At Centercode we believe in technology's ability to make everyone's life better. In the Delta Huddle Podcast, we bring together industry experts and visionaries to share their insights about building products and bringing them to market.
We're excited to announce the next episode of the Delta Huddle podcast! Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode, and Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode, are joined by Dževad Kudić, Co-founder and COO at Talliez, to discuss the importance of building brand evangelism within your user testing programs.
This episode is all about the greatest resource your testing program can offer you: your testers. Beyond the valuable feedback and insights you get from them during a project, testers offer an immense amount of hidden value and opportunity within a test program. While testers are obviously essential to a successful project, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Great testers stay with your program, form the backbone of your testing community, and even have the potential to become the vaulted “brand evangelists” in the process. With the right amount of nurturing and engagement, brand evangelists become a force multiplier for making sure you launch with confidence.
In this episode:
- How tester stories impact your organization beyond your testing program
- The dynamic nature of real world testing & effective tester recruitment
- How brand evangelists can directly influence product decisions
- Why it's crucial to make your testers feel valued within your program
- How brand evangelists can help diversify your marketing strategy
About Our Guest:
Dževad Kudić is a co-founder and COO at Talliez. Talliez is focused on re-inventing consumer reviews to make them useful, engaging, and fun. Dževad has previously worked with several early stage startups including Nest which he supported through the acquisition to Google/Alphabet. Throughout his career he has delivered insights that built higher satisfaction products through real user field testing, and post launch consumer insights programs, often with Centercode as a key partner.
Follow us and listen to the Delta Huddle Podcast on the go:
- Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3V5x74Q
- Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3Wq0HTT
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3PNYCiJ
- Audible: https://adbl.co/3Pvw90V
Episode Transcript:
00:00:00
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
This is the Delta Huddle podcast.
00:00:06
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Hello, I'm Stefan Stenroos and welcome to this episode of the Delta Huddle Podcast. Today's episode is all about the greatest resource for testing program can offer you: Your testers. Yes, beyond all of the wonderful feedback and insights they provide during a project. Testers have an immense amount of hidden value and opportunity for your entire testing program, or testers are essential for a successful project.
00:00:28
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
That's really just the tip of the iceberg. Great testers stay with your program and they form the backbone of your testing community and they also have the potential to become the vaulted brand evangelist. But the right amount of nurturing and engagement. These brand evangelists become a force multiplier for making sure you launch with confidence. Join me to discuss how to find that hidden value.
00:00:49
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Dzevad Kudic, co-founder and COO of Taillez. And Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode. Dzevad is a veteran in the user testing field, having run programs for early stage startups, including Nest. His current company, Taillez, focuses on reinventing customer reviews to make them useful, engaging and fun. And Chris has years of experience in user testing as some of the world's top brands build, optimize and revitalize their customer and employee testing programs.
00:01:18
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Together, we discussed how to find and nurture quality testers by brand evangelists are so important for great test programs and how having a strong community leads to an even stronger impact on your products. There were a lot of fun anecdotes and stories shared in this episode, and I learned some excellent lessons about how testers can shape the direction of a product and even an entire company.
00:01:39
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
And now my conversation with Dzevad Kudic and Chris Rader. Dzevad and Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. Dzevad, I wanted to start with you. Can you actually tell us more about Taillez and what you guys do over there?
00:01:54
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah. Thanks for and thanks for inviting me. This is really fun for me and exciting to be with you guys here. And with Taillez, actually, this is something that has really been a huge passion of mine. Consumer insights and field testing has been a huge part of my career, and that sort of is what led to this, is that over the many years I've realized that the review process sort of as it is today, is, in my opinion, broken.
00:02:21
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And I think a lot of people would, you know, at first you think that you think, oh, you know, it's just is what it is. It's out there. And I think when you're building a new a new company and creating a new product, it's exactly those kind of things that everybody's just kind of gotten used to and expect it to be that way.
00:02:36
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
That's where I think the biggest innovations can be. And so at Taillez, we really are looking at sort of reinventing and figuring out how can we actually make the review process. But really it's all about feedback. How can we make feedback better, easier for consumers to do, to engage with companies and then for companies, how can that be more useful?
00:02:56
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right, As opposed to being sort of this game that it is today with these reviews and fake reviews and the things that are going on? How can we fix that? And I think that's really what our focus is.
00:03:07
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Excellent. And you said that user testing and kind of this feedback from communities has been a big passion of yours. How does Taillez leverage user testing and how have you leveraged it in the past with some of the companies that you've worked with?
00:03:25
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, so Taillez that's actually one of the first things we thought about actually is when we found that a company, John and I, we immediately thought of Centercode. It was like one of our first thoughts. We were sitting down brainstorming, kind of thinking about, okay, what are our next steps? What do we set up? And obviously, you know, besides the boring, like we need to set up the corporation, we need to, you know, figure out what our team is going to look like and we need to bring another founder in.
00:03:46
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
We immediately thought of Centercode. And the reason really is because in our experience, you know, you can build these products from the ground up. You don't really know how the market is going to react to them. And when you're building a product, it's all about that market reaction. It's all about whether or not people want to post and talk about these things on our platform.
00:04:06
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Well, we needed to be able to get a sense of that with real people and I think that's the part that I love the most about Centercode is that it does feel like real people. It's not, you know, this pushing buttons or QA type testing where it's, you know, very regimented and controlled. There's some of that, obviously, and we utilize that as needed.
00:04:23
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But the bigger thing is I can get real reactions and I can adjust based on those things. So we wanted to do that as early as we could. And so it's already been a great success for us.
