Episode 12: Beyond Tasks - Reinventing Project Management with Leantime

Kevin Carney 00:08

Welcome to Kingsmen software is beyond the building podcast at Kings when we pride ourselves on building enterprise quality software and have the privilege of nice, pretty interesting people along the way. This is Kevin Carney, one of the managing partners at Kingsmen software. And I'll be hosting today's podcast. For those that joined our AI Expo last week and saw a demo of our cause greater podcast product, this is not AI generated. This is real. I think this we so far have generated five different podcasts with the Knysna that were totally fake. But today is real live, Kevin realized and he's not fake.

 

Gloria Folaron 00:39

Wouldn't AI say that?

 

Kevin Carney 00:42

Yes, the AI would say that. That's right. The AI would always claim that they're really the AI. It's like, is it opposite day? Because it is opposite day? You would say it's not a day. We'll go there later. Okay, getting back into it. Our sound engineer today is the one and only built the receipt today. You're up in the sound booth today. Right, though? I am. Thank you very much. And you're in control of the soundboard. Yeah, but we won't use it normally. That's Denise's that is actually me. Today from the Kingston bourbon studio we're talking with Gloria fuller on founder and CEO of Lean time, lean time is adding a twist to project management software by making project management software that people actually want to use. Gloria, thank you for joining us.

 

Gloria Folaron 01:26

Thanks for having me.

 

Kevin Carney 01:27

And thank you for joining us right after your NC tech Gala. Last night, right?

 

Gloria Folaron 01:33

Yep, we got I was telling Denise, we got home at 3am. So we're gonna have Okay.

 

Kevin Carney 01:36

All right. Well, thank you for coming again. We'll get back there in just a minute. But also, I'm gonna introduce Denise, a partner here at Kingsmen software and CIO. And we had Denise join us because a she loves project management and be the two of you spent a lot of time together working on some project work. Besides, she likes to tease me and vice versa. So

 

Denise Beachley 01:56

thanks, Kevin should be fun.

 

Kevin Carney 01:59

Alright, so Gloria, start off with how we connected because you to be just to be clear for everyone being transparent. You are our client, we've done some work for you. How did you first find out about us? And what were you trying to accomplish at that time? I

 

Gloria Folaron 02:13

found you guys through the Charlotte endo blog. There was an article about your AI Lab. So

 

Kevin Carney 02:20

we've want to thank for that. Yeah.

 

Gloria Folaron 02:22

So the very, very first one. And I think you when we first met, you guys had said that that had just come out. And you were still kind of mapping it out. And so we knew that we were looking at putting AI into the tool. And so we said okay, well, let's reach out figure out what you guys are offering and then kind of go from there. And it's been downhill since. Not in a bad way. Like downhill as in like, Oh, we've been rolling down the hill together.

 

Kevin Carney 02:50

Oh, all right. Okay. Yeah. I never understood as a kid whether going downhill was a better thing or a worse thing. But well, if I said uphill, it would have been hard. And I know right, I that's torturous. Tell that to my third grade teacher that gave me a C. Yeah, I said it was going downhill. Life is downhill from here. She's like, Oh, I'm sorry. You feel that way? Oh, I get it. It's all perspective. At that point. That's great. That's great. Kevin had a C I'm great. That's,

 

Denise Beachley 03:18

that's staying in as well.

 

Kevin Carney 03:19

It was third grade it was expunge my record. So you're only you lien time as a company is only a little over a year old. Right? That's pretty darn new.

 

Gloria Folaron 03:29

Yeah. But I think we incorporated July of 22. Okay,

 

Kevin Carney 03:33

so Yeah, almost a year and a half. Yep. Well, you've come up pretty far away, right? I mean, you've been involved in a couple of incubator programs. You've won some awards. Tell us a bit about those things. So

 

Gloria Folaron 03:44

to date, so we have been, we were NC Idea micro grant recipients. And then we were also part of the AWS impact accelerator, the Latino founders cohort over the summer. And then along with that, we've been very active in Charlotte launch, formerly venture prize with the UNCC. And then also with launch lkn. Now launch CLT.

 

Kevin Carney 04:14

Know the AWS Impact Program, you went to New York in you rang the bell on the NASDAQ.

 

Gloria Folaron 04:20

Yep, that was that was. Yeah, kind of sets the bar for where we're supposed to go. Right. I think I found it. It was inspiring in a way that kind of caught me off guard. Growing up for coming from a Hispanic family that this is not what I'm doing now is not what you see. That's not a common theme. So when the closing bell happened, you had you had a very diverse panel, also ringing the bell and you don't ever see that at least from where I'm sitting and where I grew up. So it was it was really cool to see that and

 

Kevin Carney 04:58

then you had your face and light In light on Times

 

Gloria Folaron 05:02

Square Oh yeah. Yep. And Marcel's face got blocked out by the window.

 

Kevin Carney 05:08

Where's Marcel? For everyone that doesn't know Marcel. Marcel

 

Gloria Folaron 05:11

is my technical co founder and also stuck with me partner in life.

 

Kevin Carney 05:18

So, if I had my picture on Time Square, I would be like posting it everywhere I probably get a tattoo on my body just to memory commemorate that. I'm not gonna put a picture of you it tattooed on my body. But that's a pretty amazing life accomplishment, isn't it? I mean, that's, maybe for me that is you don't look, because you didn't seem as enthralled by that, as I do know, that's

 

Gloria Folaron 05:41

a default state on my face. That is just something that I'm working on. The inside doesn't always reflect the outside. No, it's it's really it's been really incredible. I think, even to you talking about the the gala yesterday. Like it's been a year and a half. And we've been in an impact accelerator, we've had opportunity after opportunity. And we've just been growing. And I think it's, it's really hard to won it. I don't know how to explain it. The way I explained it to NC, NC tech association is that as a founder, you're always looking for signals. You're looking for signals, is this right for the customer? Is this right for the market, and you're listening and listening. But when the people around you are also giving signals of, hey, this is a great direction, you're figuring this out. It comes with a nother layer of support that I think comes with that excitement, and that that experience. So think of the whole time square thing, amazing to be on the front. But what that means is all over the place. I have all these other people who have been rooting for us and pushing us forward ahead of that. Right. Right.

 

Kevin Carney 06:53

Yeah, if people like casting their ballot for you, right, you've got so by being accepted to these accelerator programs, people are casting your ballot by getting grants. They're casting their ballot by downloading your software using your software, they're casting a ballot, right. Yeah, that feels great. When people realize what you're doing and feel it has a lot of value, right? Must be very fulfilling.

 

Gloria Folaron 07:11

Yes. And it also says that, like we're on the path to changing the future that my daughters might have. Alright.

 

Kevin Carney 07:19

So in terms of casting votes, you've had a lot of people cast votes by downloading your platform on open source and, like, how many instances do you have?

 

Gloria Folaron 07:26

We are nearing? We just crossed 21,000.

 

Kevin Carney 07:31

That's outrageous. Yep.

 

Gloria Folaron 07:33

We just did the math. Earlier today. Since November to November we've grown over 573%. That's amazing. Yep. So just the last three months was 25% growth across the three months. So it's, it's not too bad. Yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 07:48

So 21,000 instances, though, right? That's not necessarily users, right? There could be more users

 

Gloria Folaron 07:53

than that. Yep. So what because we're open source, data tracking gets a little more complicated. We respectable by people are open source. And it's often for data protection and privacy. So they have the option to turn off what we call telemetry. And that means that when they set up the software, we see very small data points the first time, and then they click the switch. We don't get any more data points from that. So it gets hard to measure. Did they invite 100 200 1000 users and what they did after that?

 

Kevin Carney 08:28

So I was dumbfounded. We told me that number. A couple of weeks ago, we're doing our prep session, I was expecting 200. Maybe 2000 20,000, though, was like 10 to 100 times what I was expecting in one year. That's a lot. That's a ton.

