#120: Tech Marketing, Copywriting & Modern Management
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Welcome back to another episode of the richer geek podcast. I am very happy to have with us all the way from England. Matthew Stibbe. And he is a serial entrepreneur, marketing maven. I'm not sure what he doesn't do. But he’s very good at marketing campaigns. He is the current CEO of Articulate Marketing, which is a UK marketing agency specializing in the tech sector. And he was also the CEO of intelligent games. So, he's not only a tech person, but he's a gamer. He was the founder and CEO of a 70-person computer game company where he designed games for Lego produced two games based on Dune.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
[2:10] His credentials and his geek tendency
[3:01] Tech Marketing and his experience on website design
[9:23] The importance of the correct inbound marketing
[11:21] How important is the copywriting
[15:14] How he can help on the sales acceleration after all it’s done
[19:46] What is a ‘B Corp’ and why should I care?
[24:11] How does he manage remote workers?
[29:10] How does he keep employees happy
[32:01] About his website called: www.geekboss.com (Modern management)
[34:50] How does he develop and design games? He designed games for Lego
Resources from Matthew
Articulate Marketing | Geek Boss | Vincarta | LinkedIn
+ Read the transcript
Mike Stohler
What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income. Now, if you're wanting to get ahead financially, and enjoy greater freedom of choice, if you want a comfortable retirement, and you know you'll have more choices, if you can do more with your money. Now, if you've wondered who else is creating ways to make their money work for them, and you want actionable ideas, with honest pros and cons, and no fluff. Welcome to the richer geek podcast, where you here helping people find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I'm Mike Stohler, and in this podcast, you'll hear from others who are already doing these things, and learn how you can.
Alright, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Richard geek podcast. I am very happy to have with us all the way from England. Matthew Stibbe. And he is a serial entrepreneur, marketing Maven, he, I'm not sure what he what he doesn't do. But you're very good at marketing campaigns. He is the current CEO of articulate marketing, which is a UK marketing agency specializing in the tech sector. And he was also the CEO of intelligent games. So he's not only a tech person, but he's a gamer. He was the founder and CEO of a 70 person computer game company where he designed games for Lego produced two games based on Dune. How're you doing Matthew?
Matthew Stibbe Doing very well. It's really nice to be here. Mike, thank you so much for having me.
Mike Stohler
Absolutely. And, you know, we could go on and on about your credentials. You went to Oxford? You're Somalia.
Matthew Stibbe I'm a bit of a wine geek. Yes, I'm afraid. So I have developed this geek tendency of getting very obsessed about things and spending a lot of time learning about them history and then computer games and wine and then writing and marketing.
Mike Stohler
And and aviation. I hear
Matthew Stibbe
yes, yes. I have a an American and FAA commercial pilot's license and instrument rating as well.
Mike Stohler
Very nice. Yeah, I, in my previous life, I was an airline pilot. Oh, awesome. And so I know how fun and hard it is to get your commercial instrument rating.
Matthew Stibbe
Especially if you're paying for it, although I think if you do it in the US to become a commercial pilot and actual commercial pilot getting paid to actually fly, you still have to pay for your training to train people.
Mike Stohler
Now you do you know, unless you were in the military, then it's a little bit easier. You have the government pay for your licenses, and then it's easier to trance transfer from military to civilian. But anyway, let's talk a little bit about you know, there's a lot of things that we could go into let's let's start with articulate marketing. And getting into the differences on like tech marketing, you know, if I were to go out and I am a tech person, my wife is in the tech field. And I wanted to start my own company, you know, you have, suppose I need a website. And I know that you have a company that helps with website and marketing. So tell us a little bit about tech marketing.
Matthew Stibbe
Well, articulate marketing. We do a lot of work around content, website development strategy for tech companies. And the thing that I've learned in for doing this for 20 years, for companies like Microsoft and Dell, and smaller, more entrepreneurial companies, the secret of tech marketing is not to talk about the technology. Okay, so that sounds counterintuitive. But if I can put it in the words of Jason freed if I can borrow his words, founder of Basecamp, he's said there's an enormous difference between this is what our technology does. And this is what you can do with our technology. And good marketers say this is what you can do with our technology. It's about understanding people's needs, understanding their pain points, and showing them how they can use what you are making the clever stuff that you are building with your technology. How you How they can change their life, how they can improve things, how they can make progress, in whatever ways are meaningful for them. And I think this is this is one of the things that Apple has done incredibly well. And a lot of its competitors who, you know, functionally sell the same things do not do so well. Think back to think different the the apple campaign in the 90s, everybody else was talking about speeds and free feeds. And you know, we've got 90 gigabytes, and we've got this much memory, and Apple just had a picture of Einstein on the poster, right? Apple's gonna make you smart, more creative, more clever. Or you can go and buy one of these other computers, that's just got some numbers. And by analogy, one of my former clients, and I won't name the names to protect the guilty, but internally, they used to describe their marketing is calling sushi, cold dead fish. Because they were always talking about the product, and never talking about the thing that you can do with it.
Mike Stohler
That's very interesting. It's, it's kind of a way of, you know, if you're in real estate investing, you know, when you say, what do you do? Well, I sell real estate or I do real estate syndications, you can say that because that's obvious. Or you could say something in the marketing aspect of I diversified my clients portfolios. And give them a better, more stable return. I mean, you can say it,
Matthew Stibbe
those types get richer.
Mike Stohler
Instead of just saying, I syndicate real estate, or I do this, yeah, yeah, make it a little prettier.
Matthew Stibbe
So that's the first thing that I've seen. And the next sort of stage on from that, I think, and I've been banging on about this for years and years and years, when you are doing marketing, the first thing you have to do to bring people into a conversation with you. And that might be getting them to a website where they might convert sign up, download, engage, do something, you got to start the conversation talking to them about their issues in their language, you've got to understand where they're at, and go what go meet them at least halfway. So if you are sitting on your website going, you know, you're going to come find us because blah, blah, blah, blah, we're talking about our product, we're talking about our products and our language. Nobody's searching Google for that stuff, especially if nobody's heard of you. So I'll give you an example of this. We have a client years ago called Red Pixie, they were eventually bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And they made software that would take a huge complicated Excel spreadsheet, upload it into Microsoft as your where it would run super fast. And now that's not a problem for most people. But if you're an insurance company, and you're doing risk modeling in Excel, you click Calculate, and you come back eight hours later.
And it's still calculating, you upload it into the into this as your calculation engine, as they call it. And it would be done in 10 minutes and the chain, the dramatic business changing results have been able to do this high performance computing in the cloud with your Excel models, transformation. Our first campaign for them was not you know, we we've got this as your calculation engine, it does high performance computing. And you know, in the zero cloud, because nobody was searching for that. The problem people had was they were running really big spreadsheets in Excel that was slow. So we wrote blog posts, like pimp my Excel 10 ways to make Excel faster, just because that's what they were typing, how do I make Excel faster, they were looking for any small angle that would get their thing done quicker. And and it was it was huge. Within a couple of weeks, we have a few 100 signups for this white paper that we wrote, one of them within a couple of months went on to be a seven figure deal for the for the client, and it was a huge success. But we weren't talking about the product or the technology, we were talking about the issues that the users cared about.
Mike Stohler You know, inbound marketing is very, very important. You know, it's, I can spend $100,000 on a website and have all these processes in forms. But if you don't have the correct inbound marketing, no one will ever get there, right.
Matthew Stibbe This is a very common problem, not so much for the multinationals who sort of seem to have huge amounts of traffic. But for startups and small businesses and businesses that are ambitious and looking to grow, we've we very often come across companies that have got, you know, two three 4000 visitors a month to their website, you know, and anything over 1000 is is, is starting to get real people anything under 1000 sessions a month is just bots and spiders and your mother. So, and that they're saying, Well, you know, we want to improve the conversion rate, we want to get more leads, yes, conversion rate optimization is important. But actually job one is get more people to the site. Yeah, and inbound marketing with genuine thought leadership. And you now I think these days, the marketplace of ideas is much more competitive. In 2006, I started my blog, and you know, I got 40,000 sessions, visitors a month, and just from like writing stuff. And now to go from zero to 40,000 sessions, that takes quite a lot of work. So you need to also be thinking about SEO, you need to be thinking about PPC, you need to be thinking about kind of reaching out and attracting people with social media and doing things like talking to interesting interviewers on podcasts, so that there's more to it. But the fundamental thing of value before commitment, of demonstrating thought leadership of inviting people into your world by talking about their issues and needs, and starting a conversation and nurturing conversation. All the fundamentals of inbound marketing are as true today as they ever were, you just have to do them a bit better than you could have, you could get away with 10 years ago.
