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Lee:
Welcome to the Event Engine podcast. I am your host, Lee, and today we have on the show, the one, the only, it’s Adam Jones from FFAIR. How are you, sir?
Adam Jones:
I’m very well, thank you. How are you doing?
Lee:
I am brilliant. We’ve had a wonderful good laugh just before we start recording this show. So first of all, thank you, mate. It’s been a very long day, so I really could have used a good giggle. And hopefully we can carry that on as we learn about you and your company. So before we jump in, mate, could you just give us a very a quick potted history of who Adam Jones is and how he got into this FFAIR industry?
Adam Jones:
So 23 years I’ve been serving my event sentence. I got into events. Me too. No, me too. There’s many of us. I came out of university. I wanted to get a job in sportswear design, and that was taking longer than I thought. So I just thought, okay, I’m just going to take any odd CAD job. It was a bit of a stepping stone, and that got me into events. I started off as a floor plan designer. Worked for that company for a little while. We had the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, and that business went a lot. So I decided to have a choice. Either I search for a job or make my own, and I decided to make my own job, doing pretty much what I was doing at the previous company, but with the goal of actually building some software. So I could make myself redundant with my own software. Did that over the course of five or six years, built up to quite a nice little business, and then sold it to Freeman, worked for Freeman for how many years, five or six years, something around that time. And then decided after that period, obviously, lockdown and everything else, everything happened.
Adam Jones:
I got that itch to build another software product and business again. And that’s what I did. So that’s where I am now.
Lee:
It’s quite addictive, isn’t it, really?
Adam Jones:
It is.
Lee:
Creating something that doesn’t exist and having people use it and add value into their lives and stuff like that.
Adam Jones:
It’s scarier the second time around. Even though I know more, I think sometimes ignorance is bliss to some extent. And also, I haven’t Much more, many more liabilities, let’s put it that way.
Lee:
Well, there’s a whole other show, isn’t there? The mistakes we made developing software.
Adam Jones:
Absolutely.
Lee:
That would be amazing. Well, let’s move on to the product itself. We which is called FFAIR with 2Fs. And we’d really love to know, what does the platform do and who is it built for?
Adam Jones:
So starting with the problem. The problem I found and exhibiting. So one of my things, the dream was to try and promote the product we had to as many people as we could. And I wanted to practise what we preach and go to exhibitions because they’re a great way of selling and getting in front of people. So I signed up to around seven different exhibitions in the year. And because it was my product, I felt obliged to do the free show compliance. And oh, boy, I really wish I hadn’t. But it gave me an insight into what we’re putting our exhibitors through to exhibit shows. Quite frankly, two of the shows were so bad, I cancelled them because it was just so painful. It got me thinking, well, if I’m willing to cancel the show and I’m an advocate of exhibitions and I want to support the industry, other brands aren’t going to be as loyal. There’s so many other marketing channels you can go down that are going to give good returns, but without the level of effort. So really that problem was the catalyst for me to start thinking, Surely we can do this better.
Adam Jones:
And that was the spark that led to me thinking about, to start with, another business. And the way things came around with lockdown, it created an opportunity. And I think a lot of businesses are created at times of difficulties. So, yeah, it was the idea. And I’m being an entrepreneur, I’ve got 50 different ideas bouncing around my noggin at any one time.
Lee:
So on a daily basis, yeah.
Adam Jones:
That’s it. But that was the one that stuck and that was the one that didn’t involve too much new learning or the Dunning-Kroger effect where you think something It was easy, and then you find out it’s all catastrophically difficult. But it was a known entity. What I really wanted to do, and we’ve got very, very simple mission statement that’s to make exhibiting easier. Something so simple is what I was hoping to achieve by FFAIR. The other thing I was exposed to being at the operations level with floor plans was how much pressure Ops people are under. They are We talk about events and exhibitions being one of the most stressful jobs. It’s always up there in the top three of most stressful jobs. Operations is another level. That was very visible to me that Ops teams were working till nine o’clock in the evening and they’re starting again at six o’clock, and this never-ending cycle of chasing exhibitors for information, validating it. Just in my mind, we can automate this. So A big part of there is around all of those day-to-day things that take so much time. If we automate it, that’s going to give operations teams more time, more head space to be proactive rather than reactive.
