Surviving the 2008 Crisis: Our Startup Story

Full transcript

Year of growth

So welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today, we are joined by Joel Macaluso. Joel, welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you for having me. Why don't we start this by you telling us a little bit about yourself, Joel, and what you guys do? Sure thing. I am one of the founders of a company called iMedia, and we are a digital agency based out of The United States. We are a 100% remote company now. We used to have an office in New Jersey, and then we we decided to, like a lot of companies, go fully remote. So we have staff all over the basically all over The United States in multiple different areas. My personal personally, I'm in Florida at the moment, enjoying the sunshine and warm weather. And we we are about 25 people at the moment. Our typical client is Fortune 500 companies. We do a lot of work in healthcare and financial, and we also do a lot of work in the performing arts, so large theaters and and and and venues. Do a lot of work for those companies. And and, yeah, that's about it. Okay. And looking

back, were there any major steps that shaped your career? Sure thing. I I I'm a developer. I've always been a developer. I don't code as much anymore, and probably that's a good thing, so because it's changing so frequently. But I still know how now how to use AI to kinda get me to what I need to to to understand. So I had started off, I think it almost thirty years now, over thirty years now if you think about it, for how how long I've been doing this. I started off in the industrial automation field. So I was working with electrical engineers doing plant floor automation, startups, things like that. And my schooling was software development. So not knowing any better, I was bringing in things, was building charts and graphs using Visual Basic back in the day, using data from plant floors, and building a lot of things that were that were new to that industry at they time, know, database technologies that they weren't that they weren't really using. So, you know, having batch batch information that was not just real time spit out to a printer, but also stored and retrievable.

That got that was fun, but I wanted to move into more of the web industry as I started to grow, so I moved into there. But I the point I'm trying to make here is that I took a lot of the real time plant floor information to whatever I'm doing for clients, and that's really helped along the way. I mean validation on a on a on a pharmaceutical line is very important. So taking that information that we we were able to use on a plant floor and migrating that in the early days of the web when when there really wasn't a lot of standardization, trying to make things really easy for people to use. And so if you fast forward now, because this is a long story if I keep going for thirty years, My background in that allowed me to quickly have detailed conversations with the end client when I was probably younger than than most people who were doing that. So I got kind put into the fire right away, talking to the customer, making sure that I understood the requirements. And the thing that I've started with, and it's really kinda taken me

Starting in a crisis

through till today is really understanding what the goals and objectives are. And that doesn't change. Right? So there's always goals and objectives, and and sometimes in our industry a lot of people get bogged down with the with the specifics, and and therefore never get to the finish line, never get to the to the to the you know, it's important to launch this site before September 1 because new new school year is starting, and we need to make sure that students can enroll and things like that. Well, if you're worried about, you know, certain things like holiday schedule or something like that, then maybe you're gonna miss the whole whole launch. So understanding what the most important parts are with any website, any web build, and and making sure that we address them. Sometimes not always the fanciest way of doing something or the most award winning way, but just making sure that the project gets done on time, on budget, and and clients are happy. Mhmm. I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, but you guys opened the same day that AIG collapsed. That is a very

I know I know that, you know, more most people at that time were running for cover. And, you know, you look at it, and it was the worst financial crisis. And Yeah. You said, now i the time to start a business. Like, can you tell me more how that happened? We me and my two business partners at the time we working for an agency that got acquired. And the acquisition seemed very promising, but the the result of the acquisition, they wanted us to wind down our United States presence and, you know, basically fire everybody that was working for us, and migrate everybody, and start managing the offshore team. We just figured that was really not in our interest, and not only, you know, we not wanna fire all the good people that we working for us, we also figured we would be gone at that point. So we did what a lot of people do at the time, which was we went and got home equity lines and started our company. And if I had waited probably a month later,

there would not have been any money to be given for for home equity as a result of that crash, and and then the housing market changing. And so we got in at a so, yes, it was very opportunistic, lucky, and just the timing was was amazing. The issue is was good and bad, right, because there was a lot of projects that stalled, a lot of people weren't spending, but a lot of competition started to leave the market. So that we we were able to survive that, you know, first tough year, and then start getting clients where when we were a brand new company, people were taking a chance on us as opposed to maybe not if there was more people, you know, doing the work at the time. So the slight thinning out of the market, it really wind up helping us. Mhmm. So really took the advantage. Okay. That's nice. And from your seat, what has changed most in how clients buy and build these digital experiences nowadays? Great question. Early on, you know, talking about 2012, a lot of our work was

Change in metrics

CMS migration. So content management systems, going from one platform to another because the platform didn't have the capabilities that the client needed. So most of our work was locking in with a particular vendor or two and saying, okay, we're going to be the agency that is there for you, and we're gonna understand how to migrate clients from one platform to your platform and be really successful doing that. WordPress is a very solid platform now. It's an enterprise platform, but early on when people were using it as an enterprise platform and there were a lot of security risks, a lot of our clients were people saying, hey, we had some people building a site for us in WordPress, we got hacked, we got so now we need to go to an enterprise, so know, off the shelf content management solution. So we used to get a lot of business in in that respect. Today, CMSs are very advanced, and a lot of them are, you know, obviously, you can do a lot more things, you know, we would talk about composable, or monolithic, still, you know, still definitely a very good choice in certain circumstances, but