Mike Stohler How important is copywriting with that?
Matthew Stibbe
copywriting is the secret weapon, in my view, now, I say that as a recovering ex journalist and a you know, a reader and a writer. But this is particularly true these days. Because there are so many blog posts, and so many of them are written by content farms for pennies per word. You've got to have two things, in my view, for content for copyright for articles, one depth of content, it has to be genuinely interesting, valuable, useful entertaining, it has to have some ideally, some original research, some expert opinions, some expert values and value for the reader some resource in that it has to be useful.
Typically, that also means it has to be a little bit longer than it used to be, you know, you need to be thinking in the region of 1000 to 2000 words for a blog post. And the second thing is it needs to be well written because people as you know, read differently online than they read in a book. So Jakob Nielsen and the Norman Nielsen Group publishes a report called how people read online. Fascinating critical reading, you need to make it short, punchy, scannable, and so on. And also, I think, if you can write with a bit of fism, ginger, bit of vim bit of excitement, and that takes skill. That also if you make it easy for people to read, and you make it interesting for people to read, that's a good a good outcome. That last bit is very hard. And I often say that everybody is everyone can write. I mean, certainly in your audience, everyone's got degrees, and they're all clever people. Just they they know how to put sentences together. Right? They've been to school. But they're not writers. And writers do some things that civilians don't do to make good copy.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, yeah. And that's interesting. So it to me, it's the back end of those things, the copyrights and SEOs. Those are seemed to me more important than the actual website design and build, or is it go hand in hand?
Matthew Stibbe
It again, I think you're right, my instinct, my experience is, if you have a really shiny, polished website, but there's no depth and content and value for the visitor, that actually is fatuous. If you have a there is a sort of minimum standard for websites. And I think you can't have a really poor website with great content. And that probably won't work. But you don't need to have a phantom. You don't need to have this sort of super polished shiny, overdesigned website. And in fact, I think when people get when people think about their website, they often over engineer the design, they obsess about design, we often hear from new clients, I want something that's different from everybody else.
Well, could you imagine Stephen King going to his publisher go, I've written this new book, and I want the book to work differently from everyone else's book. I want the you know, the pages printed sideways and I want it to start in the middle and go, Why would you do that you want you know, everyone knows how a book works. Right? You start on page one you read to the end and the vicar did it. So you kind of want to have websites that people know how to use so just like don't break the conventions. Make it faster, make it load between making it accessible for people with disabilities just just do a good job. Beyond that point, in my view, spend the money on the content, not on more more design.
Mike Stohler
Perfect. Now what once they get the SEO, they get the copyright, you know, they're kind of in the growth. Let's talk a little bit about how you can help them in the sales acceleration once all that stuff's gone. And I know you're using like HubSpot and things like that, what are some of the excels, sales accelerators that there's out there.
Matthew Stibbe
So we're HubSpot diamond partner. So we're, we're sort of programmed to use that. But what I'm what I'm going to try and suggest here would work with other things Marketo, or low credits that then techniques rather than software specific. So imagine in the world, there are two streams of people coming into your sales funnel, stream number one coming through your website inbound, right, they've that you've done all your SEO, you've done your social, they've come to the website, and you've you've started a conversation with them. So maybe they filled in a form to download a white paper or report or an interactive calculator or webinar, something they've engaged in, so they've dropped into your CRM. So that's one source. The other sources, the outbound sort of prospecting, or, you know, target Account Based Marketing, targeting people and reaching out proactively to them. The intent with the outbound stuff, is only to get them to that starting line where they've come to your website, and they've downloaded something, right.
