1978 – Strategies for Thriving in the Evolving Tech Landscape with FYC Labs’ Justin Fortier

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1:05With us right now, it's Justin Fortier. Justin, you are the founder and CEO of FYC Labs. You are found on the web at fyclabs.com. Justin, it's great to have you. Josh, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Well, give us an overview of your work. And again, I know that FYC Labs is part of a larger consortium, but I'll let you kind of maybe fill in the gaps on that. Yeah, that's the perfect word for it. So FYC Labs is kind of the mainstay or the primary business that we run day to day. It's a development and creative agency that builds web applications, mobile applications and websites. Our clients tend to be SMB, a lot of B2B, some enterprise clients.

1:51Remax is one of our larger clients. A lot of startups that have been acquired. So we built a lot of different technology and that has allowed us to then spin off and build our own products and create our own venture studio and do some angel investing and getting in with some of the really cool startups that we found through our agency. So as that, as FYC has grown, we've been able to kind of build this larger group that we're calling Fractal. I'll talk a little bit about that later and kind of what it's like to be a serial entrepreneur and use one, you know, use your services business to build up some internal products and things like that.

2:24So, yeah, core product, core business, 11 years old, FYC Labs development agency, about 50 employees. So, yeah. Now, so, you know, some may look at kind of the software development, app development world and wonder how that world has changed over the past 11 years. Certainly, you've had the longevity in it to kind of stand the test of time. What is it that FYC has been able to do to differentiate yourself where maybe other lesser folks have not stayed around or not been able to continue to maintain growth and thriving in an environment where maybe a lot more is done by AI, maybe a lot more is done by cheaper labor from different parts of the world?

3:18I mean, I can't pinpoint one or two specific things that I could say would differentiate us. It's a very difficult thing to stay alive 11 years. It's a very difficult thing in the agency side to keep going. What we've really done, I guess the one thing that if I go back and look at it, it's diversification and innovation. So if I look at how the path of our agency has gone, I've left and come back quite a few times, gone out, built products that are sort of outside of the traditional kind of status quo technology. I went and did blockchain stuff, did AI stuff, came back, brought that knowledge back to the agency.

3:55So that diversification of knowledge, that diversification of investment into different pieces, and then to have some internal products that we built up to kind of bolster what we're doing has been really influential. It came from, ironically, it came from when I was in grad school, I worked at a bar. And our bar group spun off about 10 restaurants in a five-year span, right? So what they did was they would they create a consortium of businesses and they allowed that different group to create buying power, create a diversification of employment opportunities that retain longer term employees. Because if you think about bar work, restaurant bar workers, they're typically only working two or three shifts for one business and they're picking up a couple.

4:40Well, if they all stay within the family, you're retaining that talent. So the diversification that FYC has done over the years allows us to retain talent longer because it gives them different options and different tracks for their employment versus a traditional agency, which is we're going to place you at a client and we'll call you in six months and see how that's going with that client. Right. Justin, I'm sure that in your world, you're seeing a ton of evolution taking place, obviously, as AI, which has been around for quite some time, but certainly hitting the mainstream a lot more. And I would say, you know, in a bit of Moore's law, we're seeing certainly some evolutions that are kind of exciting.

5:20How has that impacted your world? So, you know, I mean, obviously there's the fear of losing out to AI and saying, hey, it's going to replace the work that we're doing. There's no doubt if we were lazy and complacent, that definitely would take our position. If we weren't trying to stay ahead of it, it's trying to stay innovative. There's applications out there with a few prompts. They can give you boilerplates that took me three, four years to develop through my team and hone and perfect. A couple prompts inside of AI now, and you've got that same boilerplate that I had, and it's ready to go, and you've got a small SaaS product.

5:51Now, I know that those applications are still going to require maintenance over the years. Somebody's going to screw them up. And then here we come in and we fix it and save the day. We did that with WordPress back when WordPress scared everybody that web developers were not going to be needed anymore. When Wix came in, when Squarespace came in, somebody's always making a mess with these low code tools, no code tools. And we're always there to bail them out of trouble. So I know that what we're doing is creating more democracy or democratizing the web application and development and software process, which is beautiful.

6:20I think it's a really cool skill to learn. I think everybody should have to go through at least a JavaScript class just so they can learn how code works and they have some empathy and understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. So I think it's a beautiful thing that it's democratizing that piece. There's going to be Lint. There's going to be tech debt forever. It never goes away. It's always been there. So in many ways, as long as we stay ahead of the curve, I'm starting to teach our group the frameworks that are being generated by AI so that when we go back into repair them, we know the framework already.