00:04:35
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Excellent. Yeah, that's a sentiment that we get from a lot of our customers is that they find Centercode as a tool at one company and then that tool happens to follow them wherever they end up going. So, some customers even go to a company and start a brand new beta program with Centercode as the foundation. So we're really glad that you were thinking of Centercode right from the get go.
00:04:57
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Like, Hey, you know, we're starting this new company. Centercode has to be at the center of it somehow, which is amazing.
00:05:04
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Dzevad I mean, that's like your story, right? You started off with it's funny, you mentioned field testing. Can you tell us your story of like not how you came to Centercode specifically, but how you got into field testing?
00:05:18
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, I should you know, it does sort of still feel like an industry term, which, you know, I sort of settled on field testing because I don't like to use the term beta. I know that you guys have maybe some similar sentiments. I think for me, beta is just to confine and it definitely feels too tech-y.
00:05:36
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
It definitely feels so much more like an internal process than it is a real human thing. Whereas, you know, really when I started out at Nest in the really early days and got involved in the field testing program there, it really wasn't about that. It was about real life at the time thermostat, you know, as the first product.
00:05:53
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
It's about putting it in real people's homes and seeing how it interacts, how it works. And without that type of testing, you know, you could call it beta testing, but it's really not. You know, we were making sure that there was a good representation and diversity in the population. You also had to make sure that there was the right HVAC systems and that, you know, we could actually test things in a real home and watch the temperature change, watch user behavior.
00:06:18
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
You know, train algorithms do those kinds of things. And you can't really do that without a really thoughtful program where we are really building that community. And whenever I've tried to explain feel testing to people, I actually end up comparing it much more to a pilot program, which I think a lot of people are familiar with than I do with beta testing.
00:06:35
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
I think it's, you know, it's really more about putting a real product experience out there. I love to think about it as intent, right? There is this intention that it's going to actually be operating for those testers like the consumer population would. But a bit early, right? Maybe there's some rough edges and there's some things that, you know, aren't going to work that well.
00:06:56
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But I think really that's the difference for me and sort of sort of, you know, the term we started to use more and more at Nest in the early days especially is field testing. And that's kind of what we landed on for a while.
00:07:07
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Yeah. I mean there's a lot of… we've done like old studies like for many years now at this point. But there's a lot of fragmentation in that industry about what they call it and just some interesting stories about that. I remember talking with a company where they want to do a… they were testing a new product and they were looking to build a plan for it.
00:07:27
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And I was recommending an alpha test based on their objectives, right? They really wanted to do real functionality stuff. They wanted to get in there quick and they're like, Can we not call it an alpha test? And I'm like, Sure, why? Why does it matter? And they said, Well, if we were to tell any of our executives were an alpha, they would be a little upset because they feel like we're further along.
00:07:51
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Right. So like when you say things like alpha and beta, they tend to also align to positions and product development. And when you think a field like it's, it kind of gets out of the the, the, the idea of product development, it gets it to know it's where you're going, you're going into the field like when you do field marketing, when you do this field testing, it's like, Oh, you're getting out in the field.
00:08:13
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Other names like friendly user trials, they're trials of it or pilots, they get away from the aspect of the product development. But there's so many companies that just, you know, they have their their preferences of names and that kind of just speaks kind of volumes to that fragmentation and the problem that we encounter at Centercode is how do we have we unite everybody under like we can't come up necessarily with a common term to do this.
00:08:38
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
So we have to be able to, you know, speak to everybody. And we're hoping that our Delta testing is kind of this evolution of what that concept of beta testing more so, right? Like beta testing and field are probably very similar and the way they're run. But we're kind of trying to unite everybody under the term delta testing for a better way to do it.
00:08:58
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, I found that to be true. Right? Once you land on something that is different than what the industry is used to, you kind of have to make up a new name for it, right? Because there's so much, so much stigma and all these things that are around the current terminology. It's funny, I was smiling as you were talking about that, because we had that experience as well when we were acquired by Google, you know, at Nest.
00:09:18
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And that was a huge thing because obviously a very established company, very large company has its processes, you know, and their big thing is sort of dog food. And then you start to go earlier and people were like, actually, well, this is actually fishfood, right? Because it's not. And so because you start to get into these things.
00:09:33
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And for me, it was very interesting. You know, I think sometimes the conversation was more about the terminology and like where we were, what that meant to the company as to where we were, as opposed to like, I try to keep bringing that conversation back to, you know what, like why are we doing this? Just why Like, forget about where we are in the program.
00:09:53
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
What are we trying to get out of this? What is the goal? What are we getting from this? And that's why I kind of kept trying to bring them back to that, to that more encompassing feel testing term. And maybe for you guys, Delta testing. And I have to stay that a little bit and kind of take it in, I've obviously heard you guys say don't a lot.
00:10:10
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
It's something that yeah, I'm just not so used to these terms as well. So it's funny how that really starts to confine us. I think. So I try to bring it back and just remove that and remove the terminology as often as I can.
00:10:22
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
I think the “why” behind testing is incredibly important, right? And maybe sometimes you discover a couple of those whys along the way, right? I think a lot of people look at field testing or user testing or beta testing as, Hey, we need to find the issues in the bugs and the things that are wrong and maybe sometimes neglect like, hey, what are the really cool ideas that our community can give us?
00:10:43
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Or Hey, what are the pieces of praise that people are saying, right, that we can use to really kind of prop up our product? And kind of in that same vein, what are some of the big impactful pieces of feedback, Dzevad, that you found in some of your tests? What are some of the things that really opened your eyes and you said, Wow, this is incredible.
00:11:01
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Like we need to incorporate this into the product?