Lee:
That’s phenomenal. My own experience then as well is I do support a few companies locally here actually who go and exhibit at some rather large events around the world. There was one just a few months ago in Düsseldorff. Amazing event. There are, I think, something ridiculous, like 6,000 exhibitors in my head. That’s just mind-blowing. You would actually have thought that that meant the process of being able to book the stand and get assets arranged for the stand and rent things and fill in all of the relevant compliance forms and upload all of our documentation and upload all of our insurances and all of the other stuff that we were expected to provide and do and sort and arrange, etc, would have all been easier to understand and all within the system. And yet it wasn’t. It was a really, really hard to understand system. Everything was just jointed. It felt like you were going to different websites from different suppliers. We were constantly having to email questions into the poor operations team saying, Hey, we tried to upload this, but it ain’t working. Can you help here? Here’s the files, or here’s a wee transfer link, or whatever.
Lee:
It’s just this complete nightmare. Then the other thing as well that was really frustrating to us was that if We booked on a few of the supplier products for the stand itself, TV, et cetera, all the different elements we might want to have there because that was really useful. It’s like, great, they’ve got these suppliers, we can add all these products, and it all gets sorted out, we can pay online. But then it turned out that we could pay online for all those elements, but the fitting and stuff wasn’t included, and that was all well had to be done separately, e-mailed for quotes where you told them what you’d ordered in your basket. Well, actually, you had to pay It was just a complete nightmare. And like you, we wanted to… As exhibitors, we didn’t really feel looked after. We wanted to almost walk away from it, but we couldn’t. We were in a position where this is a massive event. We need to be there. It just created a whole lot of stress and headaches for us. Equally, I imagine the operations team are in a whole world of hell every year as the event comes around with that many exhibitors, et cetera.
Lee:
That’s just my experience. Folks, if you’re listening in, if you’re watching on YouTube, let us know what are your nightmares? Let us know in the comments. If you’re listening in, email us. We’d love to know and maybe even get you on the show. It’d be phenomenal. Also, don’t forget, later on in this episode, we’re actually getting a demo aFFAIR. So stay tuned. If you’re listening in your ears, then there will be a link in the show notes for you to watch the demo. So that’ll be pretty cool. So mate, can you tell us, out of all that that I just shared with you, because really that was just therapy for me. Thanks.
Adam Jones:
That’s okay. I’m a good listener.
Lee:
It was really nice. You didn’t even interrupt. It was really nice. Can you tell me how FFAIR would have made my life different as an exhibitor, unequally for the poor operations team at that event. No names being mentioned.
Adam Jones:
So the thing that you mentioned which was one of the biggest pain points for me was the purchasing experience. Being in the UK, it’s a very fragmented market. So the organisers probably choosing seven or eight different suppliers from AV to carpet, to furniture, whatever it may My experience was having to go to all different suppliers and order in seven very different ways and getting a completely different experience from one to the other. One was so bad, I had to fax the order. I had to go to a link, I downloaded a PDF, I then scribbled all over it, and then phoned them up because that was the only contact information. You have no email address, just a phone number. I rang it and it was the whole screaching noise that you get from a fax machine. I said, Oh, crap, this is a fax machine. So I found some dodgy software, scanned it in. But that, to me, was like, Christ, this is 2018, ’19, surely we can do better than this. The shop element is really important. What we did was build a marketplace. Essentially, you can bring all of your recommended suppliers into the system.
Adam Jones:
But from the exhibitor perspective, be it a screen or a carpet or a furniture, you’re checking out once. You might be ordering from seven different suppliers. Does that include fitting? It includes fitting, it includes testing charges, whatever it may be. But what took me about four days, in my experience, to coordinate all this stuff. You can get everything in your basket, pay for it, and you’re done in four minutes. That’s a much better experience. Also, from a supplier perspective, it’s much better because the easier you make something, the more likely they are to order from you. I remember from my side, again, it was so hard to order furniture from one of these suppliers. I ended up just buying a sofa from IKEA and renting a van and loading into the van because that was an easier process for me. Turned out not to be because I got a parking fine and I had nowhere to store this sofa. So it was a short sight of view.
Lee:
And it’s not sustainable if you had to throw the sofa out.
