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Programmer and web app developer Ross Mann talks about enhancing your web presence with special tech, via his experience launching several startups.

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Sean Corbett:
Hello there again everybody. It’s Sean Corbett, Websites.ca marketing. Today we’re joined by a very interesting guest to talk about app development. So our guest today is Ross Mann. He runs the company Solid Solutions. He’s currently involved in an exciting energy tech startup, and Ross and I have known each other for a long time. We’ve done a lot of work online together, not just with apps, but with websites, with marketing campaigns and so on. So he’s got a really good overview. The reason why I brought him on for you today is that although his background is firmly rooted in tech, he is a person who happens to straddle both worlds, of that kind of the developer’s world and the business person or entrepreneur’s world. It’s very, very rare to find. So usually when somebody hires an app developer or a website developer, the developer sort of wishes they didn’t have a budget, they wish they could work forever, all that kind of thing. And there’s a lot of tension and conflict often between the two sides. And I’ve seen Ross come in as a consultant and manage developers, but also be able to speak the entrepreneur’s language. So for a business owner to get somebody with that insight into that world, it’s really exciting. So Ross, thanks for being here today.

Ross Mann:
Yeah, you’re welcome. It should be fun.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. So I think we’ll jump in by, just, could you tell the people a little bit about your background and how you got into the online world altogether?

Ross Mann:
Sure. Yeah. Well, I’ll start a way back. I’ve always been interested in software development and making the computers do what I want. I went to school to get formally trained in software development, picked up a job working on a very old machine creating software solutions in the finance world, payroll. And that was interesting; it was interesting to see how software works and how old it can get and how long it can be maintained for. But that was obviously not as fun as a young man. So I flipped over to web development back in the day and started off with this really neat web tech company that was trying to push everyone into switching from traditional marketing to online marketing and developing websites and developing web applications and that type of stuff for their business. It was very early, their business struggled, but it was interesting and fun.
Learned a lot. They continued to move up to scale to more and more web applications, bigger, more complex web applications and mainly in the business to business world and continued to learn more and more of that. But along the way, I teamed up with a small group that kind of was a marketing and a web development company, and I learned that there was a struggle between outsourcing software development to places like China and India and understanding the business requirements that a business needs and communicating that over to a developer. So because I am who I am, like you said, I kind of have this quirk of me that I can speak both sides. I found quickly that a lot of the base software development was going to be shifting towards China, India, these other places for cost savings. But there’s a big gap between those two cultures and areas that it would be hard to transmit or communicate the business information.
So I figured that’s where I could sit, that’s where I could provide value is talk to local Canadian or American, whatever, business owners and communicate with their offshore team. And that worked really well. I enjoyed that. And then eventually I decided that instead of doing that for other people, that I should start doing that for myself and taking on startup web apps, startup technologies and take on partners, communicate in that way with partners and offshore teams and develop some of myself and kind of move from doing it for someone else to doing it for myself, which I’ve been doing it for quite a long time now.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. So actually we talked ahead of the recording, but I even forgot to mention this and we should tell it to the audience. You essentially had, for lack of a better word, one of your projects at that time was an early version of what people would now come to know as what Dropbox does. So you had a file storage system online before there was even a Dropbox, didn’t you?

Ross Mann:
Yeah, so one of my early projects that wasn’t a business to business kind of back office kind of scenario was a product called Files Direct that I helped develop with a few partners. And we were very early to the market to provide a way to transmit large files over the internet. It came out of necessity. We were working with a Chinese offshore team and of course in the workings of software development, especially transmitting and communicating information from the client over to the offshore team, we would have to send files and email just wasn’t cutting it. So we built the system so that we can send our large files to our team. And of course my associates I was working with, we thought, “Hey, other people probably have this problem.” So we pushed it out to the general public to use and because of who we were, we’re business oriented, we’re tech oriented, we really grew it in the world of engineering and accounting. So we had most of our clients in engineering, accounting, business type clients, not individual type clients. And that worked really well for a long time. And then of course the big tech companies came in [inaudible] value in that game. And so we kind of just let that go off into the sunset eventually. But yeah, that was a good app for sure. One of my firsts. Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
What year was Files Direct launched? Just to give people a perspective?

Ross Mann:
2004, I think maybe. I know my partner Eric had the idea way earlier and I was brought in sometime after that. But yeah, it’s pretty early app. It’s kind of all blended together now in the past. But yeah, it’s quite early in the early 2000s.