00:11:05
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two types of it, right? I think the first type is sort of what you're talking about. It's sort of the required type. You know, you just have to do it. Now that was, you know, those were made approving field tests at Nest, for instance. So easy because we knew that you have to put the product in a real home, otherwise algorithms don't work correctly.
00:11:24
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
The system is actually being controlled. The wires have to actually touch and connect for you to know whether or not the hardware is the right quality. You know, we had in our testing program thermostats were installed, you know, in the Deep South where it's super human and also super dry and arid areas. And part of that was to get different systems.
00:11:42
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But also it's like how did it impact the materials, how did it impact how the devices worked? And that was true not just for thermostat, but for like outdoor cameras and anything you can imagine, right? You start to have these environmental things that you can't control. So there's that section of it that was very impactful in that just that it it almost so impactful that it was literally what made it possible.
00:12:01
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right. I do think, you know, to get a high quality product out there that works in all those scenarios, you really care about that. Well, you have to do that to be able to get that quality up. And not every company does that right. Some of them do just sort of curiosity testing in the lab. Looks like it's working and you put it out there and you kind of hope it all works out right.
00:12:21
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
So I think that was more obvious. I think the more interesting one is, those scenarios that I think you alluded to, Stefan, is that there's scenarios where you just don't know what you're going to get. You know, you put it out there and you don't know how the reaction is going to be. I think for me, one of the big ways in the very beginning of a test is actually in recruiting, right?
00:12:40
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
So there's all this market research the company has done to try to figure out, okay, who is our customer, what do they look like? You know, you make these user profiles and you think about why they like your product, why they would like your product, and you do all this research. And then oftentimes when you get to this testing stage and you're recruiting for your first your first test of that product, that's when you really find out, okay, who really is interested in this?
00:13:05
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right? And there's definitely been times where, you know, a company that I'm working with is adamant sort of that, no, we have this customer. We want you to find 250 people that look like this, this person. Right. And, you know, I always push back against that. And sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. But what ends up happening is that you go after that customer and sometimes they're not as interested as you thought they were.
00:13:28
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
It doesn't necessarily meet their needs. It wasn't actually that exciting for them. And that's been some of the more impactful things in the past, is that you get to that recruiting stage and you realize, wait a minute, there's actually this other group of people that like way more engaged, way more interested in what you're doing, have these ideas for how to use the product and what it should be to them.
00:13:46
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And and that's been, you know, usually the first impactful part of any testing program I've done has actually been this really early stage sort of market validation and being able to kind of go back to the marketing team and the executive team and say, hey, wait a minute, we're seeing something strange here. We should be thinking about who we were marketing this to.
00:14:04
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And that happened, you know, at Noon was a smart lighting company. We built the system and really meant for it to be more sort of DIY installation and something and, you know, we had testers that were totally comfortable doing that and were able to, you know, it's the high voltage wiring for your lighting, but they were comfortable doing it.
00:14:22
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But that doesn't mean they were all comfortable, even if they were very tech savvy and they were sort of like what other products would consider very much so early adopters. There was something about that electricity, and that definitely puts some people off. And so, you know, the company actually ended up making a pivot to a B2B-style sales method.
00:14:39
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And then all of a sudden the website, the marketing, who are actual customers that were marketing this to became sort of these installers and these different shops that would be doing these things instead, right? And so it just sort of completely changed how the company was operating. And so it's stuff like that that I think is super impactful and you just don't, you can make all these educated guesses.
00:14:59
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
I think the cool thing for me and why I love working on this stuff is its reality. You know, it's the first time that you actually get out there and you're in front of real life, real people, and sometimes they just love it and they run with it and other times they just go meh. And you kind of have to like, try to figure that out and adjust.
00:15:16
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And I think that those have been the times where it's really impacted things.
00:15:19
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
But it's super.
00:15:20
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Interesting, go ahead.
00:15:22
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And I mean, you I come from market research like one of my backgrounds in and research itself. But what you're explaining is like product market fit. All right. So you do research to establish like these user problems and they get a make up of what they would look like. And then you align your product and your solutions to those problems and you say, okay, there's the product market fit, and you could establish this months maybe even further, like a year in advance of that.
00:15:50
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And it's kind of hard pressed that, you know, your market's not going to change in that time frame, right? So while you're building it, you kind of need to keep up on that research and refresh that data. And there's a point where you actually develop your product and it's ready and you get to actually validate that product market fit.
00:16:09
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And that's huge, right? It's and it's before it's going out because you don't know exactly like everything is kind of an assumption. You're doing interviews and surveys and like, yeah, they have these problems and yeah, they'd be interested in our solution and we're totally going to nail this. And then we do some, you know, prototypes and like, yeah, cool.
00:16:25
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
But once it gets in their home or in their office and they start using it, that's when you get a sense of, oh what, what are they liking, what are they not liking. And does this actually solve that problem? Is there some other solution that's solving it? And it's just interesting. And I think that longevity of testing is important, that you're not just you're not entering product development saying, okay, we're going to do one beta or one field test and that's it.
00:16:52
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
It's like this idea of you're going to be reaching out to customers throughout like during this whole cycle. You don't want to have gaps.
00:17:01
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, I mean, it's a time machine in some ways, right? So, you know, you put things out into the real world and you actually launch it. Well, then you have, you know, the market reaction to it. Well, you know, everybody's like, oh well, and if only we had a glass ball and we could kind of see how they would react.
00:17:15
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Looks like, well, actually, this is a version of that. And it's not perfect. It's not going to get it 100% right every time. But I found it to be way, way more accurate and way more like what actually happened at launch than not. You know, it's so often that I've been able to have a presentation to sort of summarize how the test went at these different stages and definitely at every company right before launch, we would sort of do a final like, okay, this is what we learned, This is what happened.
