RIA Weekly: Using the Intuit Partner Platform, Alterity’s story – RIA Weekly #69

RIA Weekly

One company's story of using Intuit's Partner Platform to deliver new, cloud-based RIAs.

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0h31m
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Episode synopsis

In this episode, I talk with Alterity’s Brian Sweat about launching their new application, Easy Analytics for Inventory, on the Intuit Partner Platform. We talk about IPP, Flex, cloud, analytics, and the ready to go QuickBooks customer-base of 4.5 million users – a pretty exciting setup for one development team’s story on using RIAs and the cloud.

You can download this episode directly directly and it’ll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

If you’re interested in an overview of IPP, I suggest last week’s episode with Intuit architect Jeff Collins.

Show Notes

  • Brian tells us about Alterity and their new offering, Easy Analytics for Inventory.
  • I ask Brian to tell us how they started getting interested in using IPP and what the process was like getting up and running.
  • We talk about the use of Flex and how the IPP platform integrates with the UI layer.
  • Brian tells us about the ability to more closely track what users are actually using and doing (or not using) in a cloud-based application.
  • While customers don’t seem to be overly concerned with cloud vs. desktop deployment – at this early point – Brain says the support and even install time on cloud seems much smaller than for traditional deployment options.
  • This leads to a discussion about the other effects a PaaS, like IPP, has on a company’s structure: namely not having to worry so much about billing and other back-office concerns. And then there’s all the marketing Intuit does for them in the App Center.

Full Transcript

Michael Coté: Hello everybody! We’ve got a special edition today where we are going to be talking with a guest about, it’s a nice mixture of — you could say it’s sort of a Rich Internet Application style thing — but it’s also a mixture of using cloud technologies and SaaS things and it’s all over the map with some interesting new technologies. Then it’s also one of my favorites, sort of, I don’t know, you could call it a dark horse topic here where it’s kind of this question of what do you do with, if you have already got an existing piece of software that’s doing well and it’s kind of successful and what do you do with all of these exciting new shiny objects if you are not doing a brand-new greenfield thing.

But with that, I am, as always, one of the hosts, Michael Coté available at www.peopleoverprocess.com and we are joined by the guest for this episode. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Brian Sweat: Okay. This is Brian Sweat and I work with Alterity and we are a QuickBooks Add-on developer. We have been building software that works with other accounting software packages such as QuickBooks for the last ten years.

I started in 2001, shortly thereafter, Intuit announced that QuickBooks was going to open its doors and they publish the first SDK for small business QuickBooks users. So we jumped on that opportunity and developed one of the first — actually, we were in the first group of gold-certified developers for QuickBooks and that was in 2003.

Of course, that was 100% desktop used a COM-based API for synchronizing to QuickBooks data. They were using XML. They developed their own format of XML, but the technology has changed quite a bit and today we are launching a new application called Easy Analytics for Inventory and what we are doing is building on our experience with QuickBooks and dealing in the inventory segment of QuickBooks, and building the tool that is cloud-based that runs on Intuit’s new cloud platform called the Intuit Partner Platform.

I know in the past, Coté, you talked to a couple of people from Intuit: Alex Barnett and Jeff Collins on what the Intuit Partner Platform is, but of course, I can offer some experience on what it’s like to develop on another platform such as–

Michael Coté: Yeah, that’s exactly why it was — that’s why I have been looking forward to talking with you about it, because it is, like you are saying, we have talked about IPP as far as like an architectural overview and kind of the potentials for it and everything and I think you guys, being someone who has been in the sort of QuickBooks area for a while and doing your inventory management, warehouse management, things like that. I mean you guys have an interesting application to see if all of the great promises of the cloud essentially and then more narrowly, if IPP actually kind of play out for you.

So I mean that said, can you kind of walk us through? Like you said, you were having an existing desktop sort of classic Windows kind of application, if you will, and you guys are now transitioning to doing more, even more cloud-based stuff. So when did you start to go through that process and what was the thinking that was occurring as you were doing that?

Brian Sweat: I am not sure there is a lot of thinking, but for the most part –

Michael Coté: That’s always the best type of software development. It’s just magic. Never mind what happens behind the curtain, right?

Brian Sweat: Right. Again, our first product was ACCTivate! which is our desktop application that we built and it’s a pretty large scale application for small businesses. So it’s, like I said, thick client, Visual Basic, started in VB6 and we have migrated most of the code to VB.NET and definitely Microsoft SQL Server background, peer-to-peer client/server type technology, all on local servers of the small businesses.