Sean Corbett:
Interesting. So that brings me to my next topic. So we keep using the word app and I did want to talk about another giant thing that you helped innovate in the engineering and geological space called Formation Finder. And you and I, when we talk about Formation Finder, we say that ais an app you built, but when other people hear the word app, what do they think and what do you and I really talking about?

Ross Mann:
Yeah, I think that’s a great distinction to have to make. When most people hear apps, they think mobile apps, apps that are on their phone or their tablet, and that is very much the late iteration of this software that we call app.Apps just short for application. So earlier in the web world we would have web applications, so applications on your phone, but they were on websites and primarily viewed through the web browser, but functionally they’re pretty much the same. They just don’t show up in the install system like Google Play or Apple Store and they don’t show up on your phone as shortcuts and stuff like that. They still could be viewed on your phone just through your web browser on your phone. So that’s the biggest distinction is what they’re built for, what platform they’re built for. And you have different access to different things like obviously a web app may not have access to your other apps on your phone and stuff like that, but they can be more power hungry, they can be bigger, they can access more data, they can be faster because they’re using laptops, desktops such as that.

Sean Corbett:
So it’s very similar to basically downloading software and using software on your computer. But instead of having to download something, you go to a web browser, you sign in, but essentially now you’re signed in to software that you can now use.

Ross Mann:
That’s right. And even the previous iteration from that were installable applications. If you’re really going back, we used to have things on CDs or disks and we installed applications. So just kind of a progression of how we got the application delivered to the end user. And in my world, I could do both. I tend to lean towards the web world because I like that. But in reality, you could start with a web application. If someone came to me and said they wanted to have a mobile app, I would have a series of questions I would ask to validate that and we can discuss that later. But I would definitely start with a web application, a mobile web application, which is to say that the web app would work even if you open it up on your browser, on your phone in terms of size, but it’s still ran by your web browser. And if you have success and business success there, then you can look at shifting into the complications and additional effort and resources into getting installable mobile app.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s right. And I think a lot of people don’t realize when you’re talking about them in these stages is that it’s not just about building the technology to get on the phone. That’s the easy part. It’s dealing with do you want a hidden app that you have to give to people directly or do you want them to be able to download it, like you said on the Apple or Google stores, that is an entirely different world of jumping through hoops. They’re constantly changing and you have to update for both. So yeah, it gets pretty crazy.
So the web app is kind of a validation way, a quick thing to get into it. We should give people some specifics. Let’s use Formation Finder and maybe even your newest project, which is eMission. So us apart from just a normal website where a company says what they do and they give you some contact details, which is what most listeners are going to be familiar with. And then the next level of complexity that our audience might be familiar with is obviously, e-commerce. Oh okay, now there’s a shopping card on my website and there’s a ordering and there’s a checkout. So then what are some of the examples of where a business would come to a developer like you and say, I need to do a web application.
Yeah. Why would they do that? Why does it have to get more complicated than that?

Ross Mann:
Well, itself is a web application. It’s an application that is providing the business solution of online commerce, online purchasing and stuff. So it’s probably the most used web application that people would understand in the world. Facebook has a mobile web application version. If you go to Facebook on its own or even in your phone in your browser, it has a non installed mobile app version of itself. So there is providing both services to clients. The main reason why someone would want this is that they’re providing some sort of unique solution or service that your standard marketing website just isn’t doing. So it’s an online solution like software as a solution or online presentation of information that’s beyond just your marketing site. So I just try to distinguish the two between a marketing site, which tells you who the company is, how to contact them, all your marketing campaigns and stuff like that goes on there. And then your web application.

Sean Corbett:
And typically, just as an example, someone would use a sub-domain for the web application. They’d go from the marketing website is company.com, and then the app would be app.company.com.

Ross Mann:
Yeah. In the case of Formation Finder, we didn’t do that, but Formation Finder was unique. Most applications that I write and have a hand in writing the marketing site, I do use different domains or sub domains for that because they’re very distinctive, different technologies. It’s easier to split the two kind of roles and responsibilities amongst the team by doing it.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. And the split basically happens typically with you tell people, do you want to log in now? And then that’s where the split sort of happens.

Ross Mann:
And tie it back to websites.ca, I could assign the role of managing the marketing site to websites.ca, which will use their infrastructure and then I would handle the web application that would be using my technology infrastructure.