Adam Jones:
Hopefully, you kept it. Well, yeah, no, it’s a good place, but marketplace sale. But by the by. It led me to making a bad decision. If it was easier, if it was more convenient, I’d have checked out and not thought about it anymore. But we were putting that decision on the and exhibitors were making a bad choice. The whole marketplace concept of being able to order from multiple suppliers, that wasn’t a new idea. There were other people on the market doing it, but it was a general marketplace. Their suppliers weren’t vetted, they weren’t chosen by the organiser. To me, the gap in the market and the unique selling point there was the organiser chooses their preferred suppliers. They then have control control and visibility and can run off snagging lists. If an exhibitor comes into the organiser’s office, say, Oh, I’ve only got a 500-watt socket, they have a system where they can check it rather than completely being blindsided by the information that they can’t see. So giving the organiser control was a really key element to us. The next step for me was, because that was really the first product idea that I had for FFAIR was the shop element.
Adam Jones:
But then I kept waking up in cold sweats thinking, Christ, how are we going to market this to the exhibitors? How are we going to get people in there? That’s where the idea of the exhibitor manual was born, really. It was a bad experience that I remembered and vividly remembered, as do you. That was really the solution to get over the marketing element. If we’re bringing exhibitors into something where they have to actually enter and complete risk assessments, method statements, upload stand designs, you’re bringing 100% footfall of exhibitors to the shop. Therefore, you don’t need to market it. All of a sudden, this massive number of Google ads, I was thinking, suddenly goes away. Yeah, that was really the solution was combining the shop with everything pre-shown, the compliance, and also moving away from forms. Forms, to me, it’s a legacy. When I started- Have you moved to fax machines? Have I moved from fax machines?
Lee:
No, you said moved from forms. I don’t know what’s next. Have you moved to fax machines or something then?
Adam Jones:
Yeah. You’ll see how I just got fax machines all around the office. I was just out of view. Forms, it’s a strange one because when I started in the industry, the company that I worked for, you’ll never see as many filing cabinets as this company had because they kept a paper trail of everything. Everything that was submitted was posted and they had to keep it in some filing system. They would hire a van and take it up on site. That was the Exhibitor manual. It was printed and posted. Immediately after printing and posting, the organiser would phone up and go, We just want to make one change to it. I was, Well, that’s gone now. That would be four weeks before the show and you can’t do anything about it. That evolved. Some tech companies came along and went, Okay, well, let’s replicate that paper-based process online. That’s a great idea. So many other people then copied that. They were trying to replicate a paper process online. Then when it was my turn to think about problems, why are we shackled by this paper process? Because we’re using technology, we can do it in a different way.
Adam Jones:
It doesn’t need to be a form that someone downloads, fills out, and uploads. It’s just a greater task. Gather the information in the task, then that becomes reportable. You can report at a granular level, not just what the file name is because you’re blind to the information in the file. Also tasks allow you so much more functionality. You can put approval processes on it. You can put automated reminders in there. You can run custom reports and feed out the bits of data that you want. You can set it up as a JSON feed, so it feeds up a third-party website without anyone ever needing to get in control.
Lee:
It’s a little close to an engine there, which is 100% compatible with FFAIR. Sorry, mate. Keep going.
Adam Jones:
100% compatible. This is also a major problem that we’re trying to tackle is a lot of organisers don’t want to go to a one-stop shop because there’s always an element of a one-stop shop that isn’t quite as good as the It’s the poor sibling that doesn’t make much money, therefore it doesn’t get much love, and it falls behind from a development standpoint. The features aren’t quite as good as everything else. So I think in a lot of cases, organisers would much prefer to use best-in-class pieces, but only if they talk to each other. And this is where we’ve integrated with Event Engine to make sure that any information is put into FFAIR, then and propagates through and fills out the information. It’s another job for the organiser that’s being consolidated. You don’t have to enter that information into places. The exhibitor gets access earlier, so that integration is so important. But it’s also so blinking hard because all of these different systems have different needs and requirements. What you need for registration isn’t what you need for an exhibitor manual. So we’re collecting different information. They’ve got some stuff that we don’t have. They don’t have the information that we have, and some things are really critical to them and not to us.
Adam Jones:
So compatibility is really difficult. It gets my go a little bit when I hear organisers go, Why can’t they just integrate? It seems so easy. Okay, cool. That’s good. It’s really. The desire is definitely there, and I know it is from event engine.