Michael Coté: I mean just to interject; it’s used for doing inventory. Could you tell us a little bit about what businesses use it for?

Brian Sweat: Right. What we found is QuickBooks does a really great job and unquestionably, [is] the leading small business accounting package which it’s really good as for a checkbook for a payroll, customers and vendors. But where it kind of breaks down is the advanced inventory features. They have an item list in inventory; they don’t have the ability to track like serial numbers or track multiple locations, like if you have BINs or do any barcoding. If you want to have a scanner that syncs with your QuickBooks data, that’s really not just possible with QuickBooks. So that’s where we came in with an add-on to QuickBooks and that’s what kind of our history.

What’s changing though now is you know with IPP shift, rather than selling and distributing our own add-ons that work with QuickBooks, Intuit wants to deliver the apps for us.

So they have taken on the Apple App Store approach and they are calling it the Workplace App Center and it’s actually within QuickBooks. You know there is a button right on your main toolbar called the App Center and it takes you to a catalogue that has all these applications that seamlessly integrate with QuickBooks, where you don’t have to figure out, it doesn’t work with QuickBooks and all that and they are all certified by Intuit.

So there is a lot of advantages for us that we don’t have to deal with and it’s a lot easier to deploy and to support and to sell because Intuit is taking over a lot of that. And with ACCTivate! we did 99% of the work we had to do on our own.

Michael Coté: And so I mean essentially, as other vendors will say, you’re getting access to this “channel” that Intuit has; you’re able to essentially advertise the services that you have, the application that you have to whoever might be using QuickBooks or looking in the App Center. And it sounds like from — where it sounds like, as part of that, that means you need to run on IPP, right?

So what was sort of like the first stage of getting — like so you decide you want to have access to be in the App Center and get listed here and then so, what was the process you had to go through to kind of get in the IPP to get up and running in there?

Brian Sweat: Yeah, yeah, that’s been a lot of fun actually. Again, before we just — this is something new, we started out; attended some of the presentations when they’ve initially announced it. So I’ve actually been around it since it’s started and one of the things is that the platform they build, they’re definitely committed to this, the Adobe stack.

So we are writing in Adobe Flex and they have actually provided like a Flex plug-in that exposed their APIs, like getting the list of customers, getting the invoices, getting purchase orders. So all of the business transactions are already available using their API.

Now that’s huge. It’s a big, big part of it, because before when we started out and a lot of other developers that have worked with QuickBooks data, when you pull the data out of QuickBooks off to desktop, you have to move it somewhere else to work with it, because their old SDK just didn’t really work well for web-based application. So you ended up synchronizing the data into MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server, and then your app would run off that database.

With the Intuit Partner Platform, since our app runs in their cloud and has direct access to the QuickBooks data that’s also synchronized to their cloud, we don’t have to rewrite all of that data storage, query language, all of that goes away. So you just say, give me a list of invoices, and they’re right there. We don’t have to worry about getting the invoices out of QuickBooks.

Michael Coté: Yeah, and it sounds like compared to the past API stuff you would have sort of in the desktop area, but there is both a – that’s about just access to the data that you would have normally from whatever data source you’re using. But also, it sounds like that there is additional or better sort of data modeling that’s going on that’s sort of more native to the SDK and the toolkits that you’re using. So, you know, from what you’re saying, it sounds like you have to spend a lot of time getting the data in a format that’s actually usable in your application.

Brian Sweat: Yeah, that’s right. It’s fast enough to get it straight out of their format and work with it. Yeah, you don’t have to worry about that. So that is very significant for us, because we didn’t have to worry about all of that; the data storage, where we’re going to store the temporary data, what are we going to do with it, and how do we secure that, because they handle the authentication, the security of the data, they take care of all that for us.

So we are really just as — what Adobe Flex is really good for is building a front end for an existing data service. And they are providing the data service, it’s called Intuit Data Services and our application sits on top of that and just exposes that and provide some nice, again, it’s called Easy Analytics for Inventory.

So what we’re doing is we’re analyzing their sales data out of QuickBooks in a really nice presentation, with nice charts and histograms and we got some new charts plan that aren’t out yet, like pie charts and they gives you that nice drill down and just capabilities that you don’t find in QuickBooks.