00:17:40
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Like, this is what we should be prepared for. We've gotten customer support ready. We've done as much as we can do. And now we're waiting. You know, it's been, you know, the top ten end up being the top ten. You know, maybe they'd move around a little bit in priority or, you know, something happens that we didn't expect or something.
00:17:55
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But generally speaking, it's correct. So you get this time machine and you can actually say, okay, what should we do about this? And I think the bigger struggle for me has actually been to convince people internally that, no, no, no, this really is something we should listen to. There's a lot of internal bias that goes on. There's a lot of sort of feeling that we know, you know, something that the consumer doesn't know.
00:18:16
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And oftentimes we do, you know, visionaries and innovators, they do know something that consumers don't know. But I think the problem with that is that it doesn't mean they're ready. And I think that is one thing that the field testing can really do is help you see whether or not your market is actually ready for this innovation. And I've definitely hit scenarios where that's happened right?
00:18:34
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Where we built a great product. It worked really well. It was very user friendly. It was really the right idea. You know, when you talk about it in a room, it's like that makes total sense. Of course. Why would you want to walk around to your different lights and click them all on and off, like, you know, all around your room when you could just go to one place and control them all together?
00:18:53
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
That's so obvious. And I think if you're talking to people, that's obvious. But then human nature doesn't work that way, right? There's you know, people are so used to it and it's a part of their daily habits that they're still clicking. These are switches even though they don't need to. But you gotta bring them along that journey.
00:19:08
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And I think that's something that, you know, you can really capture those things in these field testing programs and then really use that to figure out how to bring them along that journey. Do we need to change something? Do we need to do things? And there were definitely times where we were able to do that and then we decided to actually make it so that you could dim the lights at those individual locations.
00:19:26
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Again, it didn't make sense to us from a user experience point of view, but because people were so used to it, we didn't want to completely upend their defined habits. We wanted to bring them along and eventually get them. And this was what would happen eventually, over time, they would stop doing it. They would stop going to those other switches that are sort of the remote ones, and they would start to use our room directory that we had that kind of controlled everything from one place.
00:19:51
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
So, you know, we were able to find that had we not we, we probably would have launched without that feature and to get a lot of one star reviews saying, Hey, you know what? This is like, why can't I do this? I can't turn off my light. This makes no sense. I've got to get this thing out of my house, right?
00:20:05
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Because you have to, you have to bring them on that journey.
00:20:08
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And you have to have it soak like that, right? Like you have to be able to see that over time. You can't get that kind of insight from a survey. You can't get that kind of insight from a 30 minute call with someone looking at a prototype or a screen like it has to be in their lives, kind of injected there to see what the behavior is going to be.
00:20:31
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And that's.
00:20:32
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Exactly the.
00:20:33
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Value.
00:20:34
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
That the audience gets to kind of be a part of this product development journey. Right? If you're developing in a bubble, right, and you're just relying on, hey, we have this amazing idea and leaving it in a vacuum, like you said, Dzevad, you get to Amazon and suddenly there's a bunch of one star reviews. So I think that's one of the really fun things about field testing or delta testing or whatever you want to call it, is that the audience kind of becomes a central part of the journey from ideation all the way to launch.
00:21:01
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Speaking of the audience, obviously you've had a lot of experience in the testing field and it seems like that experience has kind of shaped how you recruit. What are some of the main things that you look for when recruiting? What identifies as, Hey, this person is going to be a great tester for this product?
00:21:20
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, no, I think I kind of alluded to or kind of spoke to the first point, which is I actually tried to give some sense of diversity to looking at the general, you know, the US market. Let's say if it's the U.S., we did some international stuff, I've done some international things as well. So obviously it's a little bit different.
00:21:37
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But using the U.S. market as an example, when I take a look at that a little bit more broadly, that doesn't mean that I would recruit for, you know, equal to the U.S. Census. Right. Like I'm getting exactly the right mix of all that kind of stuff. We bias it, obviously, because I think you can make educated guesses.
00:21:53
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
You can kind of know if you're if you have sort of a techie product or if you have sort of, you know, a home goods type product, you can definitely make some smart, educated guesses and make sure your community has the right set of people. But you know, one way that, you know, we've been able to do it in the past is to put that marketing message out there into that recruitment and see what you get right.
00:22:13
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And so I think that's always been an interesting thing. And Chris, I'd love your thoughts on this, but, you know, for the marketing team that's been awesome for them is because they can actually put that marketing message out there, an early version, you know, something that's a few sentences, you know, and really tested for the first time and just see sort of like who response to this and why do they respond to it and why are they interested in it.
00:22:32
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And, you know, that's that's why that second step is really sort of having that survey ready, You know, that I've talked to the marketing team, the executive team, we kind of work together to figure out, okay, what is it that we want to know about this population of potential customers, these people that might be interested in our thing?
00:22:50
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
What do we want to know about them? Some of it's obvious demographic things, but a lot of it is also just sort of the simple questions of like, why are you interested in this, in this test? You know, what made you know, what made you click this and apply for this? And I think those have been really interesting ways to kind of help choose those testers.
00:23:07
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
A lot of it for me really has been sort of their level of engagement excitement in actually just applying, right. Because they haven't gotten anything yet. You know, they have an interest, they have something that they want to bring to that. And, you know, one of the standard questions and I think you guys have it in your templates, even as you know, what makes you a good fit for this test.
00:23:26
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right. And I think those have always been very illuminating. You can kind of see and you can hear really how people connected to your product idea. And I think that, you know, that's always been a good way to kind of get started. So again, I try to keep it, put the marketing message out there, see who comes in, and then take a look through that and see sort of what their comments are and why they're interested in joining that.