Sean Corbett:
Exactly what we’ve done before. Yeah, that’s right. So that’s a good distinction to make too for people is that if you have to develop basically a more complex piece of software that has to interact with the user, then that doesn’t mean that you have to leave your current web host, especially if you’re happy with your current web host, they should be able to work with a developer like Ross and then they’re really two separate sites, but it won’t feel that way to a user, that would be the ideal outcome. So yeah, Formation Finder, let’s talk about that specifically for a second. Why did somebody come to you to do that? Why did you guys choose to do it? Or first of all, what is it and then why did you choose to do it as a web app and what has it become today?
Yeah, so the best idea to create a web app is something that exists in the real world that hasn’t yet been digitized in some way. That’s the stuff I like to see in here. So as an entrepreneur, I like to get into that and when companies ask me to build their products, I often measure it against that as well. And something that can be easily transferred over to the web world is even better. So Formation Finder is specifically an oil and gas exploration tool that takes basically your formations, like your rock formations that are in the ground. As you go deeper there’s different types of rock formations, just think of going through the mountains. So you see all these different rock types, basically that continues all the way down to the core of the earth. And that’s important for geologists and oil and gas because each section of that part of the earth could have oil or not have oil or create troubles for drilling a certain oil that’s underneath it.
And it’s just kind of giving them a map of what’s under the ground. So at the time, I wasn’t partner with him, but we became partners, Wayne Ellis, who’s a great guy, he brought me this idea, Wayne Ellis and Eric Allen. And at first I thought, well oil and gas is billions and billions of dollars of money, how could they be working off a paper chart. At the time was everyone was printing this chart, putting it on their wall and memorizing it. And I couldn’t believe that could happen. I figured, and this is mostly the case with a lot of entrepreneurs when they want to go with web app, usually they don’t do a good enough Google search and that the app does exist. So I went home and I said, “Wayne obviously can’t use Google.” And I went out and I Googled and I Googled and I didn’t find it and I thought, “Well maybe I don’t know the terms right enough and I don’t know how to use Google.”
And I kept looking and looking and looking and there was something kind of similar and there was online version of the charts that you could print, but nothing interactive with the user like you said earlier. And so yeah, it was hooked and said, “Okay, this is something that doesn’t exist. That’s very interesting.” So I would sit down with Wayne, who is the primary user of these charts, “What do you do every day with this chart? Why do you use it? Why is it important?” And we just kind of picked apart his daily use of this chart and then applied it to some sort of website use case. How would a user use it on a website rather than a physical piece of paper? And then because it’s digital, how do we optimize and improve and speed up that person’s work process? So obviously you can’t do a search on a paper chart. So one of the first things we rolled out was search function. So you can type in the names of these formations and we would pinpoint them exactly on the chart where they need to be rather than searching for 10, 15 minutes every single day to try and find this stuff. So we figured if we aggregate that across the entire industry of oil and gas exploration, that alone could be worth a lot of money.
So basically you get a searchable database, at least as at its core, from a bunch of existing information that somebody would’ve had to go seek out one thing at a time in paper format.

Ross Mann:
Exactly. And then we allowed them to drop and save pins so they could pin everything. We could just kept replicating what we saw in the office space. So we would go in, I remember sometimes I was in Calgary high rises, I could see into other people’s offices and I could see them using the chart as wild. And I saw, I think the idea that Wayne and I were in an office and we saw people putting pins on the chart from across the way between two high-rise buildings. We were like, “Ah, well there you go. That’s obviously something we should do is allow for them to correlate and pin formations that they’re currently working on.” And then I wanted to run over there, because this was my business, run over there, tear down the chart and show them the app of course. But seeing how the user used it in real life was very helpful.
And that is something web applications do and a web developer needs to figure out as a skill is to sit down with the industry experts, see what they’re doing and try and mimic that online and then optimize it. That’s one of the main skill sets. And I learned that earlier in my career from a good friend of mine and he’s very skilled at that and that is the kind of the killer skill that we learned. And a successful web app mimics what they do in real life and then speeds up the process for them. So the next thing we found out is that other government public data, people would go search formations and then they would go look at additional data that was online on public sites, government sites. So we started combining all that together so it’s one easy search place that’s formation specific. And that combination was the big value add that everyone then became very, very interested in and wanting to use and saved a ton of time for everyone.