Michael Coté: Yeah, because QuickBooks is still, for as mature as a product it is, I mean it’s still very accounting and billing and sort of focused — and it does seem like it has — there’s plenty of room in the QuickBooks community whether it’s inventory management or tougher analytics on top of it which is — It is nice to see when there’s older successful applications that they kind of figure out how to transition doing more open way of running things, so people can layer on top of it, and it seems to make a nice market for you guys as well.

Brian Sweat: Oh! It’s huge, yeah. The term that Intuit is using, is they call it “Connected Services.” So they have four-and-a-half million companies in the US using QuickBooks. So what we are trying to do is just provide as they call it Connected Services, to give them a little more than what QuickBooks has. QuickBooks, as you said, is very mature product, focused on data entry on recording bills, invoices, transactions. But they don’t put a lot of the — they don’t focus on niche markets. So we are doing something that’s specific to people that have inventory and need this advanced reporting and advanced analysis tools.

But if it doesn’t make sense for all four-and-a-half million of their customers, it’s a lot harder to put that into the QuickBooks products. So that’s why they turned us and look for small add-ons that handle one problem and do it really well.

Michael Coté: Yeah, so getting to the technology part, getting back to that a little bit, like you mentioned several times that and of course, part of IPP is using Flex on top of it. And like you were saying, earlier, traditionally, you started out with VB and then you had Windows Desktop stuff, and so forth and so on. How is it been using Flex in this environment; like how is that sort of added to the portfolio architecture planning that you guys do?

Brian Sweat: Yeah, that’s a very, very good transition; it’s been a lot of fun. I have got four developers here that we are all working in .NET that’s pretty much all they do everyday. And we took one person off earlier this year, in the fall to start working on this application in Flex. I’ll tell you, as a product manager, I looked at that and said, okay, well, I hope he likes it, because I worked with Flex and it’s something that I did the sample, I ran through a lot of sample code and actually wrote some small applications that run on the Intuit Partner Platform just in test. I like it; it’s really easy to use, of course, anybody, who has worked with it, can say that it’s a pretty good product. Now, it came along a long way since Flex 2, the initial old version which I never dealt with.

So the transition from — if you have dealt with Java or other languages before, I think it’s a nice platform to work on. And the guy that has been programming out here, he is Austin, is really happy with it and excited to get back and split his time between .NET and Flex and hopefully, we’ll be able to give him a full-time job in Flex and never look back. But –

Michael Coté: Yeah. Since you have been using Flex more, I mean do you start thinking of using it for other products that aren’t necessarily tied to IPP or like what?

Brian Sweat: Yeah, yeah.

Michael Coté: Is it starting to spread around or something or what? It’s interesting to think, like, a .NET shop with a Flex front-end, with Silverlight and other things running around there; there’s other options out there as well.

Brian Sweat: That’s exactly right and we have been talking about that a lot in terms of ease of Flex and what they call the native Intuit Partner Platform apps, which are built on Flex. Does that make sense for all applications that we have got planned? If you are building something from scratch and you are starting on a small app that’s going to run on Intuit and integrate with QuickBooks, one of the things that — I think Flex provides a really nice, consistent user interface. The sense I get from them is that they’d like a lot of the apps to kind of have the same theme or may be like look and feel. So whether or not –

Michael Coté: That’s always a good goal to have for sure.

Brian Sweat: Yeah, I think if you look at Force.com or one of these other platforms, you want the applications to have kind of a consistent user interface. So they are allowing other as they call it federated platform, so you can write a Microsoft Azure application, which I guess is still the kind of new announcement they just made. I don’t know a lot about that, I have kind of been reading up on it over the last months, a couple of months, but again, I had no experience with it. But if you are comfortable in that, then you can build an app on Azure and still have it integrate with the QuickBooks data.

But I think my personal opinion is I do like the idea of having kind of a consistent look and feel. A great example of the nice Flex charting that I like to look at is Intuit recently acquired Mint.com like six months ago or so.

Michael Coté: Sure. My wife is paying bills today and I am sure she has been logging into that all everyday with a distressed look on her face, that’s — all the time.

Brian Sweat: Absolutely. Yeah. So I think it’s a good example of even Intuit is like, the Mint.com approach which uses like great Flex charting. An application like that, you could have some of the code written in .NET, and they are adding a new, like, a way to have what they call server-side business logic.

