CUBEcast: Recent Episodes
Charl Coetzee
A launchpad for community, growth, and inspiration. CUBEcast is about connecting with your audience, helping you serve your current and potential customers well and with ease. We discuss common challenges faced with communication, technology, and customer experience and we share new ideas, solutions, best practices, and opportunities.
Not just for developers, this episode will help business leaders in any department to serve their customers. Charl Coetzee, CUBE Chief Technology Officer, discusses:
- how he approaches technology as the CTO (beginning at 4:42),
- the downside of building seamless technology (starting at 11:25)
- how he decides what tools or technologies the CUBE team should be using (timestamp 22:25),
- how he evaluates what a customer wants (when sometimes they don't know themselves!) (starting at 30:22 and again at 48:21),
- the workflow management of development (53:49),
- how to evaluate technology honestly (1:02:51), and
- a look ahead for technology (1:06:33)
Though technology is ever-evolving, Charl gives key insight with examples from the past that bring clarity and practical ideas that you could implement into your personal or team practices today.
Books mentioned: The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick
A.K.A. "Chester's USS Nimitz Episode." Chester Hull, CUBE's COO, had the opportunity of a lifetime - experience a week on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier! Chester shares about the different jobs of these "unsung heroes" while sharing some practical lessons that he learned witnessing the most dangerous job in the world.
Highlights:
- Preparation: What it takes to become an overnight success. Chester shares about how this opportunity came along suddenly... because of 10 years of prep work.
- Teamwork: The "Power of the Ask," and how half-hugs, wooden model aircrafts, and cleaning are crucial for team success.
- Leadership: How the commander set up his team for success, mentored, and lifted up his team. How this approach curated respect.
Submit follow-up questions here: hello@cubemc.com and use "Podcast" in the subject line.
Do you want people to hear your ads and remember your name? Adam McGale, an Advertising Liberator through his company Air Support Radio, and Advertising Consultant at Jim Pattison Broadcast Group, shares his expertise - writing ridiculous ads that are fun and purposeful. He gives tips on how to write creatively and what makes a successful (and an unsuccessful) ad.
Highlights:
- Inundated with advertising, we create firewalls to block out the bad and the cliche ads. The guys talk to Adam about how to break through
- We all remember ads that make us smile, but when we forget what brand the ad was for, the mission has failed….how do you do both?
- Stories: we are built to listen to them and tell them. While we like facts and statistics, we use them to convince us that the story we like is true.
Books Mentioned:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield: https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/
Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller: https://buildingastorybrand.com/
Submit follow-up questions for Adam here: hello@cubemc.com and use "Podcast" in the subject line.
How audacious thinking leads to turning things inside out or upside down. Define success before being audacious. Audacious thinking means re-looking at all assumptions, regularly. Be bold enough to overcome the fear of failure. Audacious thinking escapes the vacuum. Audacious business audio by example.
Chester, Charl, and Weldon discuss the chaos affecting our market, new products and features, and a look back at 2021. Chester relates how a support call turned into a new product that solves a big VoIP problem when CUBE doesn't integrate with the carrier. Charl talks about what is going on in the supply chain, what's causing it, what is likely to happen next, and what you can do about it. Weldon discusses how discovery with a marketing agency's client uncovered a way to use smart hold to drive callers to an app and save the client $70,000 a year, making the agency a hero.