 

Gloria Folaron 08:43

I appreciate that. Yeah, we started tracking telemetry, and it wasn't the same month we incorporated. So that was when we really started to get the first counts. And then we are both cloud and open source platforms. So having both that number is across both of them. So

 

Kevin Carney 09:00

adding on to this success, you know, short period of time, lots of adoption rate. You come from an unconventional background. And by that I mean two things. One is your bootstrapped right. I mean, you have a couple of grants, no doubt, but you've not gone through your conventional startup fundraising at yet. Or you maybe you're doing it now, but you haven't to this date, right?

 

Gloria Folaron 09:24

To this date we are now

 

Kevin Carney 09:26

and you're also not coming from some sort of prior experience prior exit pedigree or anything like that. Right? Your your, this is your first startup. Not

 

Gloria Folaron 09:37

my first startup. I'm probably coming more from a line of failures, no, than I am from a line of exits. But it just I think the failures are sometimes just as successful as an exit in that I have a better perspective every single time and I noticed that the things that I didn't see then I'm able To correct and adjust for sure. And the statistics are pretty good for multi time founders failures are not in that eventually that I get it. Yeah, failures

 

Kevin Carney 10:08

are common, right. That's not that's not anything to be concerned about. But my point is that it's not like you had a big exit. And then someone said, Oh, I'm betting on you, because you had a big exit. I don't care what your product is. I'm betting on you. So people are betting on your ideas, your product. It's, I mean, it takes us in the right manner, but it's not based on your record your reputation or your record. It's based on your idea and your product that you're delivering right now. Yeah,

 

Gloria Folaron 10:32

yeah. No, that's a that's a great call out. I don't think I've thought of it that way as well. It's not the not the name brand kind of thing that pulls pulls attention. Right.

 

Kevin Carney 10:42

Right. Okay. So let's go back to Sharon background. We can't We can't go into this too much further that talking about some of your prior or current hobbies, occupations, how you got here. Yeah. So you start off as an RN, nurse, or as an ER nurse? Yep.

 

Gloria Folaron 10:58

So my bachelor's degree is as a registered nurse, okay. And

 

Kevin Carney 11:02

you were an ER,

 

Gloria Folaron 11:03

I did er, I did pediatric research. I did peds er, I did endoscopy interventional radiology. And I did even the occasional jail shift. Oh.

 

Kevin Carney 11:14

So in this line of work, I don't find many people that were registered nurses earlier, let alone dealing with like, heart attack patients and car accidents and gunshot wounds and things like that in the ER. So this is a big change. We always say that no one ever dies in our industry, right? The nice but it's literally true.

 

Gloria Folaron 11:32

Don't get fazed, like no, no one's dying. Even I don't stomp on anybody's chest, make sure that heart keeps beating under the blood is pumping. Yeah, no, right.

 

Kevin Carney 11:41

Okay, so let's go to another realm of alpacas. explain, explain that, to that

 

Gloria Folaron 11:49

hurt my head. That was a big jump, because

 

Denise Beachley 11:53

well, it hurt ours too, as we were a very interesting background,

 

Kevin Carney 11:55

so we can't help but talk about it.

 

Gloria Folaron 11:57

So whatever 2020 We were living in outside the Bay Area in California. And I, we had our two girls who were still pretty, pretty young at that point three years ago, I guess, three and two or three and just barely turning two. And I like California, there's a lot of sunshine, a lot of good things. But that was our third year there. And every year between the fires and the blackouts, we were losing months at a time. And then finding community was getting challenging because people are too tired commuting, going to hours, everyone's busy, even our friends would live 45 minutes away. But if we didn't catch it in the right window, it would go from 45 minutes to a two hour drive. So I was getting restless, which I'm I'm prone to do. We've moved quite a few times in our in our lifetime together. And I had started to teach myself how to how to weave on a floor loom. So old school textiles making baby carriers. So wrapping babies on your body and tying it with these fabric. And one of my favorite fibers to use is alpaca. It's super soft. You use it more as a weft than you would as a warp. But it's what so weft is the direction of a fabric that goes side to side. Okay, and then a warp is the direction of the fabric that goes forward to back. Oh, so it's not strong enough to go forward to back the threads will break if you tried to do that, because it's not very strong. But it's super soft, and it's hypoallergenic. For most people. It doesn't have lanolin which often people are reacting to in wool. So I was doing that. We had just started an outdoor garden. The fires had just started again. And California

 

Kevin Carney 13:56

is Mother's nature's Disneyworld, right? Earthquake mudslides.

 

Gloria Folaron 14:01

Yep. Even the floods in San Francisco. Sometimes when those storms would get so bad they would be flooding the water would be flooding up. So one day we were in the backyard in the garden and I usually teach my girls by asking questions. And somehow it came up like what's the difference between an alpaca and a llama? And my uncle had alpaca. So I had at least been familiar with what's an alpaca? So we start Googling it and we were watching YouTube videos on our TV showing the girls alpacas and llamas, and I looked at my husband, I'm like, we could do that. And then like a month later, we were at a farm holding alpacas holding baby alpacas. And then three months later, we moved across country, but 33 acres had 25 alpacas oh and confession, I don't like being outside. So I was out in the barn like putting up walls and digging holes for fences and the whole nine yards and then never, never really done anything like that before. Wow.

 

Kevin Carney 15:06

Okay, so

 

Denise Beachley 15:07

from ER nurse to alpaca farmer, project manager for the people actually, exactly. Not much

 

Kevin Carney 15:16

of I don't know what where do you go from here?

 

Gloria Folaron 15:18

Unicorn status?

 

Kevin Carney 15:20

Oh, sure, like, perfect. Yeah.

 

Denise Beachley 15:22

That's how a company wants to go.

 

Kevin Carney 15:26

Okay, so let me go into a bit of an icebreaker here. So I was going to give you some fun facts about Alpacas, but then I realized that you probably know much more about Alpacas than I do. So that was not a good thing. I gave

 

Gloria Folaron 15:39

alpaca farm tours. So part of what we were trying to build was an agritourism business. So we were selling the yarn, I was doing soap felting classes, and then we were doing glamping so we had

 

Kevin Carney 15:51

what was the

 

Gloria Folaron 15:52

second one there? Soap felting. So felting Yep. So taking the alpaca fiber, I was hand making soap. And then I'd take the fiber and I would felt it into the soap and it's a natural loofa that base, basically biodegradable, super soft and antibacterial.

 

Kevin Carney 16:09

I just want to say the word alpaca LUFA

 

Gloria Folaron 16:14

that feels like a pack palooza. Oh, well.

 

Denise Beachley 16:18

Hey, concert at the alpaca farm.

 

Gloria Folaron 16:23

We had like a looper. The alpacas would like to sunbathe in the middle of the day. Yeah. And they would go lay in all over the dirt and you'd look out the back window and all these alpacas would be like laid up on their sides and it looks like something horrible happening then came through. joked around that it was the apocalypse.

 

Kevin Carney 16:46

They didn't glamping as well. Yep. So

 

Gloria Folaron 16:48

we, we built a industrial composting bathroom with two stalls, showers, nine yards there, and then had five tents and our forest area that was well shaded. And people were camping outside on queen sized beds. Oh, that sounds me. It was a lot. It was a lot of fun.

 

Kevin Carney 17:09

It's like Disney's Safari whatever, animal kingdom. We were did the alpacas come in, like in your window.

 

Gloria Folaron 17:15

The we didn't go there, that would have been interesting. The girl female packers, particularly are tend to be a little skittish. So probably not the best idea if you don't want spit all over your tents. Oh, and then once that's one that once that smell gets on you it does not go away very easily. Oh, so probably not the best idea,

 

Kevin Carney 17:37

right. I'm glad I didn't do all back effects. Rightly. So here's the here's the topic that so you're lean time and swing with a leaning tower of Pisa. See the lean? You see? Let me we were talking earlier about that. You heard of the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it's kind of popular. Yes. All right. So there's your lean connection. Look, I looked at Project Manager jokes and they were just the worst. They were bad. They were bad.