So rather than everything run in the actual Flash object on the browser, they are going to add some abilities to do some backend processing which is not going to be Flex, it’s Java.

But as for the front-end user interface for these apps, Flex seems to be the big winner here. But we will see and we will re-evaluate if something else comes up.

Michael Coté: So how long is the Easy Analytics for Inventory been out now?

Brian Sweat: Oh yeah, pretty short. I would say, we started with Flex like actual on Easy Analytics just in November. So we built the application very quickly and launched it right around the New Year. I think it was like January 5th or 6th. So it’s only been a couple of weeks.

Michael Coté: It’s fresh?

Brian Sweat: Yeah, it’s still new. We are trying to get a lot of feedback from these QuickBooks users. And the great part is we are watching a lot of — there is always this concern of well okay, all of their QuickBooks data is on their computer, or their server in a closet and their data has to be synchronized out to Intuit’s cloud, as I call it Intuit Data Services.

And so far, I haven’t had any problems with that. I mean, people are pretty open to sharing their data with online applications such as ours. So I guess it surprisingly has been pretty easy to deal with and we have gotten a lot of sign-ups pretty quickly without much marketing efforts from our point of view.

Intuit has done a great job in that though. They are helping out with marketing quite a bit.

Michael Coté: Yeah. So I wonder in the previous sort of IPP discussion, when I was talking with Jeff Collins, who is architect over at Intuit, I was kind of fantasizing about this kind of real-time or near-real-time access to, I guess, the analytics to kind of show you what your users are doing that’s possible in a cloud-based versus a desktop thing. And I wonder if – it’s only been out so you are saying a month. So there is not sort of like the giant pool of data to prove this out.

But I wonder if that’s something that you guys have started thinking about or noticing or something that you can actually get a sense for what your users are doing in your application more.

Brian Sweat: Yeah. Coincidently, analytics is in our product name but they have also — we have the ability to track any actual event within the application with callbacks from Flex. So they have actually set up kind of a system for that. Right now, it’s using Google Analytics, so you can set it to fire off an event when someone runs a specific function.

A lot of people talk about this and it’s an interesting problem that you have to think about when you are going with Platform as a Service like Intuit is the apps don’t run on our servers. So we don’t have full control over logging exactly what users are doing. So Intuit has provided us with some basic information like that, which is cool.

So when I sit down with my coworkers here and we look at a feature like — we have a couple of different features that we put out like right now like in the beta to kind of get a feel of what people like, and I can actually look at that and say, nobody uses feature X. It’s like not even being looked at and it really helps us shape the future of the app which on a desktop product, we don’t have a lot of data like that.

I have all the exception reports from ACCTivate!, our desktop product. So when people have a bug, I can tell how many problems people have but I don’t –

Michael Coté: Yeah, you can detect suffering but not pleasure essentially right. That seems to be the issue here.

Brian Sweat: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that’s one thing that we are hoping that we put this app out there very quickly just to get started and I am not one for spending a year in development and then launch and find out we got it wrong. It’s raw; we are going to get a lot of feedback on things that work well, things that don’t work.

And yeah, it seems pretty easy to adjust. The way Intuit’s done, it doesn’t seem like a big problem to kind of go with that approach.

Michael Coté: Yeah and like exactly the scenario we’re talking about was the thing that Jeff and I were joking about as you know, you can have the meeting where you could spend like an hour debating if someone actually uses something or if you should do it. But if you actually had some even relatively well, they would not to be perfect kind of just like tracking of what was happening, hopefully. I guess you would find other things to argue for about endlessly, but at least you still wouldn’t have that one.

Brian Sweat: Yeah, yeah.

Michael Coté: The validity of a feature or where you should put your effort. I mean it seems like it’s an interesting product management sort of input that you get that previously was very tedious to get that. Anyway, so it would be pretty interesting because you have that pans out for you guys.

Brian Sweat: Yeah, definitely and that’s a big focus for us. So we are trying to figure out what to do next.

Michael Coté: So, another thing I am always curious about is, especially like I was getting at the beginning when you are transitioning, when you have a non-cloud sort of application and you are moving into experimenting or moving into cloud stuff is, are you finding that for your customers, like are there any benefits that they are kind of noticing to this delivery model or is it more — to put it in the positive way, is it more seamless that it really doesn’t matter either way, they are just interested in the functionality?

