You can polish your friend’s shiny shaven head later, it’s time for a very special segment on the Chaotic Pattern podcast!
Hello and welcome to the Chaotic Pattern podcast, this is your host, Allen Chang. Today, I’m interviewing two very special guests. These guys are the only ones in the world that can pull off the title “Noob” in the coolest sense of the word, Brad Smith and Ryan Sims, the brains and brawn behind Virb.com and The Big Noob.
Remember to participate in our events to win a The Big Noob T-shirt. Find out more.
The transcript below is only a small sample of the hour-long interview. What are you waiting for? Listen to the podcast now!
Update: The screencast tutorial Ryan mentioned in the interview is actually Andrew Reeve’s excellent “Creating Dynamic Data Sources” tutorial found on the Overture Wiki. Apologies.
Something Personal
- Allen C.
- Hi guys, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule for this interview. Just to get ourselves warmed up, I’d like to start with some casual questions. So how’s your day been?
- Brad Smith
- Hello, this is Brad and it’s been a good day and we’re excited to be here today.
- Ryan Sims
- This is Ryan and also good day. We had a long night last night. We went to a really cool rock show in Cambridge, so today was a bit rough but it’s been a good afternoon, good evening!
- Allen C.
- Brad, what’s your fascination with Australia? On The Big Noob website, next to the header is a speech bubble that I see randomly at times, you’ve also mentioned that you’ve got a keen interest in Australia a few times on the site as well. What makes Australia so Special? Is it the girls, the beach or the accent?
- Brad Smith
- [Laughs] That’s a very good question. The funny thing about that header on The Big Noob is…I even asked Ryan about it…’cos we were kind of unsure to what you were asking. We’ve each - Ryan, Myself and Keegan - have put our own up there and we kind of looked at each other dumbfounded just wondering what the mention of Australia was. It turns out that header was put up by Keegan! [Laughs]
- Allen C.
- [Surprised laugh]
- Brad Smith
- Which was funny in itself! I don’t know, I just always had the desire…one of the places I always wanted to travel to was Australia and then of course would be New Zealand, since I would be so close. [Pause] The beaches, the girls or the accent…I’m probably going to go for all three!
- Allen C.
- Yeah, Australian girls are pretty easy…[oops!]…easy going I mean!
- Ryan Sims
- [Laughs]
- Brad Smith
- [Laughs] How about girls on the beaches, with accent.
- Ryan Sims
- The tri-factor.
- Allen C.
- Oh, that’s the perfect combination!
- Brad Smith
- That’s it, that’s it!
Something Professional
- Allen C.
- Let’s talk a little about Virb Inc.
- Allen C.
- Virb Inc. is your enterprise and world domination control centre. Where is it now and where do you envision taking it?
- Brad Smith
- Well, just to give everybody a little back story of where we’re at. Ryan and I founded a company about six, seven years ago called Neubix. It was a design firm based in the mid-west. We did that for about 5 years and met the [Virb Inc.] crew at South by Southwest (SXSW) in a design conference at Austin, Texas a few years ago. At that time, they had a website called purevolume.com and it was their sole property - a very independent-based music sharing website. It was doing great things and it was growing quickly. A lot of the artists were signing up and a lot of big record labels were jumping on board. The guys here at Virb really liked what we had at Neubix - the philosophy, the company, the way we ran it, the design style of Ryan and the ability to not taking things to serious. The proposition was that we sold a portion of Neubix and in turn we would come up here to Boston and kind of continue to do the same thing, but for this company. Shortly after getting up here, we redesigned and re-launched purevolume.com and this was in December of ‘05. Shortly after that, probably by February or March we started development of Virb. Almost an entire full-year of development and we released Virb. It is a social network. For somebody, it’s all over the Internet that people are calling it the MySpace killer, which if that was to happen, that would be amazing, but the reason we developed it was around the core that we wanted to develop a social network that we think a social network should be done. That’s all it was. If that became something huge, then that’s amazing. Already we’re seeing great growth…we’ve only been up, not even 3 months yet. Just yesterday, we hit 100,000 users.
- Allen C.
- Fantastic!
Something Symphony
- Allen C.
- The Big Noob, I’m sure all the Symphonians know, is powered by Symphony. First, I’d like to say that it’s definitely a blessing to have you guys use Symphony, it really sends a positive message out to the public. Specifically, about the confidence that surrounds the website you guys did. Keegan Jones was a very early adopter to Symphony and that’s how I know that you guys know about us, but, was that how you’ve first heard about us?
- Brad Smith
- We heard about Symphony, wow, it was long before our transition here to Boston.
- Ryan Sims
- Ryan: We were still in Missouri at that point.
- Brad Smith
- Yeah, we were still at Missouri and you guys were very very early in development and we were already very impressed with what we saw; it looked good…it shared a lot of the same aspects of the things we would do if we built a CMS for the world. That’s what really attracted us to it. It’s now running thebignoob.com as well as the blog that is behind Virb.
- Allen C.
- [Surprised] Oh!
- Brad Smith
- We use it to keep people up to date on new features we’re adding, and things like that. It is also Symphony powered.
- Ryan Sims
- blog.virb.com
- Ryan Sims
- Yep.
- Allen C.
- Amazing, that’s actually news to me. I’m sure actually that it’s news to many Symphonians! Listeners out there, I think you just got a big whopper of a news. This is definitely excellent.
- Ryan Sims
- I have one thing to add here. As far as when we first heard about you, I was kind of little perturbed the first time I saw Symphony because we were a web design shop at that point and we built our own CMS that we were using for all of our client work because we were so agitated with what was available to us out there. We were considering this portable CMS that would maybe compete with the Wordpresses, the Movable Types or what have you. We had weeks of brainstorming sessions and we came up with a name and a domain. We figured out how to develop it and then Keegan shows me Symphony. It was basically pretty much exactly what we had in mind. I was pretty perturbed when I saw it just because it looked great, it worked exactly how I wanted a CMS to work.
The segment on Symphony is a definite must-listen! Why, go get the podcast now!
Discussion
Have something to say about Allen’s man-crush for Ryan’s beard? Can’t wait to jump in to The Big Noob T-shirt giveaway event? Whatever the case, get interactive!
Brian Z. 3 July 07