 

Gloria Folaron 18:13

We sell a t shirt. That's a good project managers always finished there. p r o j dot that that that.

 

Kevin Carney 18:24

I saw you when you had one on LinkedIn today. That was like why don't vampires make good project managers? Because they avoid stakeholders? Yeah. So that was the one joke that I could find last night. And like I can't find any other good jokes. I mean, they were just either lame or inappropriate. And then I saw you post that today. I'm like, What are the chances? So even when leading to herpes, okay, so let's get in here. Five questions on leaning therapies is for both you. Oh,

 

Gloria Folaron 18:53

okay. That's all for Denise.

 

Kevin Carney 18:57

Notice multiple choice, multiple choice. All right, at its maximum tilt in 1990. Because they since repaired it but as maximum tilt 9090. How many degrees of lists did the tower have? Two ish degrees? Five ish or eight ish.

 

Gloria Folaron 19:14

That's my fun instinct to

 

Kevin Carney 19:17

five ish, five and a half degrees, which is reduced to four degrees with some remediation. Okay. All right. So the tower was built over the course of 200 years, from 1178, long time ago, to 1370 to about 200 years. When did this tower when did the towers tart leaning one of the towers start leaning immediately, once was completed after 200 years, or hundreds of years after an earthquake

 

Denise Beachley 19:51

100 years after it was built or 100 years after the

 

Kevin Carney 19:54

earthquake after the earthquake.

 

Gloria Folaron 19:56

Can I ask if you wrote the multiple choice questions, answers. I did write, I wrote them. It's, that's why they're so bad. No, they're not bad. Just you

 

Kevin Carney 20:07

trying to get in my brain, I can feel it. I'm just

 

Gloria Folaron 20:09

confused by the last choice. People tend to follow trends.

 

Kevin Carney 20:13

Just after letters after

 

Denise Beachley 20:15

an earthquake. That's all we need to say after the earthquake.

 

Kevin Carney 20:18

Like when it was started, when it's completed, or like later on after an earthquake

 

Denise Beachley 20:23

after an earthquake, the middle one, do you Okay?

 

Kevin Carney 20:27

Almost immediately started listing like the at the first and second floor and sort of listing like within within, within a few years of starting. No, they hadn't even started basically just starting it. Wow. And they pause on it because of wars went up. Why didn't they go back and fix it? Like, this wasn't something that happened away afterwards? It's hard for them. They

 

Denise Beachley 20:45

need to get some new structural engineers,

 

Gloria Folaron 20:48

or it's like running projects. Pick and choose the fires. Oh,

 

Kevin Carney 20:53

my God is totally it's totally listing. Let's keep going.

 

Gloria Folaron 20:58

We do that all the time. Yeah, not you in particular. But people, people in general, you think

 

Kevin Carney 21:02

that like after the first couple of iterations, and they realize that it was it was falling apart that they should have stopped and regrouped. But they

 

Denise Beachley 21:10

didn't like most projects, wait till you get to the end, figure out what the problems are. And then you can't fix them. Or

 

Gloria Folaron 21:14

they they get conditioned a sunk cost fallacy and they think, Okay, I can't throw this away. We got to start and keep going. 200 years later, we got to finish.

 

Kevin Carney 21:23

It's a post MVP. Let's call it phase two. Okay. All right. How many steps does the tower have 294 296? Or? Yes. Yes. Just because you said yes, exactly. So on one side, it has 294 and the other side has 296. So you can get up higher. So yes, the answer is yes. Bill. Now's

 

Gloria Folaron 21:55

a good time for cricket.

 

Denise Beachley 22:00

Perfect. All

 

Kevin Carney 22:01

right. Yeah. So is they got to the seventh floor was like seven tears, like a thing of like a wedding cake. Right? The engineers built the upper floors with one side taller than the other purposefully. So it's not even lean. It's like, it's like, it's leaning. But it's also not they were

 

Gloria Folaron 22:17

trying to compensate for the leaning also how you run projects.

 

Kevin Carney 22:21

But now it's angled. Right. So it's like if you were to make if you were to have to straighten the damn thing. It would all the

 

Denise Beachley 22:27

floors are gonna be crooked. The floors that were

 

Gloria Folaron 22:29

in the right, exactly, completely destroy the other one, the other half of the building wanted to line up.

 

Kevin Carney 22:35

Alright, Galileo famously proved that two objects of different masses fall at the same rate by dropping them off the top of the tower. One of those objects was a cannon ball. What was the other object? A different size cannon ball? A sack of feathers? A sack of alpaca wool.

 

Denise Beachley 22:56

I thought it was a feather so I'm gonna say a sack of feathers. Yeah,

 

Gloria Folaron 23:00

the feather was the first thing that came to my mind.

 

Kevin Carney 23:01

It has to be a sock because you need wind resistance right so if it's a sack you won't have the like explaining that to me. Denise

 

Gloria Folaron 23:13

if we want to do some other woman explaining on the other side to an alpaca is from South America. So may not may not have access at that point in time.

 

Kevin Carney 23:28

So different sized cannon ball soccer feathers, or a soccer ball packable.

 

Gloria Folaron 23:31

Feathers, feathers, I

 

Kevin Carney 23:32

thought it was just a different size cannon ball. Just pretty lame.

 

Gloria Folaron 23:36

So the feathers is some

 

Kevin Carney 23:37

stuff that we made up like we like in school, right? It's one of those things

 

Gloria Folaron 23:42

that that it's easier to explain to our kid questions. It's one of those questions that they give you in school. Yes, I know. That's where I was going. Just comes out wrong.

 

Kevin Carney 23:53

All right, so last one, I think we can move on. True or False? Today, the Pisa tower is the most tilted tower in the world. And by most tilted I mean, like unintentionally tilted, like some goofballs made buildings tilted on purpose, right but, but today, the Pisa tower is the most unintentionally tilted tower in the world.

 

Denise Beachley 24:17

True or False? Yes.

 

Gloria Folaron 24:21

Sure. No, that's false.

 

Denise Beachley 24:23

I said yes, it was either true or false.

 

Kevin Carney 24:26

Oh, I see. You did. Did that. So the SIR who's in steeple in Northwest Germany, claims to be the most unintentionally tilted tower with the greatest lien in the world? 1.2 degrees more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

 

Gloria Folaron 24:42

Was that after before they fixed it, see it? Before

 

Kevin Carney 24:45

they fixed the Leaning Tower of Pisa was the worst.

 

Denise Beachley 24:49

But that's mostly a draw. That's not a tower. What?

 

Kevin Carney 24:52

No, what's the steeple stable. So there is a church.

 

Gloria Folaron 24:56

You're gonna say it's a there's a pointy part. It's not actually Elliot? Yeah, no, no. Well, the

 

Kevin Carney 25:01

color is on a part of a church grounds to the company Oh. Well, it's funny, they don't call it the Leaning Tower of Pisa. They just call it the Tower of Pisa. Also,

 

Gloria Folaron 25:14

if the original PISA was the winner, then I feel like that honor should just stay there. People fixed it. Oh, yeah. Well, was. Yeah. It's like putting a patch on it. We used to have the world record

 

Kevin Carney 25:29

now. We don't have the world record anymore. Yeah. Okay. We like here. Okay, let's go back to project management. Okay, so, so you're the Lean time software, right? It's a lot of fun to put to use, right. It's not fun to use that play with us. But I was I was playing with it. Watching the little Loch Ness Monster go by the Leo dressed up in a in a dinosaur costume. So explain why Lean time is a project management software is different. So

 