00:23:47
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
That question is like such a genius move. I'm not sure who at Centercode… I'm imagining it was Luke. You came up with that idea but that is that single question to so many things it can do when you ask an open ended question in the survey because I don't recommend you asking like 15 open ended questions, it's going to kind of just kill your response rate.
00:24:10
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
But when you ask something like why do you think you're a good fit for this test, you get things like you're mentioning like fit, like are you a fit audience for this? You get beta tester fit or fit to be a tester, right? Like why are you interested in feedback? Are you well-spoken? Are you decent at giving feedback?
00:24:29
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Can I understand what you're saying well enough? There's an it just offers like the attention to detail. So they're they're more they're giving me more data in here and someone that says, I just want a free product. You're just like, Yeah, I don't, you don't seem like you're going to be a good tester or necessarily a good fit for this product.
00:24:47
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
It's a wealth of information that now it's important to ask those questions. And when you're screening for an audience as to to throw that single question out there why are you a good fit for this test itself.
00:25:01
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
So absolutely. A lot of stuff to unpack. When I've applied on a couple of tests, that question has always been like the thing I focus on the most because I feel like everything else is pretty standard. Like, Hey, have you used the product before? What's your level of skill, etc. Those questions most people have a pretty solid answer to, but you're going to find those really insightful kinds of insights about a person just by reading that long form right there at the top of the podcast.
00:25:31
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Go ahead.
00:25:31
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Sorry, I have a quick, quick story. That's fun. A test that we were running. It's funny, It was for a barbecue. It's a running test for a new smart barbecue. And I was going through the application and I was running this test. And we have that. You know why you're a good fit. And I got this beautiful response.
00:25:50
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
I hit on so many different levels. It was a firefighter looking to get onto the test and he was explaining the situation of like why he's in the market for, you know, a new a new grill and why he thinks the benefits of something smart related would be useful to him because he's got to, you know, be able to be somewhere else at the same time and be able to control a barbecue if he needs to go on an emergency and he gave me like this, like very elaborate response.
00:26:16
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
I'm like, man, this is wonderful. All that from just a single question like firefighters are known for kind of being grillers for the most part, each other, known for needing to be away from the grill. They can't sit in front of it for, you know, countless hours if they're, you know, actually grilling and they need to be able to control at any point and they're concerned with safety in there.
00:26:40
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
It was just, you know, a home run of a qualification that's like it's interesting, like when you dig into that, the value of that tester was so high, like his the feedback was invaluable to the company when we got the perspective from someone like that. So that question led to a great tester, which led to great feedback, which leads to a better product, which, you know, leads to more sales, more revenue, all that fun stuff.
00:27:08
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
It's like it opened up this Pandora's box of like, Oh my God, we had this incredible tester here and we would’ve had no idea that this person would have provided this much insight if we hadn't asked that question.
00:27:21
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Yeah, if it was just the multiple choice questions that I probably wouldn't unless I'm asked specifically what, you know, what industry they're in, what their job title is. But I would have not made that connection directly, and I don't think the company itself would have profiled that person specifically. Right. And that's, I think, what Dzevad is saying… It's like diversity, like we're not going to hit the full extent of an audience when whenever I've done personas or market segmentation, there's like a breath right.
00:27:45
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Like they give you, you know 20% of the market looks like this, 40% of the market looks like that. And then they give you ranges of things, but it's not exhaustive.
00:27:53
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
A firefighter, firefighter.
00:27:56
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Firefighter, you know, the niche in there because that's a very small market, but it's a segment of a segment of market. And it's that segment that can talk to other segments and convince them. Right. And that's where you kind of need to have some diversity in your tester, race and marketing.
00:28:15
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right? That's a great story. I mean, that's a marketing story right there. Right. And that's something that, you know, I've seen used in my tests as well, where I'll tell them one of these stories from one of those users, just like you're talking about, right? Here's this person. Here's what they look like. They had this really interesting way that they were using the system to, you know, safety or whatever the story is.
00:28:34
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Those are so much more impactful. And there's been a number of times where the marketing team is like, yes, please, like we will we would love to talk to that person. We would love to profile them. We've done that on a number of occasions where, you know, these real users were actually able to come in and sort of, you know, tell their story in a marketing way.
00:28:50
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And that was super valuable to the company. And like you said, not a part of the test plan whatsoever. Right. But really impactful.
00:28:57
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
The storytelling component, like data is data. And then this is like a thing, you know, they talk about that, that qualitative. So I was able to dig into a story. When you walk into an executive meeting, you're explaining the results from your test itself and you get to latch on to a story like that and then back it up with some data that you captured.
00:29:17
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Like that is impact right there that will get decisions made on the data rather than yeah, we ran to a couple of bugs, but when the grill's on fire and smoking and a a firefighter said it like there's there's a concern there right like there's like oh okay there's there's a problem there that's not some you know, Joe Schmo that's trying to grill that did something weird and for a bunch of oil on it or something like that like that's that's someone that that's, you know, smart enough to make good decisions and.
00:29:45
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Something in hindsight, having someone who is hyper aware of objects that could or could not be on fire is probably amazing for a grill test. Yeah. So it definitely speaks to some kind of hidden value there, Right. Kind of one of our big topics today and at the top of the podcast I mentioned, hey, how do we find that hidden value?
00:30:04
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Who are these brand evangelists? You know, who are these people who are really going to speak to the product and whatnot? And the question I want to pose to both of you is how do you define the term brand evangelist? What is a brand evangelist in your eyes?
