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Kaylee Williams: Welcome back to the “Iowa Tech” podcast. It’s your host, Kaylee Williams, and I am in the Jethro’s Barbecue studio today with Erin Rollenhagen. Hi, Erin.

Erin Rollenhagen: Hi, Kaylee.

Kaylee Williams: Kaylee. Thank you for being here with me.

Erin Rollenhagen: I’m so happy to be here

Kaylee Williams: I’m so happy to be here. I– So I’ve known you, Erin, for like 10 plus years, 15 years? Yeah, probably coming up on 15 years.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah, probably coming up on 15 now.

Kaylee Williams: been a long time. and I know you from, uh, Entrepreneurial Technologies. Now People Friendly Tech. Yeah. So maybe let’s start there. What do you do for a living?

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah, so I’m the founder of People Friendly Tech, used to be known as Entrepreneurial Technologies. We had a rebrand a couple of years ago. And we are a custom software consulting company. So founders and leaders come to us when they have an idea for a tech product that’s really high stakes for them, and they want to ensure that the build and the design goes well. Our sweet spot is kind of that intersection of things that need to be really secure and things that need to be really sexy. Cool.

Kaylee Williams: Cool. Ooh, that’s a good pitch. That was a really good elevator pitch.

Erin Rollenhagen: good elevator pitch.

Kaylee Williams: Take notes. Um, so I am familiar with some of the projects that you’ve worked on, including early stages V1 of the hummingbirds. So a number of startup companies you’ve engaged with, um, many of them Iowa-based over the years. Can you talk a little bit about, like, if, if you guys had a calling card, if your team had a calling card, what would it look like in the products that you build?

Erin Rollenhagen: Oh, yes. That’s a great question. I think what people know us for is things that are a little, uh, extra creative and outside of the box, and the thing that people maybe don’t realize that they’re getting with it is that rock solid security under the hood. So, uh, you know, a particular project that comes to mind that I think was really fun for our team to work on and, uh, fun for other people to consume is a project we did for Iowa State, uh, the Water Rocks project, which is a game to teach kids about soil and water conservation. Yeah, it was great. We got to do 3D game development, built characters, worked in all of that emotional energy betwi- behind helping people learn about things in a way that didn’t make them feel like they were doing it wrong

Kaylee Williams: Hmm.

Erin Rollenhagen: or that they were the bad guy for not knowing it. And that was really, I think, a fun way for us to kind of flex all of our user experience chops while also working on something that was pretty meaningful

Kaylee Williams: I love that. It– You’re making me think of Duolingo. Have you ever used their product?

Erin Rollenhagen: Love Duolingo

Kaylee Williams: It’s kind of the opposite, where they intentionally are sort of mean to their users, especially when they don’t use the product every day. But I think that they know inherently it, it’s like the consistency of the use that makes it work, so they try to guilt trip you into opening the app and practicing your Spanish or whatever every day.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes. I have gotten emails that say, “You made Duo sad. You haven’t logged in.”

Kaylee Williams: How dare you?

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes. Yes. And what I always point to with clients for that is that that can work, but it’s a high degree of difficulty maneuver. So yes, it can be done, and yes, they have done it really successfully. It’s not necessarily the thing that we would recommend out of the gates for a startup who’s just starting to experiment with incorporating emotion into the products that they’re working on.

Kaylee Williams: That seems like really good advice. And for your most recent example, you know, your– that product that you built, that 3D game is for children. Like, you don’t wanna guilt trip kids. You don’t wanna make them feel dumb.

Erin Rollenhagen: Exactly

Kaