Chris Ridenour CTO of Cladwell

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today we are talking to Chris Ridenour, the CTO of Cladwell, and we discuss the differences between a lead developer and CTO, his journey and experience on the startup bus, and the importance of having the entire company work towards a common goal. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) You said you're working on some API stuff. I want to hear more about it.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:00:43) Yeah. So right now in the current Cladwell app, we leverage Firebase for almost everything remote and do everything else on the device. It was not necessarily your ideal structure for an app, but when I came into the company, that was existing. And looking at my options, it was either rewrite the whole app from scratch at that point or move forward with what we have, iterate on what we have, figure out that product market fit, and then do the crazy technical stuff later. And so I've been with the company almost a year now, and we're finally making that switch to moving off of Firebase as our API and actually building out our own. So we're using Django REST Framework and just creating your generic JSON API, which is primarily helping out our older devices. So if you're running on an iPhone 5S or whatnot and you're trying to calculate two million outfit possibilities from your closet, it really slows it down. So we're trying to move all of that onto our server to create a more consistent experience for our users. But it's about a year in the making in my head, just waiting for the right time, waiting for our numbers to make sense to actually do this work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:04) Yeah. My wife, she processes about two million outfit choices in the morning.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:02:08) Yeah. It's terrifying. I mean, when they originally built the app, I think they expected most users to bring in 50 to 60 items in their closet, and it'll generate in the tens of thousands of outfit possibilities. But what we found is the people who love our app the most are bringing 300 to 350 items in their closet and generating just—I mean, a lot of times the devices just stop processing because they just give up after some weird CPU timeout because it's just generating so many outfit possibilities for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) Yeah. It's crazy. What if it should be on a server and then have them always ready and tapped up? You know, it could just generate a thousand possibilities for anything that's basic, and then every time a new one comes in, regenerate more possibilities. Right? Or is there some sort of progressive aspect to the software?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:03:02) What we normally do is we try and just match our styling rules at a basic level and generate as many possibilities. But how we actually deliver those possibilities to you is where we include the personalization. So that's where if you find certain things colder or warmer, or you like to wear these colors together even though we don't necessarily call it Cladwell approved or anything like that, that's where we take that in. So I always talk about it like we generate these outfits as generating a deck of cards, but it's how we shuffle and deal these cards to you that's on a personal level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:38) So where was the product at as far as features and what it could do and users when you joined?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:03:44) When I joined, it was the second day the app was in the store. So, you know, a couple dozen users. A lot of those had just migrated from Cladwell's previous products. And you could add items to a singular closet, and those items would generate some outfit possibilities. And basically we would mark those outfits as valid for the weather or not. But beyond that, it was just a random choice of what three outfits you got every morning. And if you didn't like those outfits, you were kind of SOL.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:22) Can I pick my pants and then just say I want these pants and then just tap possibilities and it keeps generating possibilities around those pants?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:04:30) Yes. And so you can just say I want to wear these pants today, and then we'll show you all outfits that have those pants. But that was the level of it. It was basically just an outfit generator, which was still above and beyond most of the other closet apps out there. Most of them said you take pictures, and then they were like, great, here are your clothes. Now they're in your phone. It's like, well, that doesn't actually do anything for me. So we tried to move beyond that and get into the outfit generation. And then a lot of what we've been doing the last year is a lot of listening to our users, honestly, but really trying to finish the job as well. So we knew that you don't think of your closet as one singular closet. You have your work clothes, you have your weekend clothes, you have a vacation capsule that you're going to take with you, and you want to see outfits for that. And so it was creating that personalization and categorization for people as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:22) Do you guys use color theory to match what would go together?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:05:27) We have even one better. We have the only dual major computer science and fashion major, I believe, in the country. So she works with us. She's been there since before even me. And basically she's developing all of these color algorithms and outfit algorithms, leveraging computer science and machine learning, but also her actual fashion degree, which is just fantastic to have on the team because you should never ask me about fashion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:57) Right. It's super smart because she can say, oh, well, in this material brown works with this, but in this material brown doesn't work with this.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:06:05) Exactly. Yeah. And then as we evolve the algorithm further and now that we're moving it off device, we can start to look at, alright, yeah, what are the primary colors of this item, but what are the accent colors as well, and how does that affect the outfit?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:19) Oh. Does it tell you how attractive you are to the opposite sex?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:06:23) It does not. Not yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) Okay. We're trying to work on a partnership with Tinder now.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:06:28) But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) That's what I'm talking about. That's a serious partnership. It'll read the text of the messages back and forth. And I'm going to—I can tell that you guys are meeting. It'll say inject your product, say look sharp. You'll have everyone running to their closet scanning everything possible.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:06:44) Absolutely. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) So what are you going to do next? What's the next big feature with this? What is the thing that is getting you excited to wake up every day that you're working on?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:06:54) Yeah. I mean, a lot of what we do and really a lot of what we've done for the past year is create this app to help people who—we call it they need styling help. They don't feel comfortable dressing themselves or looking in their closet saying, yes, these two pieces go together. And so we're trying to remove that stress out of the morning for a lot of people. And I feel like we've kind of—not completely solved that problem, but a lot of our features are based around that. And we have a lot of people who are coming to us every morning to get dressed. But we think there's another side of this, and that's the style inspiration. And so a lot of this is currently solved by Pinterest and fashion magazines. But, you know, those aren't your clothes and that isn't your body type and it isn't where you live. And so what we think we can do—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:44) Mind blown.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:07:45) Yeah. So we think we can do a lot more personalized fashion inspiration and just looking deeper in your closet and be like, hey, you wear these a lot, but have you thought about trying to pair this from your work clothes with this in your weekend clothes and try and create new ideas for you to expand your style a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:04) That's really smart. Because my closet, I get these clothes that I'll wear a lot in a certain period of time, and then I'll almost rediscover some favorites. Right?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:08:14) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:16) So it's out of sight, out of mind. Right? You can only focus on so much at once. So that'd be really cool. I'm going to give it a go. Yeah. I have a suggestion. I have a suggestion. Hook up with Uber, right? And then there should be a button where I can actually press a button and someone comes over and dresses me.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:08:36) We've actually—I know when we try and talk to our users and understand why they use the app and why they find value, you find some of the questions you have to ask to really understand their motivations are always fun. And I remember we were asking people, if we would send a personal stylist to you to dress you every morning, how often would you want them to come over? And there's a large number of our users who are like, every day. I would want someone in my house every day to dress me. So it's like, oh, okay. That's why you're using us. I got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:08) That's the most interesting job interview ever.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:09:12) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:14) Oh, man. Alright. Now get dressed. Okay. You can do it. Now dress me. You dress the interviewer. Yeah. No. No. No. We would have to get some sort of mannequin that you would dress. Right?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:09:27) We do have one in the office. Her name is Roberta.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:30) Roberta the mannequin. Yeah. Did you draw eyes on her, or is it plain face?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:09:35) It's plain face. But when you have a dressed mannequin sitting in someone's office chair, it is very convincing. A little terrifying sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:45) You know what? I am actually upping my skills right now. I'm practicing every day to become a dresser. I'm actually dressing a wild, crazy six-month-old baby. Now that's difficult.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:09:59) Yes. I'm starting to feel your pain. We're a month in now, so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:05) You're one month in?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:10:07) We're one month in. Yeah. Little Rowan was born on February 1st, so she is about to hit a new level of terror for us, I imagine. But it's been great so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:19) So where are you at right now? What's exciting? What's happening every day with the baby right now with Rowan?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:10:25) Oh, man. Yeah. Just she's starting to learn to be awake for the first time in her life. You know, I think pretty much the first few weeks have been she's either awake and eating or awake and needing something or just asleep. And I think she's finally getting to a point where she's just having, I'm awake, I'm alert, but I'm not upset time. And it's been really interesting to watch just how she interacts with the world, what she focuses on. You know, I love the idea that they don't know that their hands are their hands yet. It's like, that is—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:58) Oh, it's amazing.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:11:00) It's so funny to me. So, yeah, it's just been really interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:05) When they find their feet. And are you getting the morning smiles yet?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:11:09) Not yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) Okay. That changes your life.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:11:12) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:13) And it's not far away either. Yeah. Like every morning, just ear to ear for the first 20 minutes, and it's the greatest thing in the world.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:11:23) Yeah. Oh, that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:25) Your wife doing well?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:11:27) She's doing great. She's loving it. And so, yeah, we felt like we were prepared and we weren't, but we're doing well. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:37) Yeah. We actually just got—so we're hitting that six-month mark where you realize it's going to be 18 years. Yeah. No. But it's fun, right? So life has this beautiful way of keeping you excited by giving you these new things that are happening. But at the same time, it does become a lot of work when—I work a lot, so my wife was just taking care of her. So recently, just last week, we got a nanny to help out with the baby, and that's been amazing. It's been an excellent week.