Lee:
A very good example is the fact that as the event organiser in FFAIR, they can set up a whole lot of custom fields. Obviously, that means that each event is going to be unique. So you can’t just switch on an integration when the data is going to be different and unique for every different event anyway. So yeah, a lot of people will say, Just integrate. Surely there’s an API. Surely there’s an… Can’t use Zepia and blah, blah, blah, blah. But that is unfortunately oversimplifying it. And people do forget. Everyone has different requirements. And I do like what you said about the one-stop shop. I don’t really think that exists. It’s always going to something that isn’t quite right within that package, but you’re stuck with it because it talks to everything else. I don’t know, maybe it’s the registration bit and everything else is all singing and dancing, but in registration, you can’t do group bookings and it drives you crazy. Do you keep that entire all in one system and have that one thing that drives you crazy? I don’t know. It’s probably a whole other show. Now, in a minute, we’re going to get to have a look at FFAIR, which is pretty cool.
Lee:
But before we do, or maybe you can do this during the demo, but I’d be really interested if event organisers or exhibitors have surprised you at any point and come up with use cases that perhaps you hadn’t foreseen back in 2018, 2019, when you were starting to plan all of this out. So do you want to do that during the demo or do you want to answer that one now?
Adam Jones:
I’ll probably answer that now because it’d be a tricky one to demo. But probably the biggest one was one of our clients in Brighton, so Brightness I’m sure they won’t mind me saying this, were using FFAIR to manage their exhibitors. And all of a sudden we stuck in these massive files being uploaded. God, what could the exhibitors be uploading that big? Actually, what they’d done was realise that FFAIR was so flexible and they could create different build and persona types. They were using it for speaker asset collection. People are uploading their presentations and their videos and Obviously, people don’t optimise their videos. So it’s time to get one terabyte file being uploaded to. God, crack it. This is great, but also terrible.
Lee:
It’s my computer under the desk, guys. I’m only limited to so many.
Adam Jones:
It’s not going to fit on the three and a half, unfortunately. Yeah, that was great. We would never try and say that we are a speaker management platform. There’s way better systems that doing that whole package. Lineup is a great example. But there are certain elements or speaker asset collection that there is really good at. It’s really good at collecting and providing masks en masse and reminding people to do it. So the flexibility is really what’s allowed people to do it. Yeah, that was probably the biggest surprise.
Lee:
That’s good. I love it when customer surprises and something in ways that we perhaps hadn’t considered. For Event Engine, for example, we’ve had clients using the platform as an awards platform as well for online events when we were always focused on it just being a conference website platform. So it’s a involved over time. Now, let’s take a look. Do you want to hit Share Screen? Let’s take a look at FFAIR. I’m particularly excited, folks, for you to see the task section. Now, we’ve used FFAIR in a few events. I’ve actually exhibited at Brighton SEO, so I’ve actually touched your system there, but equally through EventTech Live as well, which is another phenomenal event. What we really appreciated was the whole task list infrastructure because that allowed us to understand what we needed to do. It essentially held our hand through all the stages of exhibiting at, say, EventTech Live, making sure we’d done all our documentation, making sure we’d planned our actual stand, et cetera, and hadn’t forgot anything. I’m a worrywart, so being to just jump into FFAIR before the event to make sure that everything was green, ticked off, and that Tim hadn’t forgot anything, which is likely.
Lee:
Sorry, Tim. It’s actually made the probably forgets things. I just felt mean for a second. I feel guilty now. But yeah, it was phenomenal. So folks, if you are listening in just the audio, can I suggest you go and check out the show notes? And there is a link to the YouTube channel with a timestamp so you can come and watch the demo make over to you.
Adam Jones:
What I’ll show you is the exhibitor port. If I show you everything, we’re on for another hour. But I’ll give you a high level overview of the exhibitor experience, because to me, that’s the most important. If you can make your exhibitor happy, the knock on effect of that is immense. From my perspective, you’ve skipped a step here. We’re already logged in. You can see your profile. I’ve completed some tasks. You get a nice high-level overview of everything that’s going on. I’ve got 21 tasks. I’ve completed eight of them. If you’re waiting for approval, I can see any past orders that I’ve placed. I can download invoices. I can also see what I’ve ordered in case I need to order more. We’ve got these two what looked like simple widgets, and they are simple. We implemented them, but they had a profound effect. When we implemented these two time widgets, tasks then became… It moved the actual submission date by two weeks. People were submitting their tasks two weeks earlier than they were before we put these two simple widgets in there. You can put that down to the 23rd of July, sounding like it’s quite far away, and I don’t need to worry, but 76 days, well, that’s a bit of a kick along the road.