00:30:17
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
I'm happy to start. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that question. And I think, you know, it's another industry term sort of. I really like to define it as someone that actually truly, you know, lives and breathes your product just like you do. I think, you know, usually it should be that inside your company should be your first set of brand evangelists, right?
00:30:36
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
There are people that truly believe in your mission and believe in what you're doing and why you're doing it and believe that that product is the right fit for it. I think for me, testers that are brand evangelists sort of fit that mold as well, right? You know, they really care about it when they give feedback and maybe critical feedback.
00:30:54
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
You know, there may be criticism in there, but it's constructive. It's because they actually care. They really want to see that product impact their lives, the lives of their family and friends. And so they really you know, they really start to be that evangelist for you. Right. And, you know, I saw I've seen this so many times with all the different product tests where where that, you know, that user wants another one and buys the second one, you know, gets one for their mom, gets one for, you know, So if they start that, you start to hear these stories.
00:31:21
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And I think, you know, when you go to define something like this, I think it's, you know, really seeing that type of, you know, organic, just love for the product and where they're really, you know, putting it out there and recommending it. And I think that, you know, that really is, you know, because they believe in the mission and they believe in the brand.
00:31:40
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And I think that it's that belief, I think I guess I would define it.
00:31:45
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
As a lot of passion. Right. Like I was walking through an outdoor mall. I think it's just like a couple of days ago. And on one of the storefronts, there's a couple of like posters and it says up there, brand ambassadors. And it's got like these like influencers, like Chris Pratt was on one of them. They have a few of these people that are advertising brand ambassadors now.
00:32:07
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
They're being paid, right? Like those people are being directly paid to do this, but they're, you know, leveraging their influence. When I think of a brand evangelist or someone that is, you know, kind of being the voice for your product, it's someone that's doing that, but not in a selfish manner, right? Like they're advocating for the product, like you said, they believe in the mission, right?
00:32:29
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Like I worked at a company called Western Digital and I said this for years, like I, I bled blue. I totally drank the Kool-Aid. And WD was blue. The colors were blue for context. But I love hard drives. I love I love I love them. And I thought it was much better quality than the competitor's. And since moving on, I still buy Western Digital products.
00:32:52
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
I still invest in them. I still recommend them to people. I'll leave great reviews and what's interesting is when you think of somebody that is, you know, a beta tester who's investing their time in development to give you feedback to help you better the product for other people, like they're not getting necessarily a monetary reward for it like it could be.
00:33:12
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
You know, you get a new product or you get, you know, maybe you get a gift card. So it may be slightly monetary. But imagine, you know, four weeks of time and you get a $50 gift card like the time is well worth the money spent. But that person's going to take that investment into the product to help you in product development, tune it, make it great.
00:33:32
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And then after launch, they still have that investment. They still invested their time into the product. So they're going to be more willing to go talk to people about the product after the fact. Like, Oh yeah, you know, it was, I enjoyed testing it. It was great. It does it has these benefits. They can even help with aspects of support on it.
00:33:52
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
So if like, oh yeah, I saw that issue, here's how we can kind of work around it and you think of like this single person that doesn't work at the company invested in the product, helping people after the fact. Now that's obviously pending. You have a great project experience with them. If you have an awful project experience with them, those beta testers aren't going to turn into brand evangelists, so they'll probably be a little more negative towards you or the brand itself.
00:34:18
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
But that's the passion of beta testers. Good beta testers are passionate, good beta testers that have a good, passionate team running the test and they're interested and engaged. Like that's the recipe for creating a big brand evangelist following in your product.
00:34:40
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, like what you just hit on there, Chris, right, because it is that second part that makes it important. And oftentimes, you know, the conversation starts the other way, right? Which is like, how can you get them to do this or that, or can you get them to give us reviews or like, well, wait a minute. Like we're like, what are we giving them?
00:34:55
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
What is the value that we're providing them? And I think that a huge part of it is, you do have to care. You have to really live by listening to them. Number one, I think for me, is actually listening to them, making sure that they're heard and that they can see that the things that they're saying actually leads to actions.
00:35:13
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right. It turns into a feature that they mentioned, a bug that they called out and sometimes they were more minor. There was definitely times where I pushed really hard internally to get something that was really bothering maybe just one or two testers because they were so good. They were those brand evangelists type users. I just wanted to get it fixed for them because I wanted to show them that we cared, that I cared, and that the company would do something about that.
00:35:38
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And we did it on a number of occasions. And like you said, that does create brand evangelists. And I know for sure the value we received from them. You know, it was 10x, 100x, you know, for some of them. And you know, there's the obvious examples like to point out, you know, again, testers that would actually buy a second thermostat or a thermostat for their home.
00:35:57
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
We gave them one. But that doesn't you know, it doesn't mean that they needed to do that and they weren't trying to get free stuff. Like you said, they were really just they loved and fell in love with the product and they would you know, I the other thing I think is funny is, you know, testers that sort of are like, you know, here's this person I really know they'll be good tester and add them to the program but we'll also you know in conversations will tell me that, like no they would never add that person right because like they read this these things where they do care and they want to know that there's
00:36:23
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
value being given. And so we would see that all the time when people would want to buy additional devices. And I know for sure, you know, anecdotally, obviously the data is harder to get, but I know that they were talking to their neighbors about it, showing it off when people came home. And that's you mentioned after the test is over, that's actually a reason why at Nest, for instance, and every other company I've we've always pushed to have those products be something where they get a production version at the end because it instead of having the mentality of the company being we're doing eight weeks of testing, two months, three months of testing,
00:36:55
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
We did really long tests actually for most of them. And then at the end of it's like, bring it back. We never wanted the tester to get the sense that this wasn't theirs. We wanted them to feel that ownership so that they would start to really care about it and make decisions and feedback based on the fact that they're owners, that they really know it's theirs.