Sean Corbett:
It’s funny to hear you talk about making a web app and it’s essentially, like you said, taking something that’s existing in real life and just making it slightly more convenient and also more accessible versus the language that we hear out of Silicone Valley in the current times. Because either online stuff or apps or tools or what have you, they’re either distracting in the case of social media or what Silicon Valley loves to use is that term disruptive. We’re going to have a disruptive app, it’s going to disrupt business. And it sounds like when you’re not trying to be big marketing, weird monopolistic firm, on a small level, an entrepreneur wants to have an app that’s anything but disruptive, they’re supposed to make the process just a little bit easier and more convenient. Would you say that’s accurate?

Ross Mann:
I think that’s completely accurate. I think disruptive is just a big marketing term and good on them to find the term that works. We in theory, would disrupt the… There’s companies that printed these charts, by the way, larger firms, but they were always lost leaders to get chemical analysis and other things done. And so they didn’t really care that we were disrupting their paper market. So in fact, we made strategic partners with some of them. And so yeah, the disruption is a real term. I don’t see it that way because all I’m seeing is I’m taking something and making it more efficient. And so in the case of the large Silicone Valley companies, they really are taking the form of communicating, one-on-one communicating or sharing their vacation photos. Your remember in the past, you might give someone a photo book and you would hate to receive the photo book, but then you have to look at that photo book and their vacation to Orlando or something. They disrupted that in theory, but what they really did is make other people look at your vacation photos in a more efficient manner. So it really appears.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Yeah. And that’s why I said it’s a marketing term, but I think sometimes folks listen and then what our marketing terms on a level that doesn’t apply to them suddenly become sacrosanct and like, oh, that, well then if it’s an app, it has to do this and they go down a weird path. So that kind of brings me to my final point, which you and I have talked about for many years over and over and over again on lots of different projects. It’s the concept of minimum viable product. And I’ll give you some time to explain that and how you approach it. But the reason why, just for everyone listening, the reason why I’m bringing this topic up is Russ is one of the best people I’ve ever seen manage this process. I alluded to earlier in the recording, there’s always a fundamental tension often between the owner, the person who hires the developer, the creative team, because creative is quite a bit different… When I say creative, I mean the designers instead and the copywriters and stuff, they’re usually very different than the developers.
So there’s all these tensions around and the life cycle of these projects and you can correct me Ross if you think I’m leaving something out, the life cycle’s, like everyone gets together and they’re all very excited and everyone has a grand vision and then obviously building anything, the first stage of the realization of the grand vision is the opposite of grand. It’s usually very peddling and ugly and it does a few things and most of them are broken, but it’s sort of a necessary first step so that people can start using it and getting around. And that’s when often these projects start to fall apart and costs start to go up. And another word we can talk about scope creep, it’s the scope of the project starts to change because people did not consider certain things before they started building the app. Now all of a sudden they see it and they go, “Oh, we have to have this thing.” And the developer says, “Okay, well that’s going to double your budget.” So there’s all this conflict around it and I’ve watched you navigate it and manage it really well in the past. And maybe you could talk a little bit about that and start with the MVP concept.

Ross Mann:
Yeah, I think you pretty much nailed it. Business owners, entrepreneurs often want their vision in its entirety created. They want their Ferrari on the road immediately. And that is obviously a good goal, it’s something we should reach to and everyone wants to hit that spot for sure. But the question is, how much money do you have? How much time do you have? And what is the market look like right now in terms of the business market and audience and sales and stuff like that. And the problem with trying to build the Ferrari in the garage and never taking it out until it’s done is there’s so many changing factors and budget limitations and time limitations that you don’t even know if the thing you’re building anyone cares about and even wants it, right? So you got to validate this really fast. This is stuff that comes up to Silicon Valley.
A lot of people talk about it. So my biggest problem in this process after we’ve agreed that this is something that should be built is that you need to slow down and not overbuild. And that’s the minimal viable product. So you got to get it out the door in its most crude format, into the hands of someone that is actually going to use it for multiple reasons. One big reason is testing and making sure the app works the way you want. And second, which is almost as equally as big is it providing the value that they want? Because the worst thing in the world, and this has happened, is that people have a lot more money and a lot more time than their product is actually worth. And so you spend a long time building it and a lot of money building it, and then you release it into the world and no one cares.
No one cares at all. They won’t use it for free, let alone pay for it. And so you just wasted all that money. And me as a developer, I can only work on so many things at a time, if I have an opportunity cost, I’ve wasted my time there. So what I try to do is I work with whoever, if I’m partnering with someone or I’m just doing a gig for someone, is try to determine what is the base system that we need to build to validate it. So in the case of Formation Finder, it was, can we just digitize the paper chart, put it out there, and get people to scroll around and zoom in and out on it? Because the scrolling and zooming is already better than the chart. So can we get someone to go to their website, go to our website, use it, and then hopefully it’ll be like, “Okay, I don’t need this paper chart.”, and throw it in the trash.
That would be ultimate goal for us. In the case of eMission, which is my latest product, is that can we get people to give us data, any type of data doesn’t need to be the most accurate data, just be because the world is missing so much data in terms of this environment to begin with that even thumbing the data or estimating the data and getting a calculation for their emissions output is better than not having that. So can we get people on the system and just using it so we roll it out in a way that it’s easy for users to get on there and put in their data. That’s kind of the minimal viable, there’s a lot of what we can do with that product as my partner and I, Richard, have a lot of aspirations for eMission product, but the base minimal viable product was can we get someone on it? Can we get the calculations built? Can we submit it to the reporting authorities that we need to? That was kind of the minimal bio product there. And that one took longer than most because it’s highly technical, but you need to get it out into the world and get it used and see if there’s value there. And they make decisions, you make decisions.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s right. Because a lot of people also think when you give them that first iteration of the product and you’re saying to them, “Okay, is this useful and would you use it and does it do what you want?” And then they’ll find one bug, which there’s always bugs, there’s always going to be bugs, which is why you have to keep doing testing. They’ll find one bug and think, oh, it’s broken, take it back and fix it and then come back to me when it’s not broken. So there’s that, it gets misconstrued, right? It’s like, yeah, no, I know there’s bugs. And then also, oh, it’s black and white, there’s no pictures, it’s just fields that I’m filling in and it’s giving me the answer.
And then you say, “Okay, but you just wanted the answer.” And then a lot of entrepreneurs and owners will say, but we also want our branding and we also want fancy pictures and we want this animation to happen. And all of those things, especially from my point of view, are nice because they help with engagement and they keep the users using the software and everything like that. But I’m always watching you explaining to people that that’s a later problem to solve or that’s the skin we’ll put on at the end. We’ll bring in an entirely different team to do that. But first we have to build any and their workings, the mechanics of the thing.

Ross Mann:
Yeah. And it’s just prioritizing tasks. So the worst actually are the entrepreneurs because they know what they’re not getting. The users don’t know the decisions were made to leave stuff out. They don’t know that. So they see it in its true form and they don’t know what they’re missing. So the entrepreneurs or business owners do, and they only see the ugly, they only see the missing features. And I’m victim of that as well. When I look at any of my software, I’m like, oh man, remember when I decided to do this or versus that. So my stuff always seems incomplete and so I understand where the business owner is coming from because I can feel it too, but I have to remind them that the users don’t know that. And with their budget concerns and time concerns and all of that, we just discussed these things need to get out into the world and just be committed to fixing things as they come up and expanding and adding features as needed.
And as soon as you can get something making money, actually a lot of them other problems start to go away because now it’s self-paying, right? Not coming out of capital projects or funding or whatever from a third party. It’s now paying for itself and you got users telling you what you want and you can then prioritize and direct that way. So yeah, the MVP is the kind of the holy grail, most people should recommend to follow that. Of course, if you’re working with more scrupulous vendors, say they’ll build a Ferrari. So that’s often when I come in, like you said, I can bridge the two. I can tell when there’s a offshore team just thinking, okay, I’ll build them the Ferrari, it’ll never get built, but I can soak them for a ton of money and then they’ll just losing interest or something. [inaudible].

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot, even in the marketing world, it’s all based around micro deliverables, which again, like you just alluded to is that a good worker would do the same thing. So I have to show you along the way these milestones, but what I’ve found that the unscrupulous marketing agencies will do is they’ll just email the client every day or every week here, we built this graphic here, we did this thing here, we did this thing, just to keep showing them they’re busy, but they’re not actually moving the ball forward to get their results that the client wants, but they got the client’s money, so they have to show them some low level work that they probably gave to the entry level guy or the intern who’s working for free. And then like you said, they’ll just do it until the client finally cancels.

