlycomputer, they got access to the
internet and so me, being theyounger kid, if I was just born
in isolation, probably I wouldhave missed about in the sense
because it was a veryinteresting time in the early
2000s.
You're just getting online,there's all these softwares and
new tools, everything's fresh.
But I was able to piggyback offmy older brothers in playing

(03:48):
games online, playing with flashanimation, getting to early
scripting and just beingcomfortable with the computer.
But high school is what Ipointed at.
It was because none of thatwould have meant anything until
I had a very chance, a highschool teacher that taught CSS,
and so I didn't notice at thetime.

(04:08):
So high school for me was 2001,2005.
2000, 2005.
And so when I was a grade nine,grade 10, our education system
here I would have been maybe 13or 14.
And around 2001 and 2002 waswhen the teacher that I had at

(04:30):
the time was teaching CSS.
And what's interesting aboutteaching CSS at that time is
that it was still early in theearly 2000s.
That time is that it was stillearly, right, css Zen garden, if
you're familiar with that, wasjust currently come out from
Dave Shea, and I didn't realizeat the time, but I was actually
learning quote unquote cuttingedge technology on how to
develop and develop for the web.

(04:51):
And so at that time I didn'tknow it was an advantage, but
because I was good at drawing, Iwas good at art, wanting to be
an animator, right, it led to ascenario where by the time I
wanted to drop out at 19.
So fast forward to 2006 and2007,.
I got bored of school, or, youknow, I felt like I could do
better on my own.
The first thing I tookinventory of what skill sets do

(05:13):
I have?
That if I wanted to start abusiness or try to make money on
my own, what would I look like?
And I went to web development,again not thinking that was
going to mean anything, butbecause that was the most
tangible hard skill that I couldtry to sell.
So I'll pause there, but thatwas basically how it started for
me Chance encounter and goodtiming.

That is part of the as well.
I mean, you have to be ready tograb luck when it comes by, but
sometimes it pushes you as welland you have to embrace it.

John Chan (05:44):
Absolutely.

So you said oh, I said you dropped out of
university.
Is there a story behind it?
I mean, why did you decide tonot pursue a curriculum that you
had started?

John Chan (05:56):
For sure.
So at the time, this is 2006.
So I don't think it was thatconventional to drop out of
school yet.
I wasn't trying to be anentrepreneur or what have you.
It sounds cool in the podcast,like 20 years in or 15 years in,
right, but at the time I wasjust looking for the next
immediate step and I was justdisenchanted with school.
And so one thing that's goingto come up over and over again

(06:17):
is this notion about superpowers, and I'll come back to this in
just a second.
But at the time I didn'trealize my superpower.
The strength that I uniquely hadwas I was very good at learning
.
I learned things very, veryquickly, and so, if you will get
into the stories of the threemajor arcs of my career but it's
not conventional for someone tobe a professional designer, to

(06:38):
being a professional softwaredeveloper, to transition to be a
professional marketer it's notan easy transition.
But the common thread behindall of these things that started
at university was recognizingthat I found it kind of slow for
me, or that I was bored and theformal diagnosis for ADHD came
in at 30 something.
So that was like, well, afterthe fact, before I realized, oh,

(06:59):
that makes a lot more sense.
But at the time I was justlistening to my gut and because
I felt like I wasn't getting themost of what I wanted out of
school, it felt like adistraction.
And so you touched on the factthat I was, I was an athlete.
I was, you know, at the time intraining for the Olympics.
I was working under Olympiccoach.

(07:20):
Didn't make it, but you know,it helped that I was serious
about developing myself andbeing better in certain ways so
that the conversations for myparents wasn't that hard.
And it also helped that I wasthe third kid, right.
So it's like my two olderbrothers had the bachelor's
degree already.
They were engineers, and so Ithink there was that creative
flexibility that the kid had,the third kid had, and so the

(07:42):
fact that I wasn't looking likeI was going to waste my time and
the fact that I already had,you know, somewhat constructive
endeavors made that conversationtransition easier, so that it
was easier.
So there wasn't a lot offriction and I had a lot of
support from my family tobasically go do that, even if
they'll even though at 19,you're still a kid there were
that level of uncertainty, butin a sense it kind of worked out
right, because when I, when Idropped out, this was 2006.

(08:05):
What led to it first was I wasat a.
I was, I read Rich Dad Port Ed.
You know this book by RobertKiyosaki and I read this on a
flight at the recommendationfrom a teammate in my
competition.
So I was, I was competing atTech Window and I had a teammate
at the time basicallyintroduces to me because he was
reading this book and I lookedover and was like, oh, what is

(08:27):
that?
And he explained to me it'slike, oh, it's this guy teaching
him what business or what haveyou Wasn't really my family or
my whatever to like.
Go down entrepreneurship per se, but that kind of piqued my
interest.
And so when I read that book onmy flight back from Korea right
, I was, it was a Korea open.
I came back and it wasSeptember 2006.

(08:47):
I had one.
I registered my courses at oneterm in and I was like, no, I
can't be here.
That was kind of the thought.
And so it was funny becausethere was a certain level of
conviction that came along withthat thought process where I was
so certain that I didn't wantthis, I didn't need this, that I
didn't even go to my mathfinals I did.
Well, I was like doing ninetiesin my midterms and what have
you Like I could have like stuckit through, but I didn't even

(09:10):
shop to my final because I waslike maybe a little bit brash at
the time, but it was a certainlevel of conviction and yeah, so
I started.
I dropped out in the term afterI started freelancing, doing web
development and asking friendsthat were in business and
following them around and askingquestions and all kinds of
things about what does it meanto start a business.

(09:32):
And I remember him taking to myfirst networking event.
I didn't even know what thatwas at the time.
I didn't have business cards.
People asked what I did.
I was like I make websites.
And I remember the first personI handed my contact information
to was written on a posted notebecause I was so underwhelmed
and also underprepared and, tothe credit to the person that
guided me, he didn't tell meanything, he just show up and

(09:53):
just follow what I do.
And I did and people were like,oh, websites, I need a website.
And that's how I landed my firstfew clients and the first
lesson that came along with thatwas it turns out that the
ability, the technical abilityto build something versus the
business mechanics of buildingand running a business were two
separate skills, and so I wasgood at making the websites, but

(10:15):
the self-management, theproject management, decline,
communication.
Those aspects of it meant that Iwas still young and I had a lot
to learn and that I was not avery good business person, and
so I eventually applied for areal job, ironically back at the
university that I left, andthat was really the start of my
career, where I joined, as atthe time, basically a split role

(10:39):
between a web admin where I wasmaking like content changes and
site updates, as well as aSysAdmin of sorts a systems help
desk, where I was basicallyanswering web support calls.
So I was troubleshootingbrowser caching issues, doing
password resets.
So I had a help desk supportrole as long as web.
And that's a pause there,because that leads into sort of

(11:02):
the next transition of likebeing a UX designer.
If you can sort of guess wherethat goes.

If I may, you just said this was the start of
my career.
Why do you exclude thisfreelancing part?

John Chan (11:17):
It's because it was.
The thing about being on yourown is that you don't know what
you don't know, and so were thereal structured environments of
showing up and being expected tohave a significant output.
I shouldn't say like the startof my career.
My career started before that,but it was the real place where
I really developed my career.
I should say it that wayBecause being on my own it's

(11:41):
largely being an auto-diadact ofteaching myself all these other
things.
The first initial period ofhaving a structured environment
and eventually what theuniversity would afforded me was
going to conferences and beingexposed, to quote unquote, real
professionals within theindustry just opened up the
world of what is possible andhow to develop that.
Because we talked about martialarts.

(12:01):
Martial arts is very clearprogressions.
You start as a white belt, youthen go to yellow and you
progress all the way to blackbelt, where the real journey
actually begins.
People think black belt iswhere it ends.
It's like, no, you did all thefoundations to get to black belt
because that's where masterydevelopment begins.
In that same way, I thinkthere's a bit of that
progression of like starting towork I didn't count all the odd

(12:21):
jobs and the tutoring or theteaching career.
Those things I did and as myteens, but being expected on a
salary to show up and do certainthings and being able to
explore and train, and like thatwas real and for me it felt
like, you know, I got my blackbelt.
In that sense, you know,metaphorically, and where the

(12:42):
real practice and real journeybegins.

It makes a lot of sense.
I'm just obviously projectingon myself and now that I'm a bit
older just turned 40, I'mlooking back at some stuff I did
during my teens and realizinghow foundational they were and,
for instance, leading churchgroups with 50 kids and 10 youth
of my age and I was leadingthem.

(13:05):
I realized in hindsight howmuch of a school for life it was
and how much of a role itplayed.
But initially I wouldn't havepieced that in my career
Obviously not, but actually itwas.
And in a more ridiculous sense,maybe, leading raids in online
games during nights with 40people every night during the

(13:30):
weekend, weekends, weekends.

John Chan (13:32):
That was foundational as well and it's definitely not
part of the career but it wasstill learning skills for life,
so yeah, no, I identify withthat because I'm also a gamer
and if you think about the typesof games like when you lead a
great logistical nightmare thatcomes along with project
planning and you're thinkingabout, like, how to coordinate a
bunch of people that don'tcommunicate well and get

(13:54):
emotional and, you know, put alot of blame on other people,
it's like there's a lot oflittle things at play that when
you look back, it's very pivotal, and so that's interesting that
you mentioned that, becausethere's stuff that I don't count
as well.
That also meant a lot which wasgoing back to like the first
odd job, right, you know, foryou maybe it would be formalized

(14:15):
as a job, but, like you know,leading a church group, right,
for me, a very pivotal sort oflike part of that was also
teaching Taekwondo, because whenI was teaching, when I was like
13, my brother was actuallyrunning a school.
At the time he was looking back, it's kind of crazy.
He was in his 20s and so youknow we had, like, at the school
that I was learning Taekwondoin, there was a core branch and

(14:37):
then my brother took a communitycenter.
He did like a little likeoffshoot of a branch, but
between the two of us and a fewother staff from stages two of
us between like maybe four orfive of us we had.
I was 13, we had maybe 30students, and we grew to 180
over the course of like a yearand a half.
It was something ridiculous,and the progression for teaching
someone over and over again itwas so.

(14:58):
It was crazy at the timebecause, you know, every week we
had a new student come inbecause everybody was bringing
the friend, and so we had torestart the white belt
curriculum over and over again,even though somebody else was
like two weeks in but that.
But it was interesting aboutthat, though, was that my
brother was very adamant aboutnot paying me and my mom was
upset about that.
It was like yo, he's apart-time job, he's a kid, like,
why are you like you know freelabor, what have you?

(15:20):
But that, like, I did it foryears, but that moment really
made me appreciate the craft ofdoing it for the conviction and
not for the monetary valueassociated with it, and that
played a role in the way that I.
You know there's no career pathin being a professional
Taekwondo athlete, and so forthe years I was broke and I was
training and I was trying to dothis thing and this pipe dream,

(15:42):
but for what?
And that kind of resilience andcharacter building.
It's like you can't replace itwith anything else, right?

And you said you were not an entrepreneur.
I see the same pattern there?

John Chan (15:54):
No, but it's again.
Like you know, steve Jobs didthis and you know like it's.
You know it's always kind oflike cliche to quote him, but he
said it so well you can'tconnect the dots looking forward
.
You can connect it looking back.
Right, it makes all the sense.
So you just got to trust yourguy, just go down this path and
everything plays out well in theend.
Amen to that.

Was that the first arc of the three arcs you
mentioned?

John Chan (16:15):
No.
So the three arcs.
It's good to get into that.
So the three arcs in my careeris I spent a good chunk of my
career five or six years being aprofessional developer, right
as a designer, so 2006 to 2011or so 2012.
After that, so I'll give thebackstory.
So I started off doing web adminand web support and help this

(16:37):
admin, but I was a bitdisjointed because I could build
the web pages and I wasrealizing that, well, there's
people on the other side, right,and so there's one sort of
funny story where one of thatpivotal moments of realizing
that the interfaces I wasdesigning had people that was
impacting was that at the time,the university had 11 different
branches that it was supporting.

(16:57):
You know, to the university,there's a lot of libraries I was
working for a library, so therewas a lot of different branches
, but there was this one smallteam doing tech support for all
of them, and so we get calls allthe time from, like old faculty
members wanting to pass orresets new students that uses
their library card, like once ina blue moon.
So we're just inundated withthe calls and so my two managers

(17:18):
because I had two differentroles my web manager comes up
and be like John, I need youdoing stuff.
Like why are you like whatever?
And I'm looking back at herlike do you not see me just like
answering calls all day long?
Kind of like frustrated.
And then so what I did was Istarted realizing that the
reason why people were callingus was because they were having.
That was the error message thatthey ran into when they tried
to enter a password and youcouldn't log in.

(17:40):
And so when I realized that wasthe starting point for all
these calls came in, I changedthe error message so that the
phone number, instead of routingto the system's help desk
whether it was only like threepeople answering all these calls
I routed it to circulation,which was basically the public
facing sort of like actualcustomer support at front desk,
where they had more staff andthey can process it better.
I forwarded to that number andcalls it up 80%.

(18:02):
And you know, maybe they didn'tappreciate it, so they never
knew that.
I don't know if they actuallyknow, and so maybe they'll
listen to this podcast and getus up with me years later.
But it was kind of this momentwhere it's just like no, the
things that I'm doing on thisside that has an impact on the
other side.
And then going to conferences,going to talks about usability,
going talks about user research,that really certified and that

(18:25):
kind of gave me the path of youknow what.
There's this gap in thisuniversity that needs skill.
I should go learn that.
And it became a.
They're basically their leadinguser researcher and user
experience designer until thatsort of capped out.
So that first major arc, youknow, was important because it
If you hear the inklings, itwasn't like a well-planned

(18:46):
career path.
It was, hey, I need this skillnext, let me go figure that out.
And so it went from Web Adminto usability and design and user
experience to when I realizedthat at the university it was
like four or five years in I wasdoing all these bigger projects
.
Now I was redesigning the wholeinterfaces.
I think they're still using ittoday.

(19:07):
What's interesting was that Istarted combining ideas from
tech because I noticed thatgreat designers often worked in
for-profit and privateenvironments because they had
the pressure to do it.
And academics, you know,they're a little bit more maybe
traditional or didn't have thatkind of like thinking patterns.
But I realized I can sourceinteresting design ideas if I
looked at for-profit companies.
And so, for example, it wasunconventional for a library to

(19:28):
have a value proposition, rightLike, what is the purpose of a
university library?
I invented one.
I or not invented one.
I uncovered one that we werealready doing and I was like, oh
, that makes so much sense.
That's why the entireorganization existed.
And then it dawned upon me.
It was like, well, wait asecond.
It didn't really matter howgood of a user experience I
developed, because even if I dida great user experience, that

(19:50):
organization isn't going to goaway, regardless of if I did a
good job or bad job, which iswhy I couldn't be valued for
what I was doing.
I need to get out of thisenvironment.
And so that's when I startedtying analytics and said how
could I make my designs meansomething more meaningful to a
for-profit business?
So I thought I was working inthe private sector and realized,

(20:10):
and, going to analytics, I gotinto split testing and A-B
testing, because that was like,oh, that's the most direct way
of measuring my designs,literally have two versions of
it and say how mine did betterthan the other one or not.
And so I started consulting.
I went back to consulting for abit.
I started consulting for doingconversion optimization.
Again, it was still pretty badon the business mechanics of it,

(20:32):
but it landed me a few clientsand it got me more exposure to
different types of work and atthe time I was looking for
different jobs, different roles.
I was working with differentbusiness owners, not really
going anywhere really.
But there was a chance encounterwhere somebody told me hey,
this company that you reallyliked, 37 signals, are hiring

(20:53):
for this role you should apply.
And so and that's what I did soI made a custom site that says
hey, 37 signals, my name is Johnand this is why you should hire
me or someone along those lines.
And I basically did a teardownof their homepage and the
current messaging or the productpage or pricing, redesigned it
and says here's what you'recurrently doing and here's why

(21:13):
this one would be better.
Here's what you're doing hereand here's why it would be
better.
My name is John, I'm fromVancouver, canada.
And then the rest of thishistory, and I remember setting
that at like four in the morning, three in the morning, and
Jason freed, three hours later,basically said hey, thanks for
submission, let's set a time tochat.
And paraphrase it a little bit,but it turns out it's in

(21:34):
character but it's in characterfor for a base camp now to act
like this, and I learned a lotfrom Jason.
So I know, you know he gets alittle bit flack nowadays for
you know, at least, withwhatever spectacle or what
happened, but he's, you know,even and correctly.
So I really did respect a lotof the way they ran business,
because they were unconventionalthinkers.

(21:55):
Right, you know there might besome questions about, like their
approach and all the kind ofstuff, but whatever direction
they came down, you can't arguewith the fact that they're great
original thinkers.
They called out remote work wayearlier when the rest of the
world caught up, because theyjust knew how to call out
bullshit.
They knew how things were, andso it could get little dogmatic
at times about, you know, forexample, bootstrapping versus
VCs, which we don't really haveto get into.

(22:16):
But the point was it exposed meto what great thinkers were
really like, which was the firsttime in my career at that point
outside of because I had great,you know guidance and models
personally from all the coachesand other entrepreneurs, but
there was very few of that thatI was able to see and talk to
firsthand in the industry, andso that was a really interesting

(22:39):
experience.
And so that was 2012, when Ijoined their team and it was a
short stint because, again,didn't realize at the time, but
the ADHD also meant that I wasnot a very good employee, right.
So I had these ideas and I wasalso early at it and I was
wasn't super confident.
So oftentimes I was veryconvoluted in the way that I was

(23:02):
thinking about things.
I wasn't the best communicatorand so, again, I was like 24, 25
at the time.
So because I started my careerearly, I didn't attribute to the
fact that it was just a matterof maturity, but I kind of took
it personally.
Of course I would, and so Ieventually got fired, maybe like
seven or eight or nine monthsin I can't remember exactly when
, I think for right reasons,largely about, you know, partly

(23:24):
not fitting with the team, butpartly also because I had a lot
of things.
I certainly need to learn aboutwhat it meant to actually grow
a business, or grow a companyand translate it through designs
.
And Jason was accommodating forit.
He was a great boss.
I have nothing bad to say abouthim.
He got to be taught me a lot ofdifferent things, but I wasn't

(23:45):
necessarily a good team player.
I kind of butt heads with thedata analyst a little bit, or
did not particularly with him ordidn't get the respect whatever
what I call it and the otherdesigners on the team.
I was basically outclassed andso I was like I think it's the
right call.
But what's interesting was thataround that time, jason and
this is that's the first end ofthe first arc, because around

(24:06):
that time Jason, 37 signalsinvested into a private company
that was a local company inChicago At the time.
They're called the StarterLeague.
They used to be called CodeAcademy, but it was actually
first coding bootcamp and so, aspart of the investment, I
became really good friends withthe founders of that company.
His name is Neil Salisgriffin.

(24:27):
He's currently the managingdirector of Techstars.
He's a total bad ass, right.
And but what's interesting wasthat because he invested in that
company, all the employees hadfree tuition and so I got my
foray into coding.
Not because of 37 signals,inventing Ruby and Rails and
being exit programmers, turnsout, if you're an expert, you
can't explain what you'reactually doing, right?

(24:47):
Who would have thought?
But that exposure to the codingschool was kind of the gateway
for me to actually code andbuild Rails apps at night and
you know, neil said this to mewhere he was like, you know, you
kind of don't fit in with likeDresden group.
You kind of got this manicenergy to you, like everybody
else is kind of like cool,common, collected and doing

(25:07):
things, but you're kind of like,you know, kind of like a
scrappy founder kind of thing.
Right, he didn't say thatexactly, but he was paraphrasing
that and I was like, yeah, thatkind of that kind of checks out
, but we're building like thisproduct on the side and where as
part of the curriculum.
But I learned how to code andgot decently good but not
dangerous, because up until thatpoint I was fairly effective at

(25:32):
being a self learner for beinga better designer.
From, basically, public work,you can see, you can learn from
blog posts.
You can learn a lot of conceptsreally quickly.
But programming is a verydifferent beast, because
programming, when you looksomething up and you come across
some Stack Overflow answer andyou copy and paste it into your
like you know your stack, it maywork, but you have no idea why

(25:55):
and so, even if you actuallyunderstood it, it may not be
giving you the best path tosolve a particular problem, and
context really matters and so atthis point, you know, going
back to you know.
So I had an exposure to coding.
I got fired in the beginning of2013.
I always said this juncture inmy career where I was like, what

(26:16):
do I do now?
Do I go back to consulting ordo I try to take whatever skills
I just picked up and try tobuild like a software out of it?
Right, you know both my own appor what have you and I thought
about which direction I wantedto end up.
I was like, well, I wanted tobuild my own app, so I did.
And so I spent maybe a year,year and a half, spinning my
wheels trying to build differentapps.
Some of them would get goinganywhere and I did, and I

(26:37):
eventually did lend somethingthat actually had traction.
I was building a productivitytool, which is kind of new to
think about.
That's what everyone's startingapp is.
But the angle was and it's funny, you know, thinking back now
with the DABG and all that but Iwas building an attention
management app, where I wasbuilding a task management
product.
But most task managementproduct was based on medium to
long term memory of writingthings down.