6:54So yeah, and also obviously it's helping our workflows. We're using it left and right. Copilot from GitHub and Microsoft has been changing the way we code, making things cleaner, making things more effective. It's just a great environment. Now, I'll talk about the ethical and, you know, doomsday concerns another time. But from what perspective right now, it's been really fun. Yeah. Justin, I think most of us that are listening, you know, I think there's been times where we've had successful engagements with developers. And then there's been times where we've had very unsuccessful engagements. you know maybe yeah boy okay I've got to I've got I think all of us have been in business for any length of time and you know and kind of more that high-tech world we have many many stories to tell and lots of blood on the ground from having our nose bashed in a few times I only like hanging out with people with scars you got some scars we can hang out yes right right right so tell me a bit about maybe your advice or your best practice for aligning with someone that is going to be providing tech solutions.

8:06Primarily, we're thinking about software and apps. I think that there are a lot of big promises out there. Yeah, I think it comes with any vendor that you're working with, right? It depends on how you want to treat your vendor. Is your vendor just a transactional interaction and you expect to send an email and you get a product back? you're probably not going to get the best results because you're not actually giving the right direction or you don't have your requirements fleshed out if i'm building a house and i just say hey buy me build me a house and i send you a picture of a house you're not going to get the exact house that you wanted you don't you don't haven't done all the specs right or if you're a builder in construction or commercial real estate type stuff right so with software development it takes the same amount of engagement and interaction as you would with any other vendor and i find And folks who, now don't get me wrong, there's contractors out there who fleece people for their money.

8:56They just subcontract half the work and they don't actually know what they're doing. And they're just glorified brokers of talent. At FYC, we only hire people who have technical backgrounds. Every person you talk to is either a designer actively or was a designer for three to four years or a developer for three to four years. that's our i can't i personally can't work as well with my team if they haven't been in a position where they're developers we don't have those kind of project manager kind of shuffle stuff so a lot of times i think the um war stories that you hear are often when there's non-technical project managers fence tossing work to developers and there's no kind of empathy or spec being given and drawn out so then you end up having from the client perspective they're thinking oh i'm not getting the product that I want and the project manager doesn't really have the technical know-how so you kind of lose that translation so that's why I don't love a lot of the agency models that are out there today where you have a non-technical project manager outsourcing to wherever it may be I don't care if you're U.S.

9:56based or India based uh Eastern Europe based it has more to do with the culture of ensuring that everybody in the in the positions that are doing the communication have both sides of the aisle so that's one thing that we've changed um and we'll or that we've kind of shined with is, yeah, as a boutique agency is we do not have the fence tossing of mindset. Everybody's engaged. Everybody's involved. Yeah. Justin, tell me a bit more about your organization. And I'm curious as well, just about, it seems like you do a lot of great work within your local community. And it seems like you're very actively involved and that that likely leads to continued opportunities.

10:38Am I right there? or what else do you do from a maintaining growth perspective? Yeah, I mean, there's a natural curiosity, right? Like coming out, hanging out with you, Josh, and seeing what you're up to and asking questions to you and like saying, how do you engage your community? What do you do up to? I go have beers with some friends who are all business owners. Basically my whole professional career, I found a peer group that I'll either go have coffee with or I'll go have beers with, something like that where we just sit down and talk. So there's only so much you can learn from a book. You need to know what that person's visceral emotional reaction and guttural reaction to things that they've been through, like our shared scars, that has more of an impact on you than you realize versus what I read in a book.

11:23I can go read Malcolm Gladwell till I'm blue in the face. But until I've had that intrinsic pain or fear, and I've overcome that or engaged it, you're not going to really know what it's like to be a real entrepreneur. So that community is that group that you go and talk to, that you learn from. You look at their reactions to it and you can see how serious someone is interacting with it. To the point of the community side, it's an interesting community for us as developers and as a remote business because our community isn't. I'm in Folsom, California. I'm in a great co-working space. We have a little private office and there's some really fun people out there that I love to hang out with.

11:57But that community isn't the only community that we interact with as a remote agency. So community is folks like you, other podcasts, other influencers inside the space. So it's important to engage, right? And get to know how to make that growth happen or maintain innovation and touch with what's going on. Yeah. Only because I've never chatted with someone in Folsom, California. Is there any signage or any, does Johnny Cash have any presence there? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Tell me more. Yeah, and the Folsom Prison, there's a prison museum. You go drive into our office. You go right underneath the Johnny Cash Bridge, which connects the Johnny Cash bike trail.