Ross Mann:
Yeah. And my approach when working with an offshore team or just doing it on my own is I try to pinpoint our minimal viable product as a launchable feature and then work backwards. So we need to do X as a feature, whatever’s a minimal viable product. And when X is built, it goes live and there’s no questions about it, no matter how much so-and-so wants to say no or even how I feel about it. And then they work backwards from there. So yes, they get daily updates, but it’s all working towards goal X. And yeah, there’s very many arguments and conversations with the business owner that wants to push it forward, wants it to look better, wants it to function better. And I have to tell them, no, I can’t give into that. Even though it maybe more money for me right now, it’s ultimately going to crater the project.
And that happens way more though. And then scope creep, right? Scope creep is a similar form that’s more for formal formula that say you built the Ferrari, but then the someone comes in and says, “Well, I really kind of wanted to have wings too.” We didn’t talk about having a flying car. I can build you a flying car, but now you got to pay me more money. And that kind of conversation has [inaudible] too. Or on the flip side, we just do it. And basically that means the development firm is subsidizing new changes and that you could say that’s okay sometimes, but often it kind of gets abused. So you have to manage that as well. So you’re kind of managing expectations all along the way, even on a completed product.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, there’s a lot more with any technical thing or engineering thing. And it makes sense when I say it out loud, but people have to consider this when they’re going to their own projects. Probably the longest form of the process should be at the beginning with discussions and thinking and planning before anyone touches anything to build anything.

Ross Mann:
Yeah, 100%. Actually, when I talk to people, I want to see a marketing plan first. Because the big myth, the very big myth about software development is that once the software’s built, they’re just going to become billionaires. And it’s the opposite. I can build the software, I tell people all the time, “I’ll build you the thing you need, but it doesn’t mean anyone’s going to buy it.” And even when we’re talking about MVP and putting it into the world, we need to line up users, we need to line up buyers. And that’s where marketing comes in. So if the client doesn’t have a good grasp of marketing, it does not matter how brilliant the software is, no one’s going to use it. So when I’m vetting potential customers or potential partners, I want to see some sort of indication that they understand how they’re going to sell this thing just so I can make sure that there’s going to be some sort of uptake with the software.
And one thing I really don’t like doing, but I do do as you know, is taking up the mantle of being the champion to sell the product. That annoys me. But it is needed and as you’ve experienced when I’ve been working on my product, Sean, that’s the game changer. Really, the app is there, it’s fine, but if you understand how to market it better, then you’re off to the races and people really misunderstand that. So if you have a good marketing plan, a good MVP, and a good roadmap with all the planning upfront and exactly everything you’re going to do every step of the way, then you can test and validate and build in tandem and have a lot more success with the application.

Sean Corbett:
And for people who don’t know, Ross’s app Formation Finder is now the industry standard. And of course it was built on the back of his tech, but really the foundation of it becoming the industry standard was a whole bunch of coffee meetings in downtown Calgary. So like everything we talk about here, online, offline, offline, online, there’s always an offline in-person aspect to all of this stuff. Ross, I wanted to give you the final thoughts and then if you wanted to pitch anything too, now is the time.

Ross Mann:
Yeah, I guess the final thought is that think twice before you need to develop a custom app. Do the Google searches, think of how valuable or different your idea actually is. Because as much as I would like to take your money, web app development can get very expensive and there might be an application that does 70%, 80% of what you need to do. And you just got to live with the fact that it’s not perfect. And I guess what I’m currently working on is the most important to me. It’s something I’m partnered with and I own it, which is eMission, which is what we developed to help track and inventory the emissions for municipalities and other organizations and allow them to figure out what buildings and equipment might be emitting the most CO2 equivalents, and then helping them navigate reducing that amount. And so far we haven’t found a lot of financial success there, but we’ve had a lot of interest in growing that, which is giving me a good lesson in scope creep and scope management. But it’s a very interesting application. My partner there has huge ambitions on it and I think he’s right in terms of where we can go with that. But yeah, I just got to build it every step of the way and it’s very exciting and that’s the main product I’m working on. So anyone needs something…

Sean Corbett:
What’s the main website for that?

Ross Mann:
E-mission.ca.

Sean Corbett:
There you go. Ross, thanks so much for coming to chat with me today.

Ross Mann:
Yeah, it’s been fun.

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