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:12:09) I can only imagine. Yeah. I know my wife, she's wanting to do a lot of flower farming this year. And so we have a lot of family around, so Rowan will be visiting grandma's a lot during the harvest season.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) Yeah. Lots of family is super useful. So with the app, right, what's the weirdest feature suggestion that you've gotten?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:12:33) I mean, we have a pretty open customer support. People can just reach out to us at any time, and the whole team reviews it. So we get to interact a lot with just very bizarre requests. And just the way people phrase things. You know, a lot of people want us to accessorize their outfits for them as well. Um, but the way some people ask is, you know, how am I supposed to know if I should wear this belt on my head? And you're like, well, I think that answer should answer itself. But, yeah, I mean, we just get the most bizarre things of how—because I think people just are really passionate about—you know, they've come to rely on us for dressing them in the morning, and so if we're not adding that piece of accessorizing, they get very frustrated. It's a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:25) A lot of advice. Which belt goes best with my head?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:13:28) Yeah. I mean, the head belt is really—it's kind of become its own Slack channel in our company culture now. So, um, yeah. I mean, that's obviously what happens a lot is people, for the longest time, couldn't add their own clothes, so you were limited to our database. But we did now add the ability for you to upload an image and tag that image with, you know, all the things we need to style it for you. And sometimes just going through those images of what people are wearing and what they're tagging it as, it's just so fascinating. You know, I used to think I've seen most of what people wear. Like, I've been alive. I've paid attention to clothes people wear, but not even in the slightest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:12) So are you guys going to license your data back to fashion designers about what's popular, what people like, or what trends are?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:14:19) A lot of what we're probably going to do is work with brands. And so, you know, we'd love to work for a brand like Madewell and have them, you know, talk about us in their store about how—because if you think about the fashion industry, 99% of the fashion industry is centralized about one event: the purchase. And even though 99% of someone's lifetime with a piece of clothing and how they wear it occurs after that point, that brand, that fashion team is not involved in that at all. And so we'd love to be the platform for people to be able to tap into that and say, here's how people are wearing the items we're actually putting out, and here's what they're excited about. And so we would definitely want to work with those brands and provide that data back to them. Like, oh, you know, this many people added this item to their closet, and here's how they're wearing it. Here's how often they wear it, and be able to let them use that data in return.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:17) That's really unique. So do you have any brands that you're currently working with now?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:15:22) None that we can announce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) None that you can. How big is your team currently?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:15:27) We have 11 people full-time right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) So are you primarily venture funded?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:15:33) Yeah. So we do, you know, the app is subscription-based. So we do survive without venture funding, but a lot of our growth is venture-backed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) Oh, so people pay for this?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:15:43) Yes. Yeah. So when you download the app, it's $7.99 a month. And so we basically use that as a way to just make sure that people are continually getting value. It's kind of our metric for ourself. But it's a way for us also to just be upfront and honest. Like, we don't need to sell their data. We don't need to sell them clothes. You know, our CEO loves to say we're the only fashion company that doesn't try and sell you clothes. And you'll find no links or retail thing anywhere in the app. It's just all about the clothes that you already have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) I really, actually, I like this idea. I see a lot of stuff. I like this business. Excuse me. It's not an idea. I like the business. I like the concept. I like it, Chris. I like it a lot. And clearly the market likes it too because you can survive without. Now, were you involved with the marketing at all of the product?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:16:34) No. Definitely not when I joined. I'm trying to get more involved with that now because I think the role of CTO—and it was funny when you reached out to me, I started to kind of think about it a lot. A lot of, especially in the startup world, a lot of people assume CTO just means lead developer. But a lot of the reason I joined with Cladwell was because they are a marketing-led organization, and they have a lot of interesting projects like getting into the deep learning around clothing and even image recognition so people can just take a picture and we can style that without them giving us additional data. But what was interesting to me is building a product is a lot more than development. It's a lot more than just writing those lines of code or arguing that you need to build the API or do, you know, change to the new hot language. It was really a good chance for me to kind of get involved with the whole product and move that forward. And so I'm definitely trying to get more involved with the marketing side, trying to, you know, remove any barriers from the marketing side and move forward with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:40) I agree. Right? I don't even know what else to say to that. You just summed it up so perfectly. The startup bus—you were on the startup bus. Yeah. Right? I've seen pictures. I've seen the Instagram. Right? I want to hear about you. I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. Tell me about your startup bus experience.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:17:59) Oh, man. So this was, this would have been in 2012. My experience with startups in general at that point was going to a startup weekend once. You know? It was, I was working in the agency world and just kind of knew some guys who were running the Brandery, an accelerator here in Cincinnati. But it was not much more than that. And I heard about the startup bus and, you know, decided, like, hey, this is basically startup weekend on a bus to South by Southwest. Sounds kind of cool. So jumped on it, got a few friends to join. But once we got on there, kind of split up with a lot of them and met with, you know, Rodney Williams and Josh Glick and a couple others to start a company called Listener. So we started on the bus with this idea that we knew there was this technology out there that could send audio data over audio. But we wanted to leverage that and it was used, you know, by brands to understand when you walked into a store. But we wanted to embed that into music and kind of deliver content. So if you're listening to a song for the tenth time, you would get the unlock. It kind of like that booklet that used to come in CD cases. Doesn't really exist in the digital world. We were trying to recreate that, but kind of as a reward-based mechanism for listening to this music. And so that was the idea on day one of the bus at 6 a.m. in whatever city we started it in. And so all of a sudden, we, you know, we drive around the country for three days. It doesn't take three days to drive from, you know, the middle of Ohio down to Austin. So we would stop at hotels. It's kind of drive kind of a little too far east and kind of go past. Took a stop off in San Antonio. But what we ended up doing as a team was, to be able to work on the bus, they gave you these little AT&T MiFis, but they did not have any reasonable internet speed. And so it was just so unproductive to be on the bus that we would just sleep on the bus. And when we stopped at a hotel at the night, we would just stay up throughout the entire night working. Just completely wrecked our sleep schedules. But when we finally got down to Austin, we were definitely by far the furthest along product-wise. You know, we actually had a working prototype with the data being embedded in music and unlocking things on a mobile app through an API. It was the most incredible, you know, seventy-two hours of development that I've done. And we went out and started pitching it, pitching it to anyone who'd listen at South by, but also they had these little pitch competitions as part of the startup bus. And we, you know, ended up winning our bus and made it to the regionals. So it was the 10 buses. It was those 10, the top 10 teams from those buses would move on. And so we pitched there. We didn't win anything there, but we met a couple local investors down at South by, told them about our idea, and basically had a term sheet before we left Austin. So it's just this incredible experience, and it was like, I knew nothing about startups, knew nothing about any of that when I did it. And, you know, some would say I still know nothing, but, you know, really kind of just was just jumping in both feet. No one on our team had ever done anything like that before, and it kind of led me, you know, just feet in the fire, and we came back and raised money and just started running from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:36) How did you meet the people at Cladwell and get started with them?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:21:42) Yeah. So it was actually during my last startup. So in between Listener and Cladwell, I ran a company called Cosomatic, and we were heavily involved in real estate and all of algorithmic search of the MLS data and additional data sources. But I met Blake, our CEO at Cladwell, because he's just a nerdy guy and just loves to talk about algorithms. I think you can actually probably find the tweet where he just tweets at us and says, like, hey, guys, want to grab a beer and talk about algorithms? And so we went and met up with him and just started talking about what we're doing because they were still doing, you know, fashion, even before the current outfits app and when I joined up. But they were just doing a lot of, how do you understand what you need to buy for your closet, not necessarily how to use what's in your closet at that point. But we talked a lot with him and just kind of what he was up to and the challenges he was having. And then the CMO of Cladwell, Erin Flynn, I've known her and her husband for about four or five years. They were around kind of around that startup bus era. They had a couple of companies in Cincinnati and kind of went through a couple of accelerators up in Detroit and just kind of, they were all kind of part of this, you know, what we call the Startup Cincy ecosystem. And so when we shut down my last company, I was kind of looking around of, you know, who was needing some tech help and who had an interesting product that was kind of ready for the next stage. And then started talking with Blake. And, you know, they're basically, hey, we're at the end of our seed. We're about to raise Series A. And it just seemed like a good fit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:17) Nice, man. So then, are you a co-founder of Cladwell or a partner in any way, or are you just the role of CTO?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:23:29) Yeah, just role of CTO. Came in pretty late. I think I am the fourth CTO at Cladwell. So they had one as an original founder. I, again, I think a lot of it came down to what we were talking about before. His, he thought his role was lead developer and didn't really keep the business as his top priority. His top priority was working on something cooler. He thought his job was to argue with the business side versus try and support it. And so I think that was kind of something that plagued them throughout each of their CTOs. You know, I wasn't there. I can't really say what each of them did or didn't do, but I know that it just wasn't a good fit. It wasn't supporting the business. It felt like they were struggling against technology. And when I started talking with Blake and just started talking about, you know, I'm more interested in the business side and helping you guys succeed as a startup versus building really cool things—while that does help. And I think it was kind of a breath of fresh air for him and the leadership team of, like, oh, this is someone who'll actually be part of the leadership team, not someone who reports to us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:35) Right. And that's critical to the team's success is having the entire company work towards a common goal instead of fighting each other on the details of whatever they're trying to push out.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:24:48) Absolutely. Yeah. And I think you just see that in so many different, not only startups, but in companies of all sizes. But it always gets me when you see a CTO trying to push back against a CEO on a feature. That just tells me there's a deeper cultural problem. Either you disagree with what the business is supposed to be doing, and that's never going to go well, or you just don't understand that your job is to support the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13) Yeah. I think a lot of it is them imagining that the CTO role is just senior developer.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:25:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) And then just completely—and then you get that. Right? And then you get the issues of when they get overwhelmed. Right?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:25:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) And then they get overwhelmed, and then they don't know how to deal with being overwhelmed. And so that takes itself out in frustration, then you get into arguments, and yeah. I've seen it more than a handful of times.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:25:44) Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's never good, and it drags the team down with it. And a lot of it can be just general co-founder issues, but a lot of it's just understanding the role and what you're all there to do. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:58) So you're at home today. Right?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:26:01) I am. Yeah. We, I took a couple weeks off when my daughter was born and took another couple weeks and just kind of work from home to kind of help ease the transition for the wife. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:12) And when are you going to head back into the office?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:26:15) Tomorrow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:17) Oh, yeah. So you're getting, this is a little prep for tomorrow.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:26:21) Yeah. This is how to interact with humans again. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:24) Yeah. This is our class, 101 Human Interaction. It's more interesting when there's latency involved. Right?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:26:33) I would feel that way of the baby too. You know, you're trying to interact with her and there's just, there's nothing coming back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) Oh, yeah. But that's the upward thing. That's what all the awesomeness is, is every day getting better and better. So what's the first—so you've been working just from home for the past week or so?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:26:51) Yeah. Yeah. We have a pretty good remote culture in terms of we do primarily a work-from-home Wednesday every week. So everyone on the team is just, it's really not you don't have to be home, but no one goes to the office on Wednesday. So a lot of coffee shops and things like that. And kind of do a remote stand-up and just kind of, that's kind of people's day to do adult things. If you need to have someone stop by the house or have a doctor's appointment and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:16) Get a haircut. Right?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:27:18) Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Definitely need one after a month at home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:22) How many developers, of the 11, are developers?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:27:26) Including myself, there's three of us right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:29) And are you writing iOS and Android 100% native? Are they two completely separate code bases, or are you using React Native?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:27:37) We're doing iOS completely native. Android remains to be seen. I have a lot of React Native experience, so kind of want to leverage that if we can. But it'll just depend on the hire we have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) Oh, so you haven't gone to Android yet?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:27:54) No. Not yet. That basically is something we've been trying to leverage single platform as a way to kind of move quickly and find that product-market fit. But now that we actually feel like we've got it, now it's, alright, how do we scale? How do we kind of, again, help our marketing by helping them find people without having to worry about platform?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) There's your excuse to handle the processing that you were discussing.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:28:16) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) Let's go to Android, move processing into the cloud, and make that move really quick.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:28:22) Yeah. There's, I don't think there's any way we would have been able to do it without the API. I mean, it would just be, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we did it at that point. And we also open up web at this point too. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:33) Right. So you're building the API. Right? And then you'll be able to build your web interfaces and your React Native interfaces into the users. It'll be essentially a seamless process.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:28:45) That's the goal. Yeah. We have a couple people right now who've noticed the lack of API when they, you know, pull it up on their iPad when they're getting dressed in the morning and it doesn't have the same closet as their iPhone. We're like, we're working on it. I promise. So it'll be good to finally just have that done and have it work the way people expect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:03) Yeah. It'll also be interesting for any other companies that maybe want to embed your features into their fashion apps.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:29:13) Yeah. I wonder, when we talk about brand integration, we've always thought about it like, you know, if you're in the Madewell app, how cool would it be if you're looking at an item in their store and be like, hey, here's what you could wear it with, what's already in your closet. Just a little one button pops open, and all of a sudden there's all of your outfits with that new item that they have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:34) Yeah. That sounds exactly like what they want to use for the fashion app. Yeah.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:29:40) I think that'd be huge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) Alright, man. So I'm really pumped. I'm so happy that we finally got to hang out and send them baby pictures back and forth.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:29:48) I know. Yeah. I love it. I love, luckily, people on our team have, it's pretty family-based. You know? There's a couple of guys on our team who have, you know, three or four kids at home, so it's great to join that crowd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:00) Yeah. And we've actually had a number of people from Ohio like Don Pawlowski, Brian Powell. Do you know any of those guys?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:30:07) Oh, I know Brian Powell very well. He's definitely one of my favorite people in the city.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:12) Oh, you know Brian?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:30:14) Oh, I do. I love him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15) Oh, nice. Yeah. He was a guest on our show. We had a great time. Have you heard about his thing that he's doing, the 10 Gram Flex?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:30:22) No. I haven't heard what's new with him. Last I heard, he had just left CompleteSet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) Yeah. So the short of it is that when you talk about engineering large systems, like architecture, systems like buildings and stuff, there are building codes, right? So that the doorways are a certain height, everything. They're discussing this new company, Tangram, about making the sort of building codes but for programming.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:30:53) Oh, interesting. So kind of trying to raise the bar for everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:56) Yeah. Well, I joked with them. I said, I look forward to seeing how you do it without making everybody upset.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:31:04) Yeah. What's that XKCD about, like, there's 12 competing standards, and then we should create one new standard that encompasses all of them. Soon there's 13 competing standards.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) Yeah. You said you did some real estate data. So when they were talking about that, all I could think about was RETS, which I don't know if you worked with that. But that's like, it's a standard, but 14 versions, so it's not a standard. And it's just unbelievable.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:31:29) And even within the standard, the standard is here's what the fields are named. But what's in that field is like, it's usually just an empty text field for real estate agents to just put garbage in. So it is just so upsetting to try and use in any sort of meaningful way. We basically, at the end of it all, we just did not leverage any MLS data. We just took the address.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:31:53) We didn't even take the lat and long from it because it was normally wrong. So we just took the address and then figured everything else out with third-party services. So a lot of open data from like the census and Great Schools and, you know, local county auditors and things like that. And just the RETS data was just pure garbage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:13) Yeah. It's like I used to do real estate data, and then I interacted with RETS. And now I'm in the fashion world.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:32:22) Yep. That's basically my story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24) RETS motivated me to the fashion world.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:32:27) Yep. It almost ruined development for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:31) Oh yeah. Yeah. Yep. I was there. We're not even going to go down there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) We're not going to bring those nightmares back up. But we are very excited about your little one, and you've got to send me pictures. When she starts doing, you've got to send me an email, man. When she starts doing the thing every morning when you wake up, smiling like crazy.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:32:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:51) You've got to be like, dude, I'm getting the smiles.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:32:54) Yeah. I'll definitely hit you up with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:56) Awesome. And then if anyone wants to, or when people want to find out more about you, how would they do that?

(Chris Ridenour at 00:33:02) Yeah. Cladwell.com, or check us out just on the iOS App Store or hopefully soon Android.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:10) Excellent. I'm going to try the app out. I'm going to tell my wife about it too.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:33:14) Do it. Yeah. We have men's and women's clothes in there, so we'll style you both well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:19) Excellent. And then you've got to come with like an attachment mirror or some like augmented reality thing where I can actually see the clothes on me.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:33:27) Yeah. We thought about actually, when with all the new Echo Look and everything like that, it's just creating an Echo thing because Echo can tell you like what it thinks looks better on you, but it doesn't know what's in your closet. So we wanted to kind of create just like a, "Hey, Echo. Like, what should I wear?" And then once you wear it, Echo tells you how it looks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) Oh. You've got to call up, you know, I know the chief evangelist guy over at Alexa. Yeah? Yeah. You should, his name is Dave Isbitski.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:56) You should message him, and he's very nice, and say, "Hey. This is what we do. We think it would be cool to integrate it." And then he would put you in touch with like some user, some like voice design team member, and then they would work with you as a business to take it to Alexa.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:34:12) Yeah. That'd be awesome. I'll definitely reach out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) They're very nice and open over there.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:34:16) That's good. Chief evangelists should do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:18) Yeah. Yeah. And their team is really cool too. So, man, all exciting. You let me know when you dominate the voice world with the getting dressed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:28) Alexa, put on my shoes. Yeah. Yeah.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:34:31) Send your Roomba over with your shoes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:33) There you go. We have a Christmas tree that we turn on and off with Alexa all the time in our office. So yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris, for hanging out.

(Chris Ridenour at 00:34:44) Absolutely. It's been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:57) I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.