(26:58):
So you don't forget, I wasbuilding something for short
term memory, say for people likemyself that was getting
distracted, pulled in differentdirections, because I was
building it within the browsers.
I was building an it's a Chromeextension where I was, you get
your task management show beforeyou get distracted, or that, if
you did get distracted, there'sdifferent features that will
pull you back in of like, hey,this is what you're working on

(27:18):
and this is what you said you'regoing to work on.
Go back to that.
And so it was useful and it washelpful and we had traction
because of that.
But then did that for aboutfour or five years and there was
a bit of a side giggle on theway, which I'll get into in just
a second, but it reallycouldn't commercialize that
software product and get it tocommercialize, which eventually

(27:40):
made me realize I need tounderstand user acquisition,
which is how I get to the thirdcareer path.
Right, but I'll pause there fora second because I think
there's an interesting sidestory.
But I'll pause there.
Do you have any thoughts orquestions you want to?

I'm just mesmerized, I'm just drinking
your words.
Nope, I'm kind of wondering whyyou chose to stick to the code.
If you had all those skills andvaluable skills you explored
optimization, maybe testing, andyou were able to consult for
that, why did you not choose togo back, to go back with that

(28:15):
quotes, to that career and it's.
I need to jump both feet firstin a different one.

John Chan (28:20):
Largely because client services is not a fun
environment to work in At leastit's time for me because it was
stressful.
Like I was saying earlier, Ihad these early inklings that I
had the technical skills thatwas valuable, but the business
mechanics of it I wasn't good atsales, I wasn't good at
marketing, and so consultingjust meant that I had to go
through the grind of provingmyself to other people and
explaining the process and meantthat career now, which is very

(28:43):
different, but at the time itwas like I could go do that,
which is not the thing that Iwanted to do, versus don't talk
to anyone, sit behind a computerscreen and just sell stuff,
which is kind of the dream forour programmers.
And so I think, personalitywise, that was more appealing
for me and this is why Igravitated towards it.
And there's also a sense of therespect that we had for

(29:05):
software companies.
It's like there's a reason whyJason and David built a huge
follow we get 37 signals becausethey were really one of the
early pioneers of buildingsoftware businesses and talking
about bootstrapping andbasically controlling your own
destiny and all that, and thatwas a learning and that was
appealing and that's why Irespected them.
And so, having this newfoundskill of being able to code and

(29:25):
trusting that I could learnanything on my own which is true
, but it was different withprogramming I just realized that
if I'm gonna commit to itanyways, I wanna end where I
wanna start.
So, I wanna start where I wannaend up, which was basically the
software path.
If I consulted, I would havewanted to use the profits of
that to build software businessanyways.
So, which is why, like, let'sjust screw it, let's just go

(29:47):
straight there.
But this would be a good segue,because that's what I thought
at the time.
And then I started coding and Iwas like, wait a second, this is
actually really hard, and theresources at the time was not
very abundant.
And so what's interesting wasthat, before I realized that I
needed to become a betterprogrammer, the mechanics of how
I became a programmer was Itried to look things up online,

(30:09):
with lack of results.
I used to go to meetups.
I would bring my programmingquestions to Ruby meetup groups
and I would be like, hey, I'mwriting to this issue like what
I do, and I would describe thething I'm trying to do.
And it's like we had somereally great Ruby developers in
Vancouver and it was one groupthat I was talking to Godfrey
Chen, I think he was a realcontributor at some point.
I remember was talking to himand he was like oh, you're

(30:30):
trying to pull, you're trying tobuild a polling system, this is
what you need to do.
And I'm like, oh, what's that?
And it was interesting becauseI didn't know the language or
didn't have the definition ofthe terminology for what I was
looking for.
I can't even Google for it.
And so little experiences likethat made me realize that this
is a different beast, becauseerror messages aren't very good

(30:51):
at teaching you what the nextproblem is.
You're like error on line 460.
And you look at it.
It's like what's wrong with 460?
Turns out it was actually lyingsomething way earlier and you
had to go fix that before youfix it.
So there was all these kinds ofissues that made that process
of teaching myself much harder.
So my hack or the trick at thetime was I applied to be a TA

(31:14):
because I also needed the money.
I applied to a TA at a localcoding boot camp out in
Vancouver.
So I went to Chicago to workfor Basecamp.
They invested in coding bootcamp.
I had some basic skills.
But in 2014, because I partlydefunded the business that was
trying to start, partly becauseI needed to become a better
programmer, I applied to a localboot camp out here and

(31:34):
basically said, hey, listen, hisname is Karam, the blue
principal.
I said, hey, karam, listen, I'mnot going to be the best
programmer on your team, but Iremember what it's like to be a
beginner because I'm just notthat far off so I can relate to
your students really well.
And all the teaching skillsthat I had for my teams that be
teaching type 1.0 and tutoringand all those type of things all
those things were like listen,I'll be a good teacher, I'll be
fine.
And he took.