00:37:12
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right? And so, you know, we you know, we would always do that, make sure that they kept the product at the end of it and that that becomes, you know, walking, you know, brand evangelists for you. That continues even if they leave the program. So I think that's a huge point that you make, which is that your plan can’t be to end, you know, and just say we're done now.
00:37:30
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
We did it. We checked that box. It has to be that you're creating a community of people. And when you create a community, I think that's where you can then sort of pick out those people in the community that are the leaders. I think those leaders are the brand evangelists, right? They're the people that are kind of really contributing in those, you know, A-plus ways.
00:37:46
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Right. Little bit more than others.
00:37:48
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Yeah. It's funny. I have another, you know, little story to tell. I'm chock full of stories. But at a previous company, there was two testers. I still know these testers' names to this day, I know these two testers. It's funny, they're both named Tony. I won't say their last names, but their first names were Tony. We'd walk into a bug review, so we do weekly bug reviews to go over what bugs were found by testers and what bugs were found in things like humor and all that fun stuff.
00:38:21
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And we make decisions on which things we were going to kind of address for the next release. So there's, there's bugs that we'd bring up and sometimes the engineers would, would ask what testers submitted it, and then if they heard one of the Tonys being named, they would just say, okay, we'll just we'll address that. These people put so much attention to detail, so much time into the feedback that they were there putting in.
00:38:47
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
The developers had relationships with them like they would love to go into our program and just communicate with them, say, Hey, can you get this information or can you help us out with this? You test this out and those people, those Tony's would go help other testers in situations. They would triage the feedback for me when I was doing, you know, the beta test stuff, they would help say, hey, hey, other tester, you know, we're going to you need this information or have you tried this or can you do this?
00:39:17
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And it's just like, man, they're providing support in the project. They're doing this. They would send us pictures of all the products that they had that were all from the company. Like, it was amazing. They like you said, you know, they wanted to buy more products They're so invested in. And it's such a beautiful thing to have those passionate, curious people in for a test.
00:39:37
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
And like I said all the time, like, you know them by name it's, you know, the cheers reference like, you know, I knew these testers.
00:39:44
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
I can yeah I mean look, I would get on the phone right I would get the phone people and I'm driving the traffic and the barrier of going home and would call, you know, somebody's given a piece of feedback. And some of us just have conversations. And again, it goes back to being heard. I think those Tony’s that you mentioned, they knew they were being heard.
00:40:02
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
They could see that they could watch a change. And that's what created brand evangelists. And like you said, not only do they make the purchases, but they are certainly telling their friends and family they're really recommending the products. And I think that you can't really put a price on that. That's what every company is trying to get those people and they're trying to find ways to find them and get them, you know, to really be doing this.
00:40:23
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And you mentioned influencers right earlier. Now that's the thing, you know, trust in influencers is going way down. You know, people really don't believe influencers at the end of the day. They know they're being paid for it. They can smell it, you know, in the market research that we've been doing for Tally is actually that's something we commonly hear from people is that like it's just you can tell, you can tell when you look at a review or a piece of feedback or a video online, even if the person doesn't say, you know, that that they kind of are that way.
00:40:52
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Well, I think that thing and it's not criticism and I'm trying to find a better word for it. But, you know, those Tonys providing that feedback. They were willing and wanted to say, hey, this isn't going well. And I think that's another key thing to a brand evangelist, because they care and are also willing to tell you and you know, when you have the burger sticking out of your nose like they want to they want to tell you like, hey, something's not right here.
00:41:14
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And, you know, you want to listen to them. So I think that's the other thing that's missing from that is that you can have these influencers, you can have people that are promoting your product, but I think the brand evangelists are actually willing to say, Hey, if something's wrong, please fix this. Right. And so I think that's key.
00:41:30
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
It's interesting. I think maybe the lesson here is that instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to an influencer, just go find those Tonys and nurture a community around them. Because the marketing potential there is immense.
00:41:43
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
But I think there's definitely value in it. It's like a collection of things, right? Like you might need influencer marketing, you might need these brand evangelists or word of mouth. A lot of it can depend on the product or the market that you're going into because you could want to look at multiple data points, like you could look at Amazon reviews and Best Buy reviews.
00:42:04
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
I'm like, This is old at this point, but I'd walk into a Best Buy and I go, Look at these products. I got to, you know, see products, fun walking into a store and seeing products and I'd pull up my phone and I'd scroll through the Amazon reviews of whatever I'm looking at, right? I go look at the positive views.
00:42:21
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
I go look at the negative reviews, but I'm using that review. And then I might, you know, open up a browser and do like, you know, a rated review from something like See that? Right? And I get that's that's more of like the technically like some of these people get paid are incentivized to do reviews but you review them you kind of you take a little bit of each of them and you get this kind of you get a position right of like, okay, here's this is what I believe.
00:42:45
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
This is what I don't believe. Here's what's biased and unbiased, rather than just going one source, that's that's it. If you only relied on influencer marketing, it might be a little a little rough. But I think most consumers are evaluating purchases with some intent behind it to, you know, validate that they can trust the information that they're getting.
00:43:07
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Absolutely right. I think I see those influencers as more of a discoverability thing, right? You're trying to get in front of an audience and introduce them to this new thing. So this is sort of very happy and fluffy and it's sort of, you know, it's more marketing than I think it is a true review or a, you know, a sort of referral, right?