Brian Sweat: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. For the most part I think, I most people are just interested in the functionality and I don’t think they really — from what I have seen so far, I don’t think people pay or at least, our users aren’t paying a lot of attention as where the code is or whether it’s a desktop app or web app.

But what you can’t ignore is the amount of like the kind of tech-support that we deal with on just getting our software installed and set up and for a desktop, client server, 15-20 different workstations, and all the IT type support that we have had to do for ACCTivate! over the years, a lot of that’s gone with the Intuit Partner platform.

So, there are cloud out, of course, it takes a little longer to get it set up just right from a development point of view and building the product, but once you deploy it, it’s actually pretty easy. I mean, it’s surprisingly easy how that works.

And you know, we don’t have — we are not going to have to have a lot of the same types of tech support, learning all about these different Microsoft SQL Server issues and that kind of thing, because there Intuit is taking over a lot of that for us.

Michael Coté: Yeah, it’s interesting you say that, I mean it is kind of — it’s interesting that you could have to have that shift of well, it maybe more effort of development. And you know maybe, there’s a little bit more effort upfront but then if you multiply it across all the support, you might have to have to actually do on-premise stuff, then you probably do end up, it probably does end up becoming a benefit that it’s easier just to do a web-based or a cloud-based or whatever you want to call that type of thing, that’s an interesting motivation there.

I mean, it’s the old all the software development methodology, optimizers are always talking about. The longer you wait to fix a bug, the more expensive it is.

So, in theory, if you were spending more time in development and kind of that gray area between development and deploying the cloud, then hopefully, it saves money for you guys but then also, it saves time and money for your customers, because they are not complaining about something when they are installing it.

Brian Sweat: Yeah, right. We are definitely a product company. We want to spend every hour of our day, building great software, not consulting and installing things and dealing with Windows bugs and other stuff.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I mean, if you guys have barcoders to read through, you’ve had the hardware junk to deal with too. So there is a whole other — I mean, I don’t [know] if the cloud is going to save you from barcode or barcode readers, but it’s good to have as much spare capacity for that stuff as you can, right?

Brian Sweat: Right. Yeah, that’s an interesting conversation but yeah, but we actually do spend a lot of time supporting on these like Symbol Barcode Scanners and Intermec like the rugged scanners that you see in warehouses and that’s really hard to do for — we are a company of 20 people in Texas and we have got clients all over the country and all over the world now with our ACCTivate! software and it’s really hard to tell them, okay, now scan the barcode and what does it say on the screen, because it’s really hard –

Michael Coté: Yeah, it’s almost like you need to send them like a little webcam setup, so you could just have some camera tracking them, right? So, much that that concept is probably cheaper.

Brian Sweat: A lot of people take digital cameras and just take pictures of what the scanner looks like and then we are like, wait a minute, that’s not even the scanner you told me you had. They said, they call it a Symbol but it’s really by some other off-brand and we have problems.

Michael Coté: It’s like crayon and colored pencils and [Kleenex and] tissues and everything. That makes sense and that’s interesting.

We were talking about support a little bit, and one of the things when we were talking a little while ago that you are mentioning that also the effective using IPP like a cloud-based thing is that, there is sort of backend support you need on your end like the billing and taking care of that changes. So I am curious like, I mean this is the total like non-technology, non-delivery side of it, but like what are those other ways that’s affected you guys to have sort of a cloud-based IPP thing?

Brian Sweat: Well, we are just getting started on the commercial side. So we really don’t have a lot of billing for the Easy Analytics product yet, and we don’t have any billing yet. But the dream is that Intuit is going to be actually handling all of the account management customers’ billing, the recurring fees, they handle all of that for us.

So, it’s good not just for us, it’s also good for the actual QuickBooks users because they have one account within Intuit and they pay for their payroll services, their QuickBooks merchant, like if they have a credit card processing account, and in our app, it’s all going to be on one bill. I am not sure about other apps, but like if you have five or six applications, you pay Intuit but you don’t pay my company, Alterity.

So the problem we have right now is that we spend an enormous amount of time every month invoicing customers’ collections. We have some customers pay by credit card, we have bank drafts, we also have people that mail checks. A lot of that collections and accounts receivable stuff gets off loaded back to Intuit. And of course, they take a cut, they take their fee is, I think, 20% until we scale up and sell a lot of accounts, which is a reasonable overhead for us because we just don’t want to do it. Back to my comment earlier, we want to be building software, not managing accounts receivable all day.