Maybe they pick up the phone, or they were commuting. But in most cases, the journey in for both starts being meaningful when they start a relationship on your website. So how do you how do you nurture that? First thing is, I think the high value thing that you can do is to build a relationship by offering value before commitment. So they've done something on your website, they may not yet be ready to buy, but they've taken taken a step towards you. So if you think the listener about the things that you enjoy reading the emails that you subscribe to, and actually open the podcasts that you listen to, and you listen to repeated episodes, what is it about them that keeps you coming back, go and do that in your email, nurture in your follow up. Because if you can take if you can build the relationship of trust and confidence and show expertise and value before somebody is ready to buy ready to sign up, the sales process is going to be easier, you're going to differentiate yourself from your competitor, you're going to bypass hopefully, a lot of people's objections, and build demand, build expectation, build the desire to work with you. This is this is not what most technology companies want to do.
Most technology companies believe that a product is so good that if only we can get straight to the point where we tell you all the features and benefits and point you at a credit card form or point you at a purchase order contract, you will sign up No, build the trust, build the relationship, differentiate yourself. And then the sales process will happen. So you can do that with email. And you can do that without reaching and do that in lots of different ways. But start with the audience. I bet so for my own marketing for the marketing of the agency, we find webinars work incredibly well because they allow you to demonstrate thought leadership. They allow you to show who you are who the client is going to deal with podcasts like this one. Absolutely fantastic. Also very, very good. Videos, we really liked Leila Pompa we use clickup at work for our project management. She is like the world's guru on clickup. And she just does these videos on YouTube. She's, she's just out there helping people, but you can sign her up as a consultant, and she'll in paper. So all of these are really good examples. And I really like Scott Galloway's emails, and I sign up and read those you may have seen, you've probably got emails that you read regularly that are thought provoking. So you know, there's lots of ways of doing this. And imagine what what it would difference it would make for your company, if people thought about you the way I'm thinking about these people I've mentioned.
Mike Stohler
It's very interesting. It's everybody. Again, it's articulate, articulate, marketing.com If you're interested in that, and something that I had never heard of that your company is a certified B Corp. Yeah. What is that?
Matthew Stibbe
I am tremendously proud of that part because it was hard work and partly because it's in my it's a good thing. So what is a B Corp, a B Corp, the B stands for benefit. It is a global movement that started in the us. That is that starts with the idea that businesses are force for good, okay? It's not about businesses becoming charities, it's not about not making money, it's about making sure that you are operating ethically, responsibly, with respect of the environment, with respect to your employees with respect to your other stakeholders, like suppliers and customers with respect to your community. So to become a B Corp, you fill in a B Corp impact assessment, it's it's it's, you can do the first pass and a couple of hours for free online. But to do it properly is takes can take quite a long time. And they give you a score.
So the first time we did a start ticket back in 2018, we've got a score of 35. To become a B Corp, you need a score over if I remember correctly, 70 or 80. And you need to be audited. So you don't just say you do all these great things, somebody comes and checks, right. And so we eventually became a B Corp. It took us about 18 months of revising our business policies, practices, behaviors, adding some things like carbon offsetting, changing some of our employee employee policies, putting in place health care, insurance, and just things like that. And, and it that journey was it was it served to raise our standards as a business. And then we became a B Corp, and then we were able to use that label to prove to our customers to our prospective hires and partners. We meet this standard, we are certified for this, this isn't just like greenwashing, we've done this stuff.
We recently recertified and we increased our score. Just last year, so you know, it's an ongoing journey. Okay, all of that is great. It makes me feel good and proud of the company. What are the benefits? twofold. I mean, there's a sort of virtue signaling smug happiness bit about it, but that doesn't make anyone any money. So the first thing is, it helps with recruitment, especially these days great resignation, war for talent, everything's up in the air, it's very hard to recruit, I would imagine amongst tech entrepreneurs hiring, you know, really smart people, you want to put us, you know, want to put as much as many fingers on the scale in favor of your company as you can. Being a B Corp absolutely helps people identify you as a company with values and identify your their values with your business. And it's because it's objective, it's an audited, that's a very compelling thing. So we use it in our employer branding, we use it in our recruitment, it is definitely a factor. Second thing. We have clients that we work with big multinationals who will send us onboarding forms and checklists to check our policies about this, this, this, this and this. And in the last two or three of these onboarding things that we've done, I've just said, we're a B Corp. and don't I'm not filling in the form. We're a B Corp, here's us, here's our score on their website, and they go fine, you're done.