Adam Jones:
That’s been really useful. We can also highlight days where tasks, particular tasks are required. One of the elements that was a real pain point for me was when we ordered our stand, I wasn’t the person that was allowed to place the order. I had to go through procurement and they went off and ordered it. And typical procurement didn’t communicate back what they had actually purchased. So when I got access to the exhibitor manual, no system that I used told me what we had purchased. So I didn’t know our size, I didn’t know our build type. And that’s all really important stuff because there’s certain forms that are only relevant to build type, space only or shell scheme. So being able to put that information in front of the exhibitor from the office, it sounds obvious, but no one else is doing it.
Lee:
Actually, no one else is doing it, at least that I have. I’ve had to go to invoices to go and find out what size I’m working with, etc. Just to start ordering the right things. So even something as simple as this, really cool, mate.
Adam Jones:
Yeah, it’s simple. And also, my therapy now, there was a form that took me two and a half hours to complete. It was an online form, which was great. But there was one bit of information I was waiting I went off and had to get it, request it from the marketing team. By the time they got back to me, it wiped all of my progress. So I redid it, submitted it back, and I got an email saying, You didn’t have to do that. I was like, Well, where does it say I don’t have to do it? And it was, Oh, well, it’s space only. Okay, well, I didn’t know it was space only. So yeah, it sounds like I’m being an idiot, but actually, in reality, that’s really common. The person completing the Exhibit manual is very rarely the person to bought the stand. The other thing that we’ve got is package information, so you can see what’s included in your package, so you don’t go and order electrics if you’ve already got it. Then we have custom fields, so the organiser has control over, and you mentioned earlier, to build their own custom fields.
Adam Jones:
And that can be for almost any purpose. It can be linking through to the floor plan. It can be to download their existing contract. It could be a link through to registration, whatever it may be. It gives the organiser flexibility in what they show their customers. Then we have our task list, and you mentioned it’s a really nice-This is the pretty thing for me.
Lee:
This is how my brain works. I need to know what’s coming up, etc. I want to turn everything green as soon as I can.
Adam Jones:
A lot of people are the same. We tested different ideas like Kanban boards, but to be honest, the tick box was the thing that got the best results. We tested a lot. We travelled a lot. Different formats. But most urgent things are always at the top. If it’s overdue, it has its own swim lane, everything else is date ordered. We also have approval and revision requirements. It’s quite often that you’ll submit a stamp design and it will be over the regulated height or it’ll be the wrong colour or whatever it may be and you just want a revision. It has that task management and approval process built into it as well. Then this is the area that you want to see is those green ticks. Most task lists wouldn’t be this big. It’s because it’s my demo, everyone wants to see their particular tasks shown in some respect. But the information we can collect is very VAST as well. We can collect short text responses, paragraph responses, and you can restrict those by character. A common thing is face your name boards. If your shell scheme, the general service contractor can only really print 24 characters.
Adam Jones:
We can stop that at the very beginning rather than collecting the names that are massive, like 24 Fs, that would prevent something coming forward in that. We can collect files, so we can restrict the type of file, we can make sure that’s an EPS file, we can make sure it’s a PNG, and it’s got to be 24 pixels by 24 pixels if it’s a moticon. So these are the things that we can do in collecting information en masse. From the organiser side, the massive benefits that can set a due date on a task. And applied to the due date, they can also set automated reminders. So they can say 30 days before the due date, let the system remind those exhibitors that haven’t completed it, that they need to complete it, and we can set those at different frequencies. We’ve tracked this with a number of our clients, and the time that they’ve saved is unbelievable. What What would you guess would be the time saving?
Lee:
Five hours. Five hours? Is this for an entire event or per exhibitor? Sorry. I was like…
Adam Jones:
For an event, that’s me. We’re talking months. It worked out. On average, it worked out to be a month’s worth of time saved. This is a job from an executive Ops person. They’re picking up the phone going, Oh, we noticed you haven’t submitted We did this risk assessment. Could you do that? And then the next person phoning them. So it’s just completely eradicated then. We see, come on, if I mentioned it already, but we see 95% tasks completed within our platform on average.
Lee:
The good thing is you have those Some of them I have. So when it gets past the date, we’ve had like… Because I think we didn’t have the design files, but we got a reminder. We’re still waiting from the designer, but we had a reminder that they were due soon, I think within a couple of days, which meant we could jump onto the designer, chase that down, get the final amends done, etc, and make sure we’d uploaded that in time. So stuff like that, it takes away the chasing, doesn’t it? It helps me as an exhibitor. It reminds me of the stuff and my responsibilities as coming up to the show. And equally, it’s saving the poor operations team, hammering the phones all the time, feeling like all they’re doing is nagging.