(31:56):
Between that and the fact thatI worked at 37 Signals and had
some rep for that, he took thepitch.
I was born as a TA.
But the real reason why Iwanted to do it was I wanted
access to curriculum because Idon't want to pay for it I'm not
paying $8,000 for whatever andso I would troubleshoot problems
over and over again with thestudents and they'd be like, hey

(32:18):
, I'm having this issue here,what's wrong?
And I'm like I don't know,let's figure it out, let's debug
it together.
But it exposed me to the repsof going through the same
problems over and over again andthe students would rate who's a
good TA, who's not, and I don'tget to see the scores.
But I would be told hey, john,you're highly rated and you're

(32:39):
one of the better teachers.
I wouldn't say the best, Iwouldn't dare say that but
you're students like you and I'mlike, oh great.
And so at some point one thingled to another.
I had the chance for them tosay hey, listen, we're growing
up this school in Toronto.
I'm in Vancouver.
Do you want to go teach there?
And so it'll be only a shortstint.
I know you want to go work onyour company, but we need a stop

(33:02):
gap and you're a great teacher,do you want to go do this thing
?
And so, for whatever reason andat the time it made sense, I
said yes.
So I became the head instructorinto Toronto Branch for a while
and that was again.
Taing is one thing.
Teaching the curriculum overand over again for different
cohorts, that really sort oflike my skills at Programmer.

(33:23):
So that really changed things.
But it also exposed me tobuilding a network of software
developers real softwaredevelopers, I would say, or
people that were juniordevelopers that eventually
became working at differentcompanies and in group referrals
, and so it just kind of got methrough that path of seeing and
understanding progression andhow to repeat it.

(33:45):
But I'll pause there because atthat point that was kind of
like the second arc of being aprogrammer and after that sort
of like played out and thenwe're back to my startup.
I was like, hey, we havetraction, we have a product
people actually like we hadproduct solution fit, but we
didn't have product market fit.
We didn't have enough customersto build us into a sustainable

(34:07):
product.
Now what?
And my self diagnosis at thetime was we must have second
marketing.
So time to wear hat.

Number three so let's get in there, so that
that's again a real pivot, fromdesign to coding and this
curriculum building and teachingto now understanding business
acquisition and the businessside of it, yeah, so how do you
approach that?

John Chan (34:35):
So the punchline is so, right now, we're a growth
marketing agency, we doperformance marketing for
e-commerce and SaaS companies,and so our bread and butter now
is we run a lot of ads and we doa lot of the right response
marketing, but, again, it didn'tstart there.
So, 2016, 2017, I actuallystarted off doing the initial
part that was good at, which wasdesign, knowing that I need to

(34:57):
get into marketing, and so thetask at the time that I was
trying to think about how to goabout marketing was interviewing
other experts.
So no different than whatyou're doing with going through
interviews, except that I didn'tknow I could do a podcast at
the time, which would have beenmuch easier in simple format and
logistically much easier to do.
I was running meetups, and sowe started the Vancouver's

(35:17):
growth hackers meetup, where Ihad an excuse to invite other
experts come talk about theirgrowth and acquisition problems,
and in the side, I was liketagging along and saying, oh,
but we also do conversionoptimization agency, we do a B
testing and you see that as asegue to stay in touch with that
.

(35:38):
But going back to what I wassaying earlier about consulting
for design valuable skill, butit's also not a great business
to build out, and part of thereason why is because when
you're teaching or when you'reconsulting for conversion rate
optimization, you're designing abetter user experience or a
more better convertingexperience against the previous
design.
So the first design is theeasiest.

(36:00):
After that it becomesprogressively harder because you
have to beat whatever designsyou did previously or go down
funnel where there's fewer datapoints and so, in other words,
that service inherently had adeclining or decaying lifetime
value of a customer where themore successful it is, the more
you design out of your own jobfaster.
And so you just go through thischurn and burn of system where

(36:23):
you do really well, and then youhave to go find a mixed client,
and again, that wasn't verygood at sales at the time and I
would just keep running into themechanics of running a business
and that was very challenging.
And so what happened was is oneof these consulting clients at
some point was only Google Ads,and because you're adjacent to
that category of doing designsfor the landing pages or the

(36:46):
destinations that your trafficwent towards, it came up that
hey, we can probably try GoogleAds, we can probably do.
I don't remember the exact pitch, but the first Google Ads
client that we took on was verylow rate, but it was based on
the fact that their existingmarketing team wasn't very good
and the fact that we hadexisting technical skills in

(37:07):
design or in landing pages andunderstanding marketing well
enough to be dangerous to belike you know what, if we took
it over, we can do well.
So what they really cared aboutwas the bizarre result of
reducing cost per lead.
We're like you know what, wecan probably beat the cost per
lead, and so that was our end,and we didn't know what we're
doing, but we remember veryquickly, and so what we did was
we took over the Google Adaccount and we did deliver

(37:28):
because we were able to do thecombination of being a better
design for landing pages andbeing better at the existing
marketing was what we came downto.
We took over the Google Adaccount and we're able to drop
cost per leads.
It was going to be crazy.
It was like $1,000, which waswildly inefficient on their end,
to something like $125, whichis not great by today's
standards.
I would still say like for notthe day's standards, but for the

(37:50):
industry.
I would say, but as a beginner.
It's like feather in a cap ittakes, then it's like that's
good enough and we just use thatto land the next thing.
And the next thing, you know,it's like we slowly transitioned
away from doing conversion rateoptimization, repositioned our

(38:10):
agency from being a singleconsultant to do UX design
improvements to a full-fledgedteam running ad accounts for
other folks.

Okay, so you're still aiming at reducing this
cost and and beating theprevious design and experiencing
this, this glass ceiling ofonce you have it done it once,
it's really hard to do thesecond Version.
Oh, I'm sorry.