So you pass the sort of vendor compliance checks very quickly. Great. And we have we have signed at least two deals well into six figures, because we will be caught. For example, one company wanted a B Corp, certified marketing agency, that new HubSpot, and they will be caught. So they wanted that up in their supply chain, they prep had a preference for B corpse. And we were at the time the only HubSpot agency that was B Corp certified so great. How much can we charge you for this? And and, you know, it was it was a good project and a good relationship. And we did some good work for them. Biltmore website, did some marketing and launched their new service. So it I think that's, I think there's a real good reason for going and doing it certainly going and looking at it.
Mike Stohler
It's very interesting. It's something that we should all be more cognizant about. And I will certainly look into it. Now, within your B Corp business. You have a little twist that you are all remote. Yes. And that gets into it was fashionable. Yes. And you know, that's more of you can say modern management. You did that. Now. A lot of managers that are maybe listening here have a hard time managing remote workers they're being forced to, but they may be a little more micromanage type of person, that type of personality. How do you manage your remote workers and you've been doing it for a very long time.
Matthew Stibbe Yeah, we've been remote working for what, since the beginning, but for 10 years or so I don't pretend to have all wisdom on this, but I have quite a lot of experience. And I think the number one thing that I've learned is you have to trust people to be doing their job, that letting go is quite hard. And you have to shift your metric of productivity or your measure of control from measuring inputs, how many hours they work, you know how quickly they get back to you on email, whether they come into meetings or not shift from inputs to measuring outputs. So that's the big conceptual shift, letting go and measuring outputs. It's really hard. I am a geeky Control Freak micromanager dying to watch people type their work, I would love to know what so and that's kind of normal anyway, especially in technology management, because the thing that the thing that got you promoted was the mastery of your craft and your technology work. You know, programmers who are good at programming very often get promoted to be project managers or program managers on the strength of their ability to develop software. And suddenly they're not developing software. They're managing developers. And it's a different thing, different skill set. I'm reading a fascinating book by Michael lop at the moment about that. He's rounds in repose, if you ever want to look at his blog. So I, I'm constantly fighting with that. And one of the things that we did in the agency and I think this is an offer this as a suggestion as a mechanism that might work in other areas, we, we shifted from doing timesheets, measuring inputs, rewarding hours, which are lies and Bs anyway, because I can't even remember what I did for lunch had for lunch today, let alone what how many hours I spent working on this client or that client, we shifted from that to measuring output. So we use points pricing points, effort modeling. So in our project management in clickup, we would assign writing a blog, for example, or you know, doing some building a website page or something like that, we have a tariff. So we know that on the whole, it's five points for a blog post, it's 10 points for webpage, 20 points for a white paper. And that's a measure of the average effort required to do that piece. So that at the end of the month, or at the end of a sprint, we can look at click up and we can take in and Matthews done 154 points worth of work. And I get a sort of fungible measure of output from that I can measure across the company, I can look at individuals, I can look at trends, I can see how long it takes for a new copywriter to get up to speed and things like that. So I'm I'm quantifying routine deliverables and measuring endpoints, we then use that to price up the work as well. So it's kind of so that's one mechanism that we use. The other thing that I think is really important, and this is not not so geeky, I find the human stuff quite hard. So I'm quite happy at the other side of the screen. But the cumin stuff is critical culture is critical. And so one of the things that I've learned is you have to invest in that you have to consciously work on your culture with the people in the company. We have a chief happiness officer, which is you know, big investment for a 20 person marketing agency we've we've we've done multiple, multiple workshops over the year over the years, as a as a company working on our culture and defining it and talking about it and exploring it. And I before the pandemic bc I often used to astonish people by saying it costs us more money to be a remote company than it would cost if we had an office. We spent, you know, the money we save on rent we spend on culture.
Mike Stohler
You know, but it's so important. You know, I'm just cultures. It's especially in how do you keep employees? How can you get them to say that? Why leave for 25 cents more an hour. When you're not going to be happier, you may make that little bit more but you want them to say but you'd be more happy staying for a little less.