they are almost commoditized in the sense that a lot of people are not as often switching from one platform to another. And the only time that really happens is if a platform is making a large migration to a new a new footprint and you have to make a change anyway, you may decide if if something else might be cheaper or or more more beneficial. But for the most part, a lot of our projects today are taking over development of an existing platform that we that we have experience in. Mhmm. And, Joel, when you look at the digital builds, what's usually the real root cause? Why why does the build struggle? Mhmm. There's I wish I knew that there was one answer to that, because then I would get it right every time. It seems like every project you do, there's also there's always another thing that happens that you say, right, next time this happens, I'm going to remember that, and and be better about it. The the reality is, there's dozens of reasons why they fail. But there's always, you know, a few a few specifics that I think are are common throughout

most of the bad bad launches. It's not first thing is not understanding the scope or not getting the scope from the client. It's it's very important to have the initial phases that you do with discovery and a definition phase, where you really dive into what is it that you really wanna be built, and it kinda goes back to what I was saying before about getting getting clear goals. And then, when you do all that, and you have wireframes, and you have, you know, Figma files that are exactly what the client wants, In that two months that have gone by sometimes, ideas change. Business has business moves really fast today. Right? So there are people who you're working for ah maybe they're not even there anymore, it's a new group of people. Or the business has decided that they they're going to focus on another product line or something like that. So making sure you can adapt to those kind of changes, very important. Scope creep is is a real big

big thing in these scenarios. When they start to when clients start to see what the possibilities are, the more you keep saying yes as a good as a good partner, the more it it jeopardizes the whole project. Most of our product projects are fixed fee, so we have a a commitment to a client, but we also have a commitment to, you know, to our client our company and our employees to make sure that that we don't get over overburdened and and and, you know, lose money on a project. It's not good for anybody. But we do value our relationship with our clients. We always say that a lot of our projects will start off with a a large scale web build and then migrate to monthly maintenance retainers and things like that. So we are a lot more accommodating when it comes to, you know, making sure that we can accommodate new scope during a during a build.

We always try to make sure, though, that they understand the the consequences. Right? You know, the more the more you say yes, the the more you jeopardize a launch date or the more you add complexity to something that that may be, you know, require additional testing and things like that. So I would say that scope creep and just making sure that the alignments are that you're aligned on the on the scope. Biggest problem though is a lot of times when we're responding to an RFP, don't you have the opportunity to ask the questions about all the features. You can only ask so much, and then you have to put a price in front of them and hope they pick you. Right? So so that kind becomes the the the you know, you hope that you you you scoped it correctly it the in the beginning, and sometimes you just have to live with it. Mhmm. And how do you guys help clients decide what actually should be custom built versus what should be integrated or bought off the shelf? Yeah. That's a great question. There

it really depends on what they what they have, what platform they have. You know, if it's a if it's a monolithic platform, meaning that all the components, if there's personalization built in, if there's e-commerce built into the product, if there is multilingual capabilities, it's pretty much saying, you know, under giving the client an understanding that this is what you bought, this is what you have, and we can customize to a degree. If it is a composable architecture where we're looking at best of breed solutions, we might be picking a certain product for personalization, another product for for for a dam, things like that. Then it's really up to us to make sure that the integrations are there. We we a lot of times, or customization we do a lot of customization, but it's because, not because of the product selections that we're picking, but a lot of times we are interfacing to a an existing ERP or an existing customer system, and the customizations have to happen just because just because it's a there's it's not an off the shelf product. It's a homegrown solution that's storing their product data or their customer information

still today. And then that's really where the customization work comes in, but we try to make sure that we find a right solution that we can that we can configure. And and, you know, obviously, there's gonna be coding no matter what you do, but limiting the amount of complexity for for for everybody. And and at the end of the day, most for most of what we do, our clients own the code. Right? So it's their codes. We have to make sure that they they feel comfortable with what we build. Mhmm. And looking at the rest of this year, Joel, what's your guys' vision at iMedia? Great question. So we we we we really we really think this is a great year for growth. I think there's been a lot of staleness in the in the market over the last couple years. You know, a lot of a lot of people were, for for a lot of reasons, just not not spending a a lot and and investing their in their technology.

I think AI has helped people really get motivated and say, hey, we we better start to understand where our business is, and whether that be through heavy use of AI, or whether that just be through smart usage of AI when it comes to things like digital assistants, you know, I. E. Chatbots and and and helping clients get their answers much more quickly and convert as fast as they can. That is something that we've been doing a lot of work with our clients in terms of GEO optimization, and and just understanding that when when somebody does make it to your website, they better have a very clear a very good clear path to whatever action you want them to take because, you know, it's it's it's it's not used to be time on-site was a huge metric, we wanted to keep people on your website for a very long time, and now it's the complete opposite. You want them to be, you know, quickly gone, but quickly gone after taking an action that you that that the agent agents and the LLMs have brought them there to do.

As far as how we get to growth, we've we're doing a lot more outreach, we're doing a lot more things like this, so thank you again for having having me on on your podcast. Of course. And and we've added some team members to to help grow us into different markets and different in different areas. And the biggest thing is just to keep get out there and keep getting out there and keep talking to people. You may have 10 different conversations that go nowhere, but, you know, have 20 more because one of those 30 is gonna be something that that resonates and and, you know, you just have to be constantly talking and constantly being being active. Yeah. That's great. Like, AI is improving so fast. It's I can't even comprehend it. Yeah. So it's it's it's crazy. Good year for growth, I would say. Absolutely. Okay. Joel, thanks for joining the podcast, and I will leave links so people can check you out over iMedia if they would like, and we'll see you in the next one. Wonderful. Appreciate you. Thank you for having me.