Adam Jones:
Exactly right. The other thing for the organised side is they can apply these tasks based on build type or package type. So I would never get into that situation again where I waste two and a half hours of my life completing a form that’s not relevant to me. So I will only see the tasks that are relevant to me, which should reduce the amount of tasks I have to do, which makes it less scary. We’ve also got conditional logic, so the organiser can come along and go, right, if they answer yes to this question, this task will automatically be applied to their task list. So let’s say building over four metres, they then need to send a complex structure document. So, yeah, it’s all about reducing the content and making it relevant. Show info, this is another area. So there’s the old saying, Read the fucking manual. I mean, it’s been abbreviated, but it’s very, very common. And the reason people don’t is because it’s hard to consume. It’s typically a really long 200-page PDF that’s not very searchable. So that’s another element where we’ve massively reduced the number of email traffic, the amount of email traffic going back and forth to the organiser, because you can find the information that you want in this show information really easily.
Adam Jones:
It’s another area you can philtre. Every section, you can philtre it from certain exhibitors, so I’m not going to see pages and pages of stuff that’s not relevant to me. Then the Exhibitor Shop, really simply, you’ve got lots of different suppliers, products all in one place. I think a lot of organisers, actually a lot of exhibitors, will not even realise that they’re ordering from multiple suppliers because they don’t really care. They just want to get in and out. I can pick up my branded fruit juice, I can order electric, some furniture, and lighting, and I can read more about the product that’s being provided to make sure I order the power. And importantly, actually jumping back to earlier point about people using it in ways I hadn’t expected, this is a perfect area. The organiser inviting themselves to fare as a supplier and selling their own. So brand enhancements, deposits on stands at future shows. I saw an order come through and it was a big old beefy order. Crikey, what have they ordered? And I went in there, it was Lannia’s sponsorship, and that was a 20 grand sponsorship. They’d only put it in there just as a test.
Adam Jones:
In a couple of days, they’d sold it. So that’s another surprise. But the idea being now, I’ve got four things in my car. They happen to be for the different suppliers. I can add more information. I can upload stand plans. So the electrical provider, for example, they can see where they need to pull up the electrics. And then when I am ready to check out, it’s just a a good case of plug in your credit card details and away you go. And the system will distribute the orders to the different suppliers, payments in their Stripe account immediately, invoices are generated on their behalf. From the supplier perspective, in the early days, it was quite hard to give in suppliers to go in there. It was unknown, it was unproven. But over the years, we’ve managed to convince a few, and the results have been so amazing. We’re seeing some suppliers sell three times more, and we can put that down to 100% footfall through the shop. Ease of ordering means that they’re not getting put off and going to an IKEA to order a sofa. But we’re now getting suppliers coming to us saying, Can we be on the first?
Adam Jones:
It’s a complete role reversal now. The other certain things as as well, buy products of what we’re doing. We’re seeing shows with easier build up because it’s not being clogged up with lots of higher vans, lots of people bringing in lots of small orders. More orders are going through fewer suppliers. You’re getting the preferred suppliers turning up with one big lorry full of orders rather than 20 different vans with half a van filled. From a sustainability perspective, that’s a big win, but I never set up to do that, to be honest.
Lee:
But the natural result of that is a system that’s going to put everything together in one place for an awful lot of people. This isn’t just useful for me as an exhibitor. It’s not just for the event organiser. Suppliers have everything all in one place, because I imagine for the events I was part of that I shared earlier, I was frustrated, obviously, as the exhibitor, but I can I can only imagine the amount of paperwork even each one of those suppliers had to do because they had to work out all of the different stands that had ordered their particular TV and not a different suppliers’ TV. Then and then manually start sending these fitting quotes for installation, et cetera. I can just imagine it was a complete nightmare for everyone. I really need to make an introduction of this event who will remain nameless for this podcast, but to your product, just as a please use FFAIR next time. Also, the thing I noticed as well, mate, is I’m a nerd, and I recognise Google material design when I see it. That’s beautiful because a lot of people are already exposed to that through Gmail, through Google Analytics, etc.