Matthew Stibbe
I think people answered cliche, but people leave managers, they don't leave companies. Although these days everything's up in flux, looking for different opportunities. And we certainly found before the pandemic we were attracting us there was a certain type of person that liked work. working remotely, they will often very geeky, we have quite a neuro diverse workforce and the remote work in suits certain patterns of mind and ways of thinking that suits suits the company very well. But it a lot of that's changed now. Suddenly, it's not a competitive advantage in the recruitment market in the way that it used to be.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, it's true in some of our hotels, you know, for instance, you know, housekeepers, it's, it's a very huge challenge. They're not remote, but just like, how can you keep them happy? Well, right now, it doesn't matter. They will look at a hotel and say, Oh, I go there. And for 90 days, I get a bonus. So they go there, get the bonus, quit, go to work for another company that has a bonus. So they hop around collecting these bonuses. And there's no loyalty at all, because they housekeeping housekeeping is what they're saying, you know, so it's, you know, that
Matthew Stibbe
must be very difficult. And I guess, you know, in an industry where costs are important, and you know, salaries are finally judged. Well, but I was thinking about the Ritz Carlton, and they had them mantra was, ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen. And I never knew what how deep that went. But I would imagine if I was a housekeeper, I would, I would quite like to I would be more loyal to an organization that made me feel good and important about the work I was doing, and had a culture that celebrated certain refinement or quality in doing it. I make no comment about other hotels, and I'm not a particular fan of any brand. But it I think, I think even in those sorts of markets, and those sorts of sectors, culture has a real part to play. And as does that, as do values, mind you values don't pay the rent when, or, you know, rising gas bills.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, that's true. Now, let's get into something that the richer geek loves. And that is your website, geek. boss.com. I just love those two, you're the boss, but you're not only a boss, but you're a geek boss. And I just love that term. So what is everybody? Geek boss.com You gotta go to a tell us a little bit about the gig boss.
Matthew Stibbe
Over the years that my blog at articulate marketing became much more about marketing, and much more about marketing for businesses and what we did, the space I had on there to talk about the things that interested me diminished, it stopped being my blog, it transitioned into being the company blog. Now, that's great. It's a great, great, great resource to learn about marketing for technology companies. So I started geek boss a couple of years ago as a place where I could write about blog about things I cared about. So there's a little bit about LEGO, there's a little bit of bass development, there's a little bit about this and that, but it's mostly about how to be a better manager and a better leader.
And my strong feeling is there are a lot of really bad role models and bad cultural examples of what being a boss and a leader are out there. There's an awful lot of machism a kid machismo and, you know, shot pits and Dragon's dens and you're fired, and hierarchy and humiliation, and I don't like any of that. And I think I think the geek mentality, if I can put it like that can bring a certain quality and richness and insight, I hope to being a leader and a manager, and I'm seeking it out. I mean, I think I've admitted a few of my weaknesses here about being a control freak and stuff and people stuff. So this is part of my way of exercising through that and thinking about that a lot. So I've written quite a lot about remote working. I've written a lot about employee engagement. I've written a lot about the difference between managers and leaders and and so on. These things fascinate me. So it's very personal. It's very, it's just the stuff that rattles around my brain. There's nothing I'm not selling anything. There you go. You're just getting Matthew stuff.
Mike Stohler
It's wonderful. So it you know, everybody, Geek boss.com and articulate marketing.com Now before we let you go on to enjoy your evening tea. We have to get into how do you develop and design games, you know, for all of us geeks out there. You designed games for Lego? What was that life like?
Matthew Stibbe
At the beginning, absolutely delightful, joyful because designing games as a creative thing. Games are one of a handful Things that make humans human are there, there are a little bit of game playing and other species, but mostly it's a human activity. So I love that idea of, of that. When I started, I could design a computer game. In three or four months, I could program one if I was programming it, and a few months, I could work with one or two other people and we could ship it. So my my first game, I designed it and Nick Wilson programmed it. It was published by Electronic Arts on three different machines. And fantastic I did that when I was 18. When I sold my games company, completely different story. We did a World Cup soccer game, we did the June Emperor game teams of 2030 people working for 18 months, millions of dollars. And and that trend has continued since I left the industry. So now it's huge blockbuster games, big budget. I respect all of that. I mean, they're amazing, amazing, amazing experiences.