00:43:24
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
It's really more of a marketing opportunity to introduce you to this thing. Well, then the user has to go and determine it as opposed to brand evangelists. You know, if it's someone that you trust and know and they come and they tell you like, you know, you're talking about thermostats and I know you got to get the next one because I've had it, I've had it for two years.
00:43:39
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Like, here's my experience with it. Here's what's going on: that's gold because that person really isn't going to do as much of that research as you're talking about because they have that source. And then I think everything else is sort of in between that, right, like the online reviews and that the CNET and the articles and the things are just different sort of gradients of that same problem if you want to get people to understand it.
00:43:59
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But you know, again, I think the hard part with those things, like you mentioned it, Chris, is trying to understand what's actually real and what you can trust and kind of sniff test it and go, I believe whatever at the end of it. So you've taken all this stuff and then you just kind of have to make a gut feeling on it.
00:44:16
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
So I think that's it's so it's so challenging. I have a hard time not talking about this because that's where my passion is. But then yeah, it's a real problem. You know, I have a funny story as well. I'll tell you real quick is, you know, I see that all the time.
00:44:32
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
You know, my son had this game. He was playing on the iPad. And I looked at the reviews because I was going to download it for him. And, you know, the review was so clearly fake. It was like Marco Da Vinci was the writer of the review. And it was clearly bot written. It was talking about how immaculate and perfect the product was.
00:44:49
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And it said it was really funny, it said all humans and animals should use this app. And I was just like, Who? Who is this review helping? How do you, you know, how do you get any value out of this? So, you know, I think that's that's where really, you know, yeah, I think finding these other ways to do that and to really get that value, all those things, because everybody really just wants to know which which product is right for me, what's going to work for me, what am I going to like?
00:45:14
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
What am I not going to regret buying, you know, and have frustrations and all that stuff afterwards. And so people are just trying to figure out how to do that. And I think, you know, that's, you know, going back to the brand evangelists, not to get too far off topic, but that's what really you can kind of learn about that and try to understand why.
00:45:30
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Why do they love it so much? I think it has great marketing potential too, and it can help other customers as well.
00:45:35
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
So absolutely. Yeah, we're coming up on time here. One question I wanted to ask the both of you. We like to use the term tech optimism here at Centercode, mainly to refer to our belief that technology can make everyone's life better at the end of the day. So what are some of the pieces of technology that you're really excited and optimistic about right now?
00:45:59
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
And I'll start with you, Dzevad.
00:46:01
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Yeah, Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, I'm one of the biggest optimists that you can kind of know and I kind of always just look at life that way. And I think we always as humans have the ability to do these wonderful things. And having worked in technology and seeing that sort of upend different things, you know, it's interesting I'm not in that whatsoever.
00:46:21
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
But you might be surprised to hear me say climate tech. Actually. I think, you know, I think as the problem gets more serious and as we kind of work on it, I think, know, sometimes you have these huge problems that need to be solved and you have all of a sudden all this energy to solve it.
00:46:38
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
And I think when that happens, similar to other events that have happened in our history, you know, civilizations and whatnot, it's often those things that can lead to these like technological booms. Right. And it's not always directly related to that thing. But I think, you know, you create all this you know, you create all this technology. How does it then help other people?
00:46:56
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
How does it impact, you know, clean energy and water and everything else around the planet? And I think there's a lot of things that can actually come from that that I'm very optimistic will actually improve lives for people. And I think that's one thing. Technology, I think, can still do a better job if it's made our lives more convenient.
00:47:11
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
It's made our lives easier in a lot of ways, more fun, certainly in a lot of ways. But I think that's one sort of, you know, sort of taking care of those basic needs for a lot of people on the planet, I think is actually I'm very optimistic about it.
00:47:25
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
Yeah, I would love for my answer to be that moral and ethical because it sounds really nice. I've been talking to Stefan about this and I'm raving about it all over Centercode right now. It's AI. I just I don't know how to handle this. My mind is turned to mush, having a hard time sleeping.
00:47:50
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
But yeah, well, yeah that specifically we've we've done a lot of the, like Dolly and just the A.I. generation image generation and stuff and it's just, it's mind blowing like it is to a point where it's scary and cool and amazing and beautiful and so intelligent, like writing songs that have my kids names in it, Right? Like, that's super neat.
00:48:18
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
I can create it. I created a kids story last night at, like 2 a.m. about my son and his monster trucks. And I was just like, This is the coolest thing ever. I could probably talk on this for hours and I have already for four days now. But I will I'll end with A.I. It is kind of where I'm seeing optimism.
00:48:45
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing at Centercode
I want to be optimistic about it, I think.
00:48:47
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Yeah. So all we need to do is just take the A.I. and the climate tech and just combine them together so we can ask, Hey, how do we solve the climate problem? And it just gives us a nice answer right there.
00:48:58
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
I think that's the thing, right? It can think outside the box now, or at least I can think in a different way than we can and how it sort of just supplements all these things. No, I think that what you're speaking about is really something one of those underlying technologies that changes all the industries. Right. So I think actually quite, quite important.
00:49:17
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Well, there we go. So Dzevad, Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. A lot of excellent insights, a lot of really fun stories to share with the audience. Once again, thank you so much and really appreciate it. Appreciated having you on.
00:49:34
Dzevad Kudic, Co-Founder and COO of Taillez
Awesome, thanks.
00:49:37
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
Thank you for listening to the Delta Huddle Podcast. If you enjoyed today's podcast, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Audible and if you want to learn more about how Delta Testing can maximize the impact of your user tests, head to centercode.com. You'll find a host of resources from eBooks to webinars to help you get started.
00:49:58
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer at Centercode
This has been the Delta Huddle podcast by Centercode. We'll see you in the next episode. Happy testing.