So that’s a pretty good deal, because it’s more than just like, if you go to Amazon EC2 and all that stuff, you still have to manage the commercial side of billing for your app. But with Platform as a Service approach, it’s pretty nice because they are actually doing that for us. So we don’t have to work.

Michael Coté: I tend to kind of like balk at double digit like takes that various people have whether it’s like 80/20 or 70/30 or whatever but, like, to your point, it is true that if you are running a business and you think well, let’s compare that 30% to having, like, people on staff to deal with this instead, or paying someone else to deal with this or the time we spend for it, and it does seem like, when you realize that that’s money you are going to be spending anyways more than likely. It does make it a lot more attractive that maybe you can at least — that you can get the benefits of having things centralized and maybe even optimize it a little bit. So it does that.

That was one of the more interesting things when we were talking that kind of [before the recording] is that there is — I always like to extend the old leaky abstraction idea to everything, and there is like a positive leaky abstraction to something like IPP where hopefully it changes your sort of business process for the better, and streamlines it a bit.

Brian Sweat: Right, I think it does, it’s just really clear to us that that’s a good business model. Yeah, I am sure, you are right, you balk at first that 20% cut, but I think Intuit is definitely making out for that by not only doing the administrative overhead by processing payments and stuff, but they also are actually marketing the app. Remember, they are listing our application on their website.

Michael Coté: Yeah, I guess that’s true. That percentage that they take is not only back office handling but it’s also marketing budget that you guys –

Brian Sweat: And that’s significant. That part is very hard to measure because they are putting our app, like straight out of QuickBooks. There is an App Center button now and it takes you right to their website that has all the apps, and the reviews and you can buy it right there with just a few clicks. So we think it’s a good setup and we are happy with it, a lot easier.

Michael Coté: Yeah, well I mean, I think that’s a pretty good overview of the experience you guys have had and I mean unless there is something I am leaving out, I mean the thing that I am always curious about is what kind of your future plans are with IPP here. Like you said, you just came out with just the Easy Analytics for Inventory like one piece that’s running on IPP. Are there other applications you are thinking of adding or converting over or what do you think you are doing now?

Brian Sweat: Yeah, definitely. Actually, we have got a handful of applications that we’ve got planned. We definitely like the kind of Apple model where you have a lot of small applications.

So we are not trying to build another ACCTivate! which is our desktop app; we are not porting that to the Intuit Partner Platform. What we are looking to do is find other small areas that we can build a nice small app that’s done really well that can help hundreds of thousands of the QuickBooks millions.

Yeah, definitely, we are starting off with inventory because that’s what we know, because we have been dealing with it for years, but the next couple of apps we have, we are going to stray away from that a little bit and just figure out what works, and just go from there.

Michael Coté: Oh, that’s interesting. In the same way that there is like an app economy as people like to talk about it in iPhone-land, I guess you guys are hoping that there will be a similar sort of app economy for Intuit stuff at least when it comes to IPP.

You can actually come up with new products and sort of — it’s interesting to think about in the same way that app is short for application, a lot of applications that get developed, they have the luxury, the way that they’re delivered, they have a luxury, they could be a little smaller then you would have to make a full-fledge application. You always encounter these applications, you always. Every now and then I encounter these applications, it’s kind of like, well that’s more of a feature than an application. But I think I have seen this kind of shift in whatever sort of app economy you have, where really apps that are just a small bundle of features, actually do really well.

You could have a full-fledged application as well, but it’s an interesting opportunity that wasn’t always previously available on the past, because there was kind of like this bucket you had to fill up, and if you only wanted to fill the bucket of functionality up so much, then you have to put in more effort to do it. But anyhow, that’s the free-associating for the episode.

Brian Sweat: And that’s all we want. We want to fill the bucket up.

Michael Coté: Absolutely! Well great! Well, I really appreciate you spending the time to talk about this. I mean like I’ve said several times, I think it’s — I spend a lot of time and I know like listeners of this; they spend a lot of time looking at potentially exciting new application. So it’s good to actually hear from people who are trying to, as it were, fill that bucket with new exciting things.

Brian Sweat: Yeah, I really enjoyed it, thanks.

Disclosure: Intuit is a client and sponsored this episode.

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