But that's not the bit that I like. I think today there is this incredible underground culture of independent developers doing amazing work. And that I think that's the stuff that I like. So the games that obsessed me at the moment are things like a dark room. Some of the twine, interactive fiction games, these are not sophisticated what they are, some of them are very sophisticated, but they're not big. They're not 3d worlds that you explore. So if I was going to get started doing game design again, I would be, I'd be in that space. I'd be trying to do the game that I could build myself at home in three to six months. And I'd be really, really looking for doing that quickly. And iterating on gameplay and imagination, not iterating on graphics and whiz bang, explosions and things. You know, Activision, EA, and people do. So much better. There's just no point in trying now. Yeah, yeah, it has caused another game, I think, oh, RD, Ord, just a work of towering genius. Anyway,
Mike Stohler
it's, it's come such a long way. I remember those days when I was a child and had Pong.
Matthew Stibbe
Yes. Missing ball for high school, I met Nolan Bushnell, once salutely I like I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy. This is this was the great thing about being in computer games, I actually got to meet my heroes. The first time in my life I ever ate sushi, which is an admission will write for Max's SimCity it's the Sims designer took me out to San Francisco for my first sushi meal when I was in my early 20s. And working from developing again from access. I mean, it's amazing. I just these people, just creative gods, I suspect some of these games will be remembered. Like we remember Rembrandt. And Mozart.
Mike Stohler
Absolutely, because a lot of people are actually going back to those simplistic dos type build games, you know, because it's just so funny to them. We're just so simple to go back and you know, the very first consoles, you know, the very first Atari, you know, the, there's so simplistic and pixelated that it was it was and you just go back and just you know, especially as you get a little older you reminisce about some of those older games. You know, maybe it's because I just can't figure out these new games. They're just too much it's too involved too much to a different levels. And then you have to do all these things. And then you go online, and then I get killed by a 10 year old.
Matthew Stibbe
Yes, yes, haunted by a 10 year
Mike Stohler
old song, and then they wait for you and kill you again. And tell you how much of an old man I am. So I'll stick with the old Atari stuff and the EAA stuff and I'd love to do the pong
Matthew Stibbe
with the exception that I think the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is fantastic and I think you would enjoy it as a as a pilot as I do that if you hook it up to your Xbox series X onto a 4k TV and then you go flying. It's mind bogglingly good and beautiful once the higher quality graphics actually do something useful and make it a very immersive experience. I think that's a that's a fabulous, fabulous. That's probably Yeah. So if
Mike Stohler
especially if the work within the world of VR, can you imagine if they did a flight simulator where it's I mean, you're actually grabbing things and pushing buttons. And you could see all you know, 360 degrees around you in the cockpit. I think that would be just fabulous.
Matthew Stibbe
I think that's the next stage or augmented reality
Mike Stohler
or AR. Augmented, but fabulous. Well, Matthew, it has been absolutely a pleasure. And I thank you for coming on everybody. Again, gig boss, everyone loves that name, go to gig boss.com and articulate marketing.com Is there any other way that our listeners can find you?
Matthew Stibbe
Well, if you go to articulatemarketing.com, forward slash meet, and E T, it's got my calendar. Book up a meeting. I'd love to have a chat. If you've got something interesting to say or an interesting question. That's how you can get in touch with me.
Mike Stohler
And if you're into vino, go to vincarta.com We
Matthew Stibbe
will have another chat about the wine on another occasion.
Mike Stohler
Thank you, sir, I appreciate
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ABOUT MATTHEW STIBBE
He is a serial entrepreneur, marketing maven, writer, pilot, and wine enthusiast. But not necessarily in that order. He created marketing strategies, content and campaigns for clients including Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn and HP and Contributed to Wired, Forbes and Popular Science.
Currently, he is CEO at Articulate Marketing, a UK marketing agency specializing in the technology sector. Also, his geek credentials are strong. Previously, he was founder and CEO at Intelligent Games, a 70-person computergames company where he designed games for LEGO and produced two games based on Dune.
Matthew also has his commercial pilots license and an advanced wine diploma. (Have you seen the film Somm? Like that!) At some point in the previous millennium, he studied history at Oxford University. These days, he blogs about modern management at www.geekboss. com, about marketing at www. articulatemarketing.com and wine at www.vincarta.com.