12:39We got nothing else. Okay. He's acknowledged. Okay, great. Help put it on the map. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Justin, in terms of app development, software development, obviously, we talked a little bit about AI right now. You know, for folks that are maybe in, you know, they're thinking about like they've got something, it's been on the whiteboard, they're thinking about undertaking it. And, you know, maybe it's an app, right, that, you know, supplements some of the other work that they're doing, or they want to, you know, appify, you know, something that might be a little bit more browser based.

13:19You know, again, just in helping folks be a smarter consumer, what things in the shopping around process or, you know, in chatting with developers, you know, what things might you tell them, you know, you should be asking for this, you should be wanting to know about this, you should probably be looking into this technology versus that technology, anything immediately come to mind? yeah i mean we're we're in a really interesting time where we're i mean not that this is the first time this happened but we're in a rapid development period where products are coming out like crazy to do different things with ai i mean i had a really fun time with my kids doing uh disney covers from different artists because now there's great song ai products out there and just having fun with it right um these are in that that was those are probably three month old applications so it's and it's just and there's going to be three more of them within a few weeks and then there's going to be two more uh video modification ones we we talk about uh taking a taking video like this we'll take this podcast we'll clip it up into a bunch of uh clips and put it online using opus clip this beautiful uh ai tool that helps with video so it's happening so fast um which can create fear right it could create fomo you'd be like oh i'm missing out i'm not using the latest, greatest AI tool.

14:42So my competitor is, and they're going to beat me. It could also be, oh, I don't know what they're doing with my content is where are we at? And this is, this is a very interesting time. It was, it reminds me a lot of when I was in blockchain, where there was a lot, there was a huge race and to create dApps and decentralized applications and invest into cryptocurrencies. And some people made millions and some people crashed, right? Some people lost a lot of money. There's several applications that never saw the light of day. So the main thing is right now, the same way that we approach the decentralized situation, the crypto was get to know the team behind it.

15:15Make sure that they're a reputable team who's building this. Is it somebody who slapped together a GPT wrapper who doesn't know what they're doing? And then next thing you know, your data is just getting flooded everywhere. They're not taking care of your private information. All of that is to be considered. So look at the teams developing, make sure they have a good track record. Now, not everybody's going to take that time to do it. so I get it. No one's going in there to see who's building every tool. So that would be the first thing, is look at the teams building it and then consider your business use case.

15:45Are you just playing with a toy or are you actually solving a problem? Because sometimes you're just playing with a toy and it's a major distraction. Yeah. Justin, your website is fyclabs.com. To a friend that's listening to our conversation and they're like, okay, Justin seems like a pretty good guy. What would you recommend their next steps be? So I think depending on where they stand. So there's, if they need a website, they need a web application, they need somebody to help guide them through a lot of this. That's a great place to go to fyclabs.com, engage with our team. Like I said, we're about 50 folks on the team, and we're all experienced designers, developers, and you're going to get really good talent there.

16:25The interesting thing that's happening now is we're starting to build this fractal group. And what we're trying to look for is to create a bigger community of entrepreneurs and people who kind of want to invest into this group that we're building. So we have over 11 angel investments through this group. We have four services businesses that we've started and eight venture studio product startups that we have. This group is going to be doing really cool and interesting things. And if you're looking to kind of see what a group is up to, and maybe you're an angel investor yourself, maybe looking for a fund to get involved with, we're starting to put together some more opportunities for other entrepreneurs to get involved in our larger group.

16:59Because again, the diversification allows us to build more. We have more scalable products versus agencies. I love them, but difficult to scale. They're very cash intensive. These other products, we can get a little bit further up and get better margins. So I encourage people to go to fractalgroup.io, check out our manifesto, see what we're up to. You'll start to see the different products that we're working on and really engage with whatever solution it may be. maybe you're an SDR looking for an opportunity to hustle a few products. We really need SDRs right now. We need them to get our products out.

17:31We need marketing folks. We need influencers on this group. And there's a really cool opportunity to partner with us as we grow this larger kind of ambitious goal. We should chat. Justin Fortier, again, your website, fyclabs.com. Justin, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, awesome to meet you. Take care.

18:21Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

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