Gloria Folaron 26:01

we use behavioral science and motivational psychology to find ways to intrinsically motivate somebody that has a multifold approach. As it is, people are complex, right? What motivates us is not always the same. And it's not always the same across people. But some things are always stay the same. As an example, dopamine is the motivation neurotransmitter in the brain that says, Okay, I can get up and I can go do something if I decide to, for somebody who's neurodivergent, or has ADHD, as an example, that that hormone doesn't always do the, the neurotransmitter doesn't always do the thing it's supposed to do. And so they have a harder time getting up. So we really look at how do we make this cognitively accessible is kind of our bar. And dopamine can be produced in the brain by highlighting the progress towards a goal. And not so much like when you get there and celebrate it is nice, but it's that how do we bring goals and purpose and all of the whole inclusive meaning of what you're working on? So that it feels relevant, and you have ownership? And then we add in fun things that also make it a little more interesting. So

 

Kevin Carney 27:16

how do you do that? Can you give some examples, the fun

 

Gloria Folaron 27:19

parts or the dopamine, the dopamine. So step one is that we do incorporate goals. And then we also incorporate high level strategy. So baseline, you have to have those things to be able to do that. Most tools don't as a default. And they are vital parts of a project to begin with. Most of the tools start at execution and monitoring, and skip the first two phases of the project management cycle. So step one is that we have to have all of that in there. The other thing that we have to do then is that we have to simplify and make it accessible to anyone who was in the tool and not just the software engineer or the pm who is familiar with the tools. So we've we've simplified it to make that easier. And then that last step, and where you guys came in, is that we use generative AI to make those things more permanent and interactive. So that you have you can see those things. So highlighting the goals on your project progress. Future versions of that looks like being able to show a user when they complete a task, how much they've committed and contributed to the actual goals, like what percentage of that task and their specific work. Right now where goals as a whole, but we're adding in these elements as we're constantly building? I don't know if that answered your question.

 

Kevin Carney 28:45

I'm kind of read between the lines. So I know a lot of our challenge that we face is we do project management every day for the past 10 years, it Kingsman at least right. And then before that a lot of the Project Manager software that we've worked with is designed for people to monitor like you said, execution monitor, I'm going to monitor what you're doing. And the person that's actually doing the work has very little incentive to do anything in that tooling, right? Because it doesn't help them and help someone else. And so where you can get that dopamine hit, if I'm a developer or tester or something like that, I need to use those things to to track what I'm doing. If I do get those dopamine hits of, you know, I complete a task and I get a little hurrah from the Loch Ness monster that I'm now doing it for me. I'm gonna do it for you. I'm doing it for me, I want to do it. Because that's fun. Or I can work I can break down my work and see what I'm doing or I can vote on tasks I want to do or don't want to do. And so all of a sudden, I'm engaged with the tooling for me, not for you. It's not a chore that I have to do like a timesheet. It's something that I want to do so I can organize my work better That's

 

Gloria Folaron 30:00

the goal. I would say it probably goes deeper than the Loch Ness Monster floating. Like the last like Monster, it was great. No, I that's it. Those are my happy points too happy moments. There was a study I was reading recently that actually talked about how a smile and depending on the depth of the smile is a symbol of intrinsic motivation. So you can tell if somebody is feeling motivated by how big their smile is, she was really interesting. So you can combine that and how do we make people smile with the work that they're doing and see if that also changes the chemicals in their brains to promote those things. But I think it's on a bigger level, we're also trying to find a way to how do you improve the culture of an employment at your workplace, when those things feel really out of your control. So when companies are building strategies, oftentimes they're done in a silo, they are kept away, I read one study that said only 7% of employees can can actually name a single strategic initiative for from the company that they're working on. That's a really low number. And that means that the people who are actually executing the work have no insight into what they're supposed to be aiming for. And then they have no ownership. So when we build features, we're looking at how can we also make these become conversations that people can have. So on the goal perspective, I've worked at a company where I was, let's just set some goals, let's, let's what, let's make a direction. So we know, what does it look like when we get there. And over and over again, we couldn't, I never really understood what the what the hang up was, but at some point, I just felt resigned, um, completely resigned to the fact that this is just the way it is. And then I start to check out, and then I start to disengage when really, people want to feel ownership over what they're working towards. And they want to feel like they're contributing to something and a bigger purpose. And a lot of companies are missing that. So it's kind of this ability to reframe your culture at the same time of just small shifts in the processes can make a big difference and make it more clear and obvious.

 

Kevin Carney 32:21

Do you keep those goals front and center in your software? We do.

 

Gloria Folaron 32:25

And then we're working on those applications. So you talked about how it's also for the individual contributor, a lot of the systems, they will showcase more of the company. So it's companies work companies project. And then I talked to user after user, who then came back and said that that go in the tool, look at their tasks, and then they will rewrite that list somewhere else. And then check it off based on how their brain works, and then the subtasks and things that need to be done with that. Yeah. And that never makes it back to the original system. Having the individual contributor having the ability to basically create their own workflow within the tool, so that the focus is not just here's company now it's, here's me in the company, great. And I have I have purpose in it. So we're currently working on improving on that view. But that's also where we're using AI and where you guys have come in a lot to build features for that view. So on that view, in particular, we have have the ability to collect status updates from the from the team member, particularly for developers interruptions to your workday to figure out where the work is, is not conducive to workflow. You guys get that with having your blocked time for your developers. And so they can update tasks on their time when they're ready to but then we also have aI prioritizing their individual task lists to decrease the cognitive load of okay, what do I need to do now? When I came in, Denise, you asked me think we were at four or five different questions around options do you want this or this? Do you want this or this and I'm so cognitively overload, the decisions are very hard right now. Right? Nope, just let me have the water is great. Any, anything I don't have to make a decision about. And you see that all the time now or we just everything is moving so fast that that decision process is just difficult. And there might be a task that you can't stand. And for somebody with ADHD, which is myself, you give me a task that I can't stand it will be the task that gets completed 20 minutes

 

Kevin Carney 34:34

before it's due. Eat your vegetables last? Yeah, well, no.

 

Gloria Folaron 34:39

Throw them away. You eat them first. You eat the worst thing for the

 

Denise Beachley 34:46

ones you just get them done. So they're out of the way and you don't have to worry about him anymore. Yep.

 

Gloria Folaron 34:49

So we use the AI then to prioritize that task list using three science based productivity best practices. So the AI takes those and considers that but then And the features I'm really excited about that you guys just recently put in is the task sentiment using emojis on the individual tasks, so that we have a red angry face that's swearing, and then elated unicorn, tracking how you feel on a task, but privately, so even if you were in office, it turns to a blank check mark, so somebody can't see how you feel about it. But we can then take how you feel about the work and consideration to those recommendations. So there are some techniques around if you really don't like a task, pairing similar elements of it to a task that you really love, allows you to be more productive and get that thing done sooner. But the next stage of that feature is that we will then start to make recommendations on who to assign tasks to based on what they enjoy to do. And that's something that is not currently considered in productivity. But it should be because if you're assigning somebody who hates a task, a task, it's going to be the last thing that gets done right.

 

Kevin Carney 36:03

With the goals, the reason I like the goals, circling back to saying earlier is, so many times it's hard to keep up, keep people on, on task is not the right word. But on track,

 

Gloria Folaron 36:16

it's on point on point for a measuring bar. So

 

Kevin Carney 36:21

people generally want to contribute, and they want to do what they're good at and what they know. And they're hammer looking for a nail. So I'm really good at rewriting code refactoring code, or I'm really good at doing performance improvement, like you people are generally very good at certain thing they like to do that. But that might not be part of the goal. The goal is not to do tech refresh. The goal is to make it stable, and we want to get done as quickly as possible. So we can move on to something something else. I'm using the software vernacular but my gleaned time can be used for any sort of project management, right? Not just software. Oh,

 

Gloria Folaron 37:00

yeah, we have customers. One of my favorite stories is an archaeologist. He is He received a grant to digitize world war two images from the Japanese parts of the war. And he's been using Lean time, self hosted with his students and to track his progress. So we have things like that. So we have an active pastor who does code also. And he contributes information all the time. And even things to one of the gentlemen, I've been talking to recently, just started a refinishing business on the side. He's also an engineer, I think he's it. And he goes in there and tracks the furniture He's restoring

 

Kevin Carney 37:45

Oh, is that brandmark? Remark as

 

Gloria Folaron 37:49

it is, then he didn't say anything? And yes, a lot of project management questions. So Denise, we might have to talk.

 

Denise Beachley 37:58

You were talking about the goals, one of the things that I like that you all are doing, and I think you're gonna go there with the goals is, when we're relating to them to the tasks, it allows, not only, you know, what we have already talked about, but the ability for someone who's completing those tasks, to be able to see how they're contributing to the overall goal, and where they fit into the company strategy, how they're, you know, helping the company to meet that strategy. And a lot of places when you don't have a goal in there, you never get to see that you're just, I'm completing this because I was told to, I'm doing it because somebody said I needed to do it. Yep. Exactly. And you all are solving for them.

 

Gloria Folaron 38:40

There's another piece of that that is probably a little more of a personal agenda. But I'm a big fan of people holding me accountable. And so when you set the goals, and if you have leadership, that has a tendency to go after whatever smells really good that day, you now have the ability to say as an employee to feel empowered of hey, does that actually impact the goal that we're working? Right? Yes. Where the current culture for the most part doesn't have that option. And it now then becomes a neutral topic because it's data based. And it's less how I feel about the work and then less threatening. So it starts a whole new world of conversations that might not have existed before,

 

Kevin Carney 39:28

right? Yeah, those goals are oftentimes either not done in the beginning at all. And there's a bit of a free for all or they're done at a more of a leadership level. And we can start at a team level. They're not either they're not communicated to the team, or they're communicated once a year and a half ago. And as the project is progressing, people either forgot about it or people change and the team that the team make up turns over, and those get lost. Everyone knows the goal is in the first week and then by have never, never revisited say either the wrinkles is still right, we still get wrinkles. But as you're doing work, it's hard to remember that this relates to a certain goal in this manner. Yeah. Well,

 

Gloria Folaron 40:10

in software, I think there's always that question what is done, what is done mean? Because software is always evolving, you have to always update that and done doesn't really exist. And so when you have the goal, you can say, this is what done looks like. This is as far as we're planning on going, and this is what it looks like. And then we can say, Okay, now it's time to maintain or now we can have a different direction. But you don't have those conversations if you don't set those goals.

 

Kevin Carney 40:37

You mentioned ADHD a few times, how does that both impact your, what you want to contribute to lean time, like, like in building towards it? And someone that does not have ADHD? How can they how would they either react to that or adopt that? How has it helped them? They might even realize it? It's a very open ended question. But I know that that's a big, big point for you.

 

Gloria Folaron 41:09

I was late diagnosed ADHD. So I think we're two years ago now almost, I was diagnosed and I was diagnosed because we started seeing behaviors, we didn't quite know what to do without of my eldest daughter. And she's recently been diagnosed with ADHD as well. And that led to my own hay, all of these items in this checklist. Familiar.

 

Denise Beachley 41:36

Wonder where that came from? My entire

 

Gloria Folaron 41:38

life right here on a sheet of paper. So I ended up getting tested in that process. And one, getting the diagnosis and getting treatment and getting a better understanding of the way my brain worked all of a sudden, was life changing. It suddenly made everything make a ton of sense, but also gave me the power to make more sense of it and be in better control of it. So how do I make the necessary changes, to make myself more productive, and to highlight the things that I need to be doing? So what I realized out of all of that is that I, one, you really neuro divergence has a ton of different meanings depending on which condition you're talking about. But there's a lot of stigma around it, particularly in the workplace. If you have ADHD, that means you are constantly on squirrel mode, and you can't get anybody to focus and they're just bouncing off the walls, they won't stop talking, they interrupt you, they, they go back and forth. And there are a lot of people who have ADHD and you don't know it. And I noticed that the more I talk about it, sometimes people I would have never expected it. Or I'll take that back. People that I can tell probably have it. Don't ever come out and say that until I say at first. So are they still may not know, there's a lot of that I think the rate of people who don't know was when I say it was something like one in four, I don't remember the statistic off the top of my head, but it was still really high up there was a huge populate amount of people that don't know that they have it. So normalizing that conversation is a big component of that. But the tools that exist right now, we've tried to use them for me and things that Marcelo and I have done together. And I go in there and the moment it's too overwhelming. That's it nope, not opening it again, don't ask me to we're gonna find another way to do this. Or when I first started getting into startups, we did a startup weekend. And we were doing Lean Startup methodologies. And the principles there are to print out a big lean canvas, put it on your wall, and put post it notes all over and just move them from box to box. Well, I didn't know I had ADHD, ADHD, but what do you think happens when you have somebody with ADHD, and post it notes all over the wall? I couldn't put anything together. Like I couldn't tell what progress looks like I couldn't say my making contributions to what I actually want to be doing. That's that's where people end up reactive rather than proactive, you end up whether you have ADHD or not, you end up how am I I'm just tackling whatever comes at me as opposed to I'm making forward steps. And so when we're sitting down and building we're looking at okay, what is cognitive accessibility look like? Well, it's a tool that is not overwhelming. It's a tool that's motivationally intuitive. So instead of functionally intuitive, which is how a lot of UX tends to be is that we have rules where these things go. I drive ourselves sometimes a little crazy, because I'm like, that doesn't go there that needs to go somewhere else that I've either seen somebody do something that was a little strange in the system, from doing user testing, or even my own experience like this, this flow just doesn't make any sense but But that's not where traditional UX would put something. And so we go through these conversations around. Okay, how do we make something more intuitive to somebody's brain so that it's a natural flow? And how do we make project management fit people's brains as opposed to make people's brains try to fit project management? Right.

 

Denise Beachley 45:21

The other part of your question, Kevin, is, how does lean time software impact those who do not have a ADHD.

 

Gloria Folaron 45:31

So the line of dopamine, right. In ADHD, I mentioned that it doesn't always do the thing it's supposed to do. If you are boosting dopamine for somebody who has ADHD, you are also boosting dopamine for somebody who already has enough. And the example I like to give is, if you've ever gone up a wheelchair ramp, and whether you're tired, or it's just easier, and you don't feel like going up the million of stairs that might be there. When we build the world for everybody, we do make an impact on everybody, not just it's not an inconvenience, which sometimes people tend to treat accessibility as it's really we're making the world inclusive, and how do we do that for somebody with ADHD, but then also knowing that it's also going to boost the dopamine be more motivating, feel good, and make those benefits for somebody who doesn't.

 

Kevin Carney 46:31

You had something on LinkedIn, it was like a poster or story but you, you saw a phrase that people don't buy a drill, they buy a hole, they don't buy a quarter inch drill they buy, they buy a quarter inch hole, and I never sat well with you. Because it didn't. It didn't get to it being back, think back to the goals. People don't want a whole either, right? They want something else besides that whole. Elaborate that a little bit, because I think that is a nice metaphor of how if someone is sitting on the team, and they're just doing their tasks, they don't see how it fits in the bigger picture. And there's really no motivation, right? Go buy a drill. And that's your task and go do it. You don't see how it fits in and you also don't see where the what's in it for me kind of a thing. So go with that story a little bit.

 

Gloria Folaron 47:24

So I think if I remember correctly, that that post was a while ago, so I don't know

 

Kevin Carney 47:28

why I've been stalking

 

Gloria Folaron 47:32

me, ya know, that one was like that was a while

 

Kevin Carney 47:34

ago, jog your memory a little bit? No.

 

Gloria Folaron 47:36

So I think the premise on this one is for me has always been jobs to be done is part of that theory of like, somebody wanted a drill bit to help them do something and not calling back the example well enough off the top of my head. But really what that person was probably doing was they wanted to hang a picture of their family. And that is the thing that was motivating them to do something right, not the I need this functional thing. And we tend to get lost in the function. But humans are motivated by things that are internal to them, which you called out, what is the relevant thing that I'm doing? So that picture would have been personal would have been a memory, it would have been relevant to that individual and have some sort of meaning. And those are things that I described was it's a goal, right? It's a goal of what purpose and what progress and that thing is more motivating than sometimes the problem statement that we tend to lean on so heavy, because there are problems in the world where we find a line of tolerance. And even though it's a pain point, and we know it's a problem, we just resign ourselves to the fact that okay, there's no real solution, or I don't have the time for the solution. The things that actually motivate us to do something are the ones that are most meaningful to us. All

 

Kevin Carney 48:56

right. So if I were to extrapolate on that example, a little bit, if I was the, I don't know, the shopper, like go buy a quarter inch drill bit, I'm like, Okay, I'll do that eventually, maybe. But to know that's going to be hanging family photos up on the wall so people can get can see their family and remember their family. I can relate that to a lot of project work we do. So we're starting up a new desk, over to a broker dealer. And by standing up the new desk, they're allowed to trade new products and help other corporates meet their balance sheet goals. But I need to open a new book and opening a new book. And this is you have to create new code to do that and have to go fill out forms and mobile and it's it's annoying to have to go do those things. But where I know it's helping create a new desk and have a new revenue stream for the bank. All of a sudden, I'm now part of saving the world, right as opposed to I have to go open the code and find the place to add a new book and then go test it, because that's a boring piece where now I'm engaged as part of a larger, larger entity.

 

Gloria Folaron 50:05

But if somebody put the task of open the refactor the code in front of you, you're already grumpy and miserable. And you don't understand what the end goal is. Right?

 

Kevin Carney 50:14

Exactly, exactly. Alright, so project management, I understand your why you would call this project management stocks that you really want to use. Is there a better word for project management? Because you mentioned stigma earlier? Project management has a stigma, right? It really sucks. Now, it's a necessary evil, we all have to do it, right. Yeah. Called work, breakdown, whatever it is, right? So we, we find these big challenges, we break them down into smaller, smaller challenges, and we break them down into tasks. And we kind of chip away at that. Is there is there a better term for this, not just for, like lean time, but for the industry, because project management is so it's been played, it's dry, it's ugly, but

 

Gloria Folaron 50:56

it's also very ethereal. It doesn't describe anything. So because every project is different, the starting point of every project is different. The customer and the communication that the team, there is very little consistency, sometimes between projects. Yeah. And so you say project management time. Yep. And you say project management doesn't mean

 

Kevin Carney 51:16

anything I know. And that's why it's horrible. Well, so

 

Gloria Folaron 51:19

I asked Marcel. One day, I was like, Who taught you how to make a task list? Who taught you that? We're going to learn that just pick it up? Yeah. But somebody made a list in school and said something, okay, we're writing down these topics. And then now we're writing task lists. But nobody sits down and says, how do you document and make a plan so that your task list makes sense? How do you make these things align with what your goal is and where you want to be in five years. So then people go to college, and then they get into the workforce. And they're given multimillion dollar budgets, sometimes on projects with absolutely zero project management experience, to the point where a lot of my interviews, customer discovery calls, a lot of the project managers are not formally trained in project management, they tend to be very organized people. And so it's somebody who is very intolerant to the chaos that's ensuing and finds a way to rally the troops together and pull everything together, and then they learn as they go. But that means that you end up with a huge amount of inconsistency on how projects are run. And you don't get the right training on it. Remind me the original question, because I'm trailing.

 

Kevin Carney 52:39

What we can rename project management. There we go.

 

Gloria Folaron 52:44

So the closest I've gotten to it is more of a work management, like work breakdown. The industry also has this problem, because I will I've found so many different categories that we fit in where business architecture, where, because we include strategy or strategy execution software. Now I discovered where I would think team management software would be resource management like allocation, team management, software's apparently project management tools, and so what you'll see is that the industry leaders will go around and they'll just create content around all of those words, and dominate the first like 10 keywords or the search items on a Google search. And it still doesn't mean anything, because we've just defined it as tasks for where it is, which is what most of the systems are doing.

 

Kevin Carney 53:40

I think I think Bill would call it a get stuff done.

 

Denise Beachley 53:43

Yeah, I was gonna say GSD it's interesting because you know, we don't really I don't think internally we really use the word project management we just have a process that we follow when we're trying to deliver something for a customer is priceless it is the way it

 

Gloria Folaron 53:58

falls into change management and malls in a digital transformation covers everything and thing you do to pull all the people together

 

Denise Beachley 54:06

it's it's our way it's how we do stuff and

 

Kevin Carney 54:10

so the term project imply I realize I'm probably going tangent here, but this isn't this is my squirrel. The term project indicates there's a start and a finish right I'm trying to accomplish this piece of work and start and stop but we use it for everything we use it for marketing reasons for finance, we use it for sale like like if he's in a home yeah, I mean, you have I had stickies on the wall my wife Oh,

 

Gloria Folaron 54:29

you're really into the process.

 

Denise Beachley 54:32

Well, it works for everything. It's yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 54:34

I love being able to ask my wife Okay, so what are we doing this weekend and let's prioritize it and if you don't get it I don't get everything. I don't get everything but but let me know what will work out and why and how big it is

 

Gloria Folaron 54:44

planning a trip across country taking a vacation the exact same project management processes, you plan a wedding, same thing you need to define a date and what it looks like and all those steps that it's the

 

Denise Beachley 54:57

one of the like GST GST. So

 

Gloria Folaron 55:00

have you seen GTD Getting Things Done method? There's there's a whole book and a whole cult following, and we just reached

 

Denise Beachley 55:11

out to you for an F.

 

Gloria Folaron 55:13

But does it based on the book? No, no. Okay.

 

Denise Beachley 55:17

So thing that we do is based on our Kingsman way, which is awesome.

 

Gloria Folaron 55:21

And that's culture. Right. So that's that's another element that I think gets neglected is that people tend to not realize that how you manage work as a whole, as a company is a culture element, you can drive somebody off the edge of the cliff, with how you run your work, and how they run work in a department. One of the one of the places I worked, there was a never ending shift in priorities for what was going to end up on the marketing side. And so I would be one minute working on something and then now it's urgent, I need to change gears. Two minutes later, have something else ready to go. And I was I was losing my mind. Like, it's that you, you want to feel like you're making impact and progress. And if you're constantly shifting priorities, you can't do that. Yeah,

 

Kevin Carney 56:15

it's suddenly a contract between all the different players, right? It's, it's, it's not just that the team members have to deliver what they're working on, it's got to be from the upper management, saying, I'm gonna tell you what's most important to me, I'm gonna let that stay for a little bit of time. Because if I do start ad hoc in you and changing your priorities on the fly, and then ask you why you're not using done, I shouldn't be surprised. Right? So it's a contract with both ways is I will agree to indicate what I'm trying to accomplish and give you some space as to how to accomplish it. I'm also going to give you time and not change your priorities. And if I do that, then you should be able to chip away at this stuff, the maximum to get, and this should be more predictable at that point in time. Right. You would think you would think part of that's more than the tooling. Part of that is that

 

Gloria Folaron 57:02

there's the expression that the tools are tend to only be as good as the people using

 

Kevin Carney 57:07

them. Yes. But the pilot in the cockpit, right?

 

Gloria Folaron 57:11

Where the our long term goal is going to change that.

 

Kevin Carney 57:16

All right, so we mentioned AI a little bit. And I know you've got some more AI features in the hopper and a bunch of other features in the hopper. So what what's what is the next 12 months look like? Have you got other accelerators that you're currently in? Do you have some fundraising new features? What look in the looking glass here and figure out what's coming up the next year?

 

Gloria Folaron 57:38

So I mentioning one of the ones we're in right now is the right accelerator, we finished that mid mid month, we just got accepted into a well known accelerator that has a we're not allowed to announce it yet. Okay. So we have another program that we're gonna go, we're getting ready to go into our step one right now is we project management is complex in terms of even our tool. So considering that our core, our core team is two people, we have a rather robust platform we do I know that has for two people. And then you just say we're precede I usually get a confused look, when I'm like, No, we've got a full engaged tool out there. And now we're refining and trying to make those higher end features. And so that is a bit of where we're at. And we're currently raising funds now so that we can build out integrations, we find that that's been one of our biggest hurdles to getting even more adoption. We've had engineers say I'm ready to introduce you to my company and my team. But I need you to integrate with get lab and I need you to integrate with some other their developer platforms usually, but that link with their software so that they can tie those tick those tickets with the system. And that is one of those things that other tools like JIRA have very engrained in terms of positioning that they've got the trifecta of integrations. And so fundraising gets to go to that and helping to build up that scale. So the next 12 months is really think hitting growth, and then identifying who is that real, go to market strategy. So right now we have a very horizontal demographic, which is intentional, right? So when we're talking about building project management, and it works for everything. We we started to be broad on purpose if we went into the saying, Okay, we're building a tool just for software developers, we would have a tool that looks like it's for software developers and we would be doing exact same thing, but the rest of the tools are doing. And I know it's traditional startup advice, that's what you have to do. But we're really leaning on the market and the customers and the community to drive that. So as we get those parody features and get alignment, then we have the ability to say, Okay, now we know who we're really going after. And we can go hard, because we've got this whole huge amount of betting, and not just those, okay, I know, this market could be good for it,

 

Kevin Carney 1:00:30

you're just the fact you have 20 plus 1000 20,000, plus, where you had the plus in that you have a lot of users a lot of downloads, and you're getting a lot of feedback to write. So it's one thing to talk to customers theoretically about what they might want from some software. But as they're using it, and they start asking for things, right, the voice of the customer is so much stronger, because it's real. And so, you mentioned with, you still precede but you have 20,000 instances, you already have some revenue. That's why in some of the awards, you've won, like that's why it's so mind boggling your progress. And now with your go to market strategy, and just monetizing those 20,000 users and keep growing it. That's you've got so much potential next year. It's amazing.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:01:16

Oh, I'm excited. It's funny that you call this impressive, because I still sit here and I'm like, it's not fast enough. It's not fast. Like I can do so much more. If we can do this with hardly anything. Can you imagine what we could do with a capital infusion? And I just sit here and I'm like, Ah, how do I make this work? But then people hear the word project management. And they're like, this is an old story.

 

Kevin Carney 1:01:43

Sexy name, right.

 

Denise Beachley 1:01:44

That's why we need you need to come up with another name for it.

 

Kevin Carney 1:01:47

Because your your software is very refreshing, right? As you start to use it. It's different. And you can easily see that quickly. So yeah, you need a different term.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:01:55

Can we go cool. So cool, sexy tools that were that were cool. Yesterday,

 

Kevin Carney 1:02:00

the the alpaca management tool. Now, we'll work on it.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:02:07

One of the reasons our farm did so well was when we got here, just in general, like rural areas tend to not be as up on the tech. And so the moment we had a website up, we were already ahead of the game and so many respects, they're thorough back of arms all over, you just might not know them because they're not advertising. And, yeah, that is a benefit of some of my background. Because that that nursing, where we talked about project management, that other side of my background is really that brand and initial customer adoption. So our first year, we did really like we did over six figures, no our first year, and that was only seven or eight months in. We had some unfortunate things come out with our co founder that just kind of I think it was in the other podcast who had mentioned earlier. But the SEO and elements like there is so much to be said for when you are solving for what somebody is already looking for. And they find you and you just don't end up needing to spend all of the resources on sales and hunting those people down because they're self identifying.

 

Kevin Carney 1:03:21

Right, right. Okay, so where if someone wants to learn more about Lean time and yourself, where are they going to find you? Where are the websites, what conferences you're going to be at? So be in the once the global entrepreneur week, next week, two weeks, like where will you be?

 

Gloria Folaron 1:03:37

So is it next week, two weeks, two weeks from now? We will be

 

Kevin Carney 1:03:43

which is dropped. Surprise me this week later. We'll probably drop it that week.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:03:47

Okay, podcast. Well, so this week, right now, this week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we'll be at venture 135 will be pitching that afternoon on Tuesday. Okay. And then we are also things are starting to slow down now. We've been nonstop since the beginning of October. Yeah. Well, holidays are kicking in. So things are

 

Kevin Carney 1:04:13

coming back from Raleigh three in the morning. A

 

Gloria Folaron 1:04:16

lot. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I had a better list for you right now.

 

Kevin Carney 1:04:19

My brains on.com That that

 

Gloria Folaron 1:04:21

io.io. And then I'm on LinkedIn. Fairly pretty active on LinkedIn, LinkedIn messages, and my email, which is my first name Gloria at lean time.io are the most reliable ways to get a hold of me. Okay. I'm Drew millennial. I don't answer phone calls.

 

Kevin Carney 1:04:41

Just look for the woman with a cool glasses. Right. All right.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:04:43

What if there's somebody else was cool glasses?

 

Kevin Carney 1:04:46

Well, your glasses are cooler than others. So yes, they really are. You're suddenly your signature move.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:04:52

The website though that I get these from is starting to get traction because I'm running into other people with cool glasses and I'm like, oh, Oh, I do that too. And then where do you get yours? It's the same company. So it's alright. At some point, we're gonna hit mass adoption and then so

 

Denise Beachley 1:05:09

we need to look just for Gloria at lien time that I Oh, yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 1:05:12

That's

 

Gloria Folaron 1:05:13

1. Well, thank

 

Kevin Carney 1:05:15

you for joining us. This has been awesome. Well, always a pleasure. Very, very unconventional podcast. Yes. I

 

Gloria Folaron 1:05:21

think that's your that's your MO though, right? We

 

Kevin Carney 1:05:24

tried to do that. But your apakah stories and your ER nurse and ADHD all kind of contribute to and your glasses, makes it make this much more interesting.

 

Denise Beachley 1:05:33

But when you think about it, there is a connection

 

Kevin Carney 1:05:36

to why all of these things Yeah, they're all connected, in that they're not connected know,

 

Denise Beachley 1:05:41

the, the medical background and then the diagnosis with the ADHD. And the alpacas because we got into the alpacas because they're very soothing and soft and tactile. It's all connected. You're there with me, right? No, it

 

Gloria Folaron 1:05:56

is all connected in so the ADHD is kind of part of that element. I think the last statistic I saw was 300%, you're 300% more likely to start a business if you have ADHD. And 30% of entrepreneurs have either ADHD dyslexia or some other form of neuro divergence. And it's, sometimes it's rooted in novelty seeking, which is a symptom, but I'd call it a trait of ADHD. So that novelty brings out that dopamine, but then we tend to be less risk averse. So like dropping everything three months and moving across country. Sure. But it's also partly why I started in the ER, the ER, you don't have the same patient for 12 hours, you are literally like, there are some nights where I would have four, four rooms in a patient's. And I would turn over all of those rooms at least four times. So I would see a ton of people and a ton of different complaints. Some of them would be super, super sick, and some of them would be so I'd be pulling from all of those areas in my brain.