Lee:
So you’ve created a platform, I believe, which is very user friendly and people are going to know what to do pretty much straight away. They recognise the layout, they They know where the menus are. They know how the elements work because they’re using those elements all the time. Is that a good call?
Adam Jones:
Is that what you’ve used? No, it’s completely different. I’m joking. It’s exactly that. Yeah, material time. I went down that route because familiarity is what breaks down tech anxiety. Given our industry, we could be dealing with a farming show one week and a technology show the next week. You got to build something that’s easy to use. Familiarity is one of those key things. If it looks like something you’ve used before, that’s a big tick. If you press a button and what happens when you press that button is what you expect to happen, that’s also then building up that confidence to go ahead and click something and not be fearful that it’s going to break. So, yeah, that was a real big win for us. And you’re such a geek that you also knew that I wanted poppins.
Lee:
For a while, because we used to use poppins years ago for Event Engine. If you go back into the archive. Org and have a look at our old old site from 2018, it was still poppins, but then. So we’re also using Fig tree now, which is also available on Google. Fonts, if you want, it’s great fun. Fig tree.
Adam Jones:
That’s good. I think actually, looking forward, there are a few things that are on our roadmap, and a big chunk of that is around branding. Everyone’s very sensitive about their brand being presented in the right way. That’s, again, something that Google material design gives us flexibility on. We can change background colours, we can change primary colours and images and fonts. So yeah, that’s leaves a lot of doors open to us. And also the other thing is user research. Google has done a lot for us. I hear they’re pretty big and they’ve got quite a relatively big budget to test this stuff out. So yeah, it means we don’t have to test a lot of the UX elements because they’ll try to test it.
Lee:
You and I are old enough to remember when Google were announced as a new search engine. Do you remember that? I used to use like Ask Jeeves and Alter Vista and Yahoo. And I, which was not even a search engine. I think it was more like a directory when I was looking at it. I can’t even remember using a search box with Yahoo. I remember going down categories to find things in a category. I remember when Google were announced as this new upstart with really good results. You should try it, et cetera. Sorry, I know we’re going off on a complete tangent because you said you heard Google were quite big. I remember when they were quite small.
Adam Jones:
I had to do it. Now, They’re amazing.
Lee:
Thank you, Hugo.
Adam Jones:
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s an important thing, UI and UX. And I came from a design background, so how things look are really important to me. And I think it’s not just about looking pretty, it’s about looking obvious. Sometimes function and form is possible.
Lee:
So pretty obvious, to be FFAIR.
Adam Jones:
Pretty obvious. You’re welcome. Thank you so much.
Lee:
This has been phenomenal. It’s been enlightening. It’s exciting for me as a fellow developing nerd as well and fellow designer. I loved seeing the demo. Again, if you’re listening into the show, folks, go ahead check out the show notes to watch the demo. Adam, what’s the best way for people to check out FFAIR and to connect with you? And then we shall say goodbye.
Adam Jones:
So head to our website, which is FFAIR. Io. And that’s FFAIR.io. A bit of a word on FFAIR. That’s actually Welsh for marketplace. It works on many levels. It works on many levels. But you only pronounce it FFAIR. You don’t have to say a FFAIR. That might get you in more trouble. The other place is LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn, very regular, but there’s a lot of Adam Jones’s. Yeah, it might be easier to search for Adam Jones. Probably.
Lee:
Or even easier. Go to the show notes, folks, because we will make sure we put Adam’s exact LinkedIn profile URL in the show notes. You can click and connect with the dude himself. I’ve got a similar name, mate. If you’re putting Lee Jackson into Google, there are millions. There’s one that writes Victorian crime novels, which I then bought. So I could say to people, Look, I wrote a book. There’s a Mapmaker, there’s a Marshall Amps. Great. But yeah, we’ve got quite common names. So shame. Folks, check out the show notes. FFAIR, if you’re spelling it,.io for the website and links for Adam’s LinkedIn as well. Every other way that you can connect with the legend himself, highly recommend you do. Adam, thank you so much. You are a legend. I’ve had a great fun with you and I can’t wait to get you back on the show when we do that. Terrible mistakes we made when developing products episode that we might do. Just as therapy and made of a release.
Adam Jones:
Yeah, more therapy sessions. Not releasing because we’re too ashamed.
Lee:
But It was therapy. All right, mate. Thanks so much. Take care.
Adam Jones:
Take care. Bye-bye..