John Chan (38:35):
Has that changed?
No, that's changed.
So I should close out, luke,because part of the reason why
it did ads was recognizing a fewother things too.
Because when you're, whenyou're running an agency, the
biggest difference between thesoftware company and a service
company is the fact that if youmade the wrong decision and
software let's say you launcheda feature and you're trying to
figure out, you know, hey,people aren't upticking that

(38:57):
feature sets.
What's wrong with it?
It's the copies, whatever.
And you, you come acrosshypothesis of what to improve.
You have to go through anotherproduct developments.
I go release a new feature andthen find out if it works or not
.
With services companies, ifyou're wrong about the pricing,
if you're wrong about theservice, you say, hey, update my
slide deck, here's a newservice and here's a new pricing
.
You iterate a lot faster.
So the learning cycles foriterating upon your

(39:20):
quote-unquote product is aservice is a way faster.
And so, going back to theobservation that CRO was kind of
a hard service to sell, becausewhen you know you were able to
get, like you know, $5,000,$10,000 sort of consulting gigs.
But it turns out over time soyou only last a client for three
months or six months With ads.
Here's the thing when ads areworking, what do you want to do?

(39:43):
You don't want to stop, want tokeep going.
You would increase budgets, youwant to find ways to increase.
So success begets more success,and so that's inherently as
Like a business model from.
So when you pick that as a asindustry, it just meant that
when things are working you keptgoing, and so that was a
fundamental difference betweendoing Design as a service versus

(40:03):
marketing as a service, andthat was a total game changer.
I mean, again, it wasn't astraight path, but that that was
kind of the early recognitionabout the inherent difference in
that service.
But there's also like aseparate one too, where part of
the reason why I also wanted toswitch that career path was also
, or that service model wasbecause the technical barriers

(40:25):
for teaching someone how tobecome a good user experience
designer was very high.
Right building a great a b testand be a great optimization
specialist was very high, and soyou often see boutique shops of
experts because you have tohire experts to train and staff
up your Conversionaryoptimization agency, and so it
just had a really high barrierfor for teaching and for

(40:47):
training, whereas ads isactually a lot lower.
You can compartmentalize thework for between ad copy to
account setups and what have you, so it was also like it.
Not only was it a betterbusiness model, but it was also
a better service to hire andtrain for, and so between those
two things it just made a lotmore sense.

Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it does indeed Want tothrow a small curveball at you.
There's been three arcs in inyour life and they all make
sense in their own way and andbuild up to where you've been
today.
Yes, I think there is a forceone coming.

John Chan (41:24):
I have a suspicion, and the fourth one will likely
be a synthesis of those skills,because right now, and it's
we're kind of leading down thepath already, right, and so I
mentioned running an agency.
What I haven't mentioned atthis point is the end goal of
the agency is to be a holdingcompany of portfolios of

(41:46):
companies that we acquire andgrow in house, and so we're kind
of doubling with that right now.
Right, and it's not so muchabout acquiring brands and being
an investor and you know thosetype of things.
It's kind of fancy to say butrealistically, you know, when
you learn all these hard skills.
So I'm at mid 30s right now,I'm 36.
Right now the it's, it's, it'sdone upon me that all those

(42:08):
technical skills that I'vedeveloped, it's less about
developing more of those skillsand those more adding more.
It's about using those skillsto train and guide my team
members.
Because part of the reason why,so part of the, the
philosophical change in thiscurrent business of writing the
agency that was different thanthe previous company with
running a software company, wasthat I didn't want to call

(42:29):
myself a CEO at the time Becauseit felt pretentious.
Right, I'm a product guy I love.
I'm a designer.
I love making great products.
Right, it's like who the hellam I calling myself a CEO for
three freaking people?
You know I mean.
But what's interesting aboutthat was I told this same
thought to somebody else onetime and he was like listen, if
you don't identify yourself as aCEO, one, you don't know what

(42:49):
the job is.
Two is, you can't relate andtalk to other CEOs.
Right, they'll respect youdifferently because of the CEO,
but just that's basically it.
You just don't know what itmeans to be a leader.
And he was right, because ifyou look at the way that it
operated within that thatenvironment, I Was,
quote-unquote, the smartestperson in the room and it's not
helpful.
When you do that, you could besometimes abrasive.

(43:10):
When you talk to your teammembers, you'll shoot down ideas
.
You'll do all kinds of thingsbecause you know you'll use
seniority or whatever you knowthing Incorrectly so to trump
argument and decisions,especially for environment,
where decisions aren't alwaysclear, right, so it wasn't very
helpful.
So now, when I realized that'swhat the job of CEO is to

(43:31):
actually steward and lead andreally guide it became.
It meant that I actuallylearned a new soft skill or
subset of skills around being agreat leader, and what that
meant, though, was that all thetechnical skills that I
developed was now meant to bepassed on or used for guiding
other people to become better atwhat they're doing themselves,
up to a certain point where theyeventually become better at you

(43:53):
in each of those respectivefields.
So the fourth path really comesdown is a synthesis of skills,
and bring on leaders in our teamto Really either build up the
client service business into amuch larger agency, which is
basically one path.
Agencies are scalable, and itcould be really large agencies
that you could basically buildout.
If that's one path, but theother skill is basically

(44:13):
dog-fooding your own sort ofskill sets, which is take the
skills of growing companies andacquiring brands, because all
halfway halfway through theConsulting career of growing a
growth agency was realizing thatwait a second we thought we
suck the user acquisition wesuck.
We thought we sucked atmarketing.
Most of these people that had abusiness to hire us actually
weren't that great either, whichis what the hardest in the
first place, but what they hadwas great timing, or what they

(44:36):
had was they had one acquisitionchannel that worked really well
, and they just kept exploitingit, and so that's what I was
missing, and so, when I realizedthat was a skill, were like
wait a second, it's a suit, it'sit now amplifies it even more
if you couldn't cover that.
And then it became thisrealization where it's like wait
a second.
Maybe our skill sets being ableto code, being a great
conversion rate optimizationspecialist, being a great

(44:58):
marketer all Translated to notbeing good at taking a product
from zero to something, buttaking it, I think of it, like a
zero to one versus one to ten.
Our skill sets was much bettertaking things from one to ten.
So we shouldn't be looking atstartups.
We should be looking at thingsthat already had extraction, had
a data that we can then andcover all these useful insights

(45:18):
that we can then exploit intobuilding a much bigger business.
Which is why this notion oflike acquiring companies and
brands came along, which is likeTake what's existing and make
it better.
If that's because that you have, that's what you come down to.
So I think at some point Rightnow that's not a primary income,
but I can see that being ourprimary income at some point
very soon.

No, we are.
It's not an if it's when yeah,it makes so much sense.
Yeah, oh, that has been afantastic ride and we're already
at the end of our time.
Box been a Piece of advice thathas been formative in your life
that you want to pass on.

John Chan (45:55):
Okay.
So I'm gonna go back to Jasonfeed for a second, because he
said something to me that Idon't think he wrote about, but
it really hit home for me andhas made a very pivotal career,
like change of a career sense.
So back in 2013 or so 2012,jeff Bezos was a minority,
minority investor came to visitthe office and he was giving a

(46:16):
talk to the employees.
He was Jason was Jason, davewas very courteous you know,
they were meeting with themanagement team but he was like,
hey, come, come say hi to Jeff,jeff's gonna give a talk,
whatever.
And so whoever's at the officewas him, and I'm like kind of
freaking out.
This guy's like worth 23billion, right, I was just like
I'm like some 25 year old kid,but I remember sitting there and
just listening to talk aboutall kinds of projects, all these
things that he was talkingabout, and I'm just like, man,

(46:39):
what do you even ask this guy?
Right, like what kind of advicewould you even ask him?
And so I did a very meta thingwhen I went to Jason and said,
hey, jason, I don't know what toask this guy, what would you do
?
And Jason gave me this advice,which was Whenever he thinks
about good questions to asksomebody else and you're doing
this, by the way.
He looks for places that'soriginal about that individual

(46:59):
that only they uniquely couldhave right, and so you think
about.
What's interesting about thispodcast Is you're sourcing all
these original storytelling ofall these people, because that's
where all the nuggets are.
And, and Jason in the way,basically the same thing for me,
which was like saying, hey,listen, your designer, he's a
designer, but what's differentabout you is that you had tech
window is the part of yourupbringing, and so they asked
you how does tech window relateto the way that you go about

(47:23):
being a designer?
You can, I come up with allkinds of obscure references and
all kinds of original ideas thatonly you could think about, and
that applies not only to thecareer path.
That implies to your employees.
You ask your employees or newhires, and you ask him hey, you
know, what did you play?
What sport did you play grownup?
Do you play music?
Do you play video games?

(47:44):
Do you play chess?
And they're gonna be like, yeah, I played, wow, I was a guild
leader.
And you're like well, how doesthat relate to the way the
program, how does it rate andthey're gonna be able to tell
you all kinds of interestingthings.
And what's interesting aboutthat is a lot of people,
especially early in the career,doesn't even know that part of
the brain exists, and so whenyou use that and you uncover
that on their behalf for them,next thing you know you're

(48:04):
developing all these uniquethings out of that employee that
you otherwise would not have.
Right, that also applies toproducts.
You've looked at products thathave great stories to tell what
was their genesis story and whydid they start that specific
company in their version.
And next thing you know youhave unique marketing angles.
You could tell because, guess,why we started this company is
because they saw this problem,because they had these Obscure

(48:25):
things that they came across.
And now you're like that makesa lot of sense, that's why you
have a better product and nowyou got a messaging angle that
you can lead with.
That's just crushing on themarketing campaigns.

Amen to all of this.
No, it makes.
It makes so much sense and somany bells.
Thank you for that.
Where would be the best placeto continue the discussion with
you?

John Chan (48:45):
Oh my gosh.
So you can find us at 2xagency.
That's our agency website.
I'm pretty accessible, notfamous, right?
So it's easy to find me there.
But you can also find me onTwitter, right?
So I'm or X, whatever you wantto call it now JTC Chan, or you
could do the thing where you goon LinkedIn and look for John
Chan.
There's a million of us.
Good luck with that one, butyou can also find me on LinkedIn

(49:08):
.
So, if you reach out, I'd loveto have a discussion, learn
about what you're doing.
It doesn't have to be to workrelated.
If you have career advice orquestions that you want to ask,
I would love to meet with you.
Um, but, tim, this is so muchfun.
Thank you for having me.

It was indeed, and I'll make it easy for all
the listeners.
I'll add the the links to shownotes.

John Chan (49:23):
So just make the book for John Chan on LinkedIn.
It's kind of fun.
They should do Okay.

John, it's been a blast.
Thank you so much, tim.
Thank you so much.
It's a pleasure and this hasbeen, and the very piece of the
post journey.
I will see each other next week.
Bye, bye.
Thanks a lot for tuning in.
I hope you have enjoyed thisweek's episode.
If you like the show, pleaseshare, rate and review.

(49:51):
It helps more listenersdiscover those stories.
You can find the links to allthe platforms the show appears
on on our website dev journeydot info.
Slash subscribe.
Talk to you soon.

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