 

Kevin Carney 1:06:59

You know, there's hyper focus for short periods of time, and then and then move on to the next thing. Yeah, yeah. But so I look at the pack, which I could see as being if you told me you did alpacas for like three months, that would reinsure to me. But you've done it for quite some time, right? I mean, if you have 25 packages, and you have a 33 acre farm like like, you, that's not something you just did fly by night. Now, maybe that that's played out, right? Maybe that's, that's no longer a thing. But my point is, you didn't just do it and then leave, move on. Like, that's a focus.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:07:33

Yeah. So there's a line, right. So there are elements of take nursing, for example. So even when I've gone back and picked up extra shifts in nursing at this point, in my career, there is very routine. It's very physically routine in terms of active, and my brain needs stimulation. So I have a really hard time with the mundane routine behaviors. But when it's constantly changing, constantly shifting it that that works. So startup, entrepreneur, nor life when you are building strategies, and you're working with teams, and you're working from all these events, week to week at doing totally different things every week, right? That is something that's still novelty, and then like monitoring progress, like constantly in our data and seeing how many instances do we have today? Three or four times a day,

 

Kevin Carney 1:08:29

right? That's a dopamine hit, right? Yep, that's it. Yeah, right there. You can check to see oh, I have 21,004 and 68. Yep.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:08:36

So that SEO side of my brain, I, when I started the SEO, full force or closer to full force back in probably January ish, maybe closer to March, we were getting about 5000 users have a month on the website. And this last month, we hit 15. So that's like dopamine, watching that progress.

 

Denise Beachley 1:09:03

And you're talking to users, you're not talking about instances. These are users to the website. So just the traffic

 

Gloria Folaron 1:09:09

coming to our website grew from the 5000 on a regular rate basis. So that's yeah, that's traffic

 

Kevin Carney 1:09:17

green. 1000 a month. Yep. Hits, Unique Visitor hits. Yep. Wow,

 

Denise Beachley 1:09:22

that's impressive. That's awesome.

 

Kevin Carney 1:09:24

Question and hopefully it doesn't. It comes off the right way. But neurodivergent like that, by itself sounds like a bad thing. Right. Like, but but I don't think ADHD I know is a stigma but doesn't seem like a negative thing, right? It's just, it's just a different way of your brain operating. So it's not divergent. Right. It's it's a weird term. It's divergent

 

Gloria Folaron 1:09:51

from the norm. So if you think of the traditional brain approach, you don't ADHD is an example when you put somebody with ADHD under scanner versus somebody who would identify as neurotypical. Yeah. And even the word typical right denotes that there's some normalization that we all have to align to. The brain lights up in different areas. And so some of the thought is, is that for somebody with ADHD, they are over processing information. So they take in more information in their brain than somebody in a neurotypical way, which makes them sometimes run faster. And to your point, like, it's just about finding a way to make all of our brains work together. And then when we do that, like the studies, the studies show, even for Dei, so the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, just even on a ethnicity side, the companies that focus on those things, do better have happier employees, they have better perspectives, they take more risks, and they last longer, and they do better things.

 

Kevin Carney 1:11:04

The people that I know that ADHD or at least have told me they have ADHD are the most interesting people that I know. So I see it as a very positive thing. Now, don't get me wrong, there's downsides to it as well. But there are a lot more interesting than people that are really good at doing the mundane.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:11:20

Right, we used to joke around in our last five years, we've done more than some people do in a lifetime. Yeah.

 

Denise Beachley 1:11:29

The thing that's interesting to me, and this is the teacher coming out of me is, and, of course, this is opinion of Bill's probably still recording me. This is opinion, but I think the reason that it gets and has the stigma associated with it, is usually when people are diagnosed, they're diagnosed when they are in grade school. And it's a teacher that has to I'm gonna use the wrong term, but it's a teacher who has to deal with somebody who has ADHD, and they just don't know how well it doesn't. So it's exactly, you've got 30 kids who don't know how many are in a classroom now. And the majority of them are doing something in a certain way. And then you've got these few others that aren't, and they just don't, they don't know how to deal with them. They don't have the time to deal with them. So then they become the kid that is different. Yeah. Right. And that's what gives it the stigma. And if you would just educate people to realize that they just think differently, not good, not bad, not it's just different. Is it? Is it?

 

Kevin Carney 1:12:41

They don't understand or don't know how to operate? Or is it they just don't have the time. I need I need to put together a different way of learning for those two or three kids that are seem like troublemakers.

 

Denise Beachley 1:12:51

I think it's both I mean, because if you look at some of the teachers that are out there, they've been teaching for 50 years.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:12:59

It's a systems problem, like the system is not built. For the longest time that like school, they told you you need to sit down or it was gonna smack your hands like, yeah, the model doesn't fit those, those kids and in all fairness, like we've been sitting here for the last hour, and however many minutes and you guys have not sat still, no, you're fidgeting with the cable, you've been playing with your pens and your little scarf over our system. And and that's that's part of learning, right? So that is a we are whole bodies, like our brain is kinetic, it processes information visually auditorily. When you combine all of those things, the brain processes even better. So it's like, we're telling kids not to move and to sit there in silence and wait for instruction. And it's not. That's not how adults work. But adults can find ways to make those shifts. So as an example of somebody with autism might have sensory sensory difficulties, so they don't like to wear certain type shirts, or the way socks feel. And so they turn their socks inside out. But children don't know how to do that. Or they don't know they don't have the ability to communicate to their parents that they the reason they don't want to wear those pants is because it's itchy and Bernie and it doesn't feel good to their skin. Some of the studies around that for autism in particular, the sensory, they actually trigger pain receptors in the body. And so the reaction in the brain is as if you were in pain, and yet we were like, just suck it up.

 

Denise Beachley 1:14:34

Just sit there and be quiet. Yep. Yeah. No, I know very well that I cannot sit still without something in my hands. Yeah, that is just the way I listen better. I pay attention better if I have something in my hands. It's a good thing. I never took up smoking.

 

Kevin Carney 1:14:51

My son, he's 23 he he going growing up he had ADHD undiagnosed also So, dyslexia, and he was never a great student, you kind of have solid B student, which means some A's MCS and some B's. And we get like, you know, parent teacher conferences like, well, he's not really good at reading and like, Well, why not like, looking over in the corner there. He's got the book upside down. He was like, at the first grade or second grade, there's a books upside down. And so, you know, we finally realize, like, what are you doing? He's like, it's too boring to read it the right way. So I challenged myself to read it upside down and backwards. And so that's the kind of thing where like, mundane, like sitting there and reading something was just so boring to him. He could flip it upside down, and his dyslexia brain would kind of like translated correctly. And it was just easier for him to kind of like, maybe the fun for him to go do that. And then he would never do a reading assignment. But if you give him a YouTube video, he's watching that at all hours. Because he it'll play it in the background, and he can just kind of sort of listen to it as he's doing something else. And he absorbs it all. Right now he's getting his master's in aerospace engineering. Right. So. So what he also still has his baby blanket. Here he is, like, master student, you might want for a PhD, that's commerce. Recording. But but but the tactile feel of it, right? It is, it is shreds, like you would not know what it is, because it's just whatever he does to touch and feel. So I think back to what was the was it the mutiny on the cane, the cane mutiny came up with Humphrey Bogart. He had to steel balls, he would roll around in his hands all the time. And he was when he was little bit crazy. But the point is, he always had them with them. And when he got out of sorts, he would really start moving around in his hands. And so that's what my son does is he just, he has that with them at all times is really it's really kind of weird, but it works.

 

Gloria Folaron 1:17:01

It's regulating. He

 

Kevin Carney 1:17:04

also is a huge weightlifter so

 

Gloria Folaron 1:17:09

very incongruence but that's also dopamine producing the exercise on the weightlifting really.

 

Kevin Carney 1:17:14

Yep. Interesting.

 

Denise Beachley 1:17:18

Anyway, this has been fun. Yeah, we digressed.

 

Kevin Carney 1:17:22

Well, it's impressive if you've made it to the end of this podcast. We wandered a bit in our conversation, but it follows in the spirit of having ADHD. Thank you to Denise speech li CIO of Kingston software for joining us for today's conversation. And thank you to both the receipt for taking time out as CEO duties to be our sound engineer. A special thanks to Gloria fuller on founder of lean times for sharing her journey with us. A few days after we recorded this podcast, meantime announced that they were accepted into the prestigious TechStars accelerator. So we wish them luck on their continued success. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Houston's beyond the build podcast where we showcase interesting innovators from the Charlotte area until the next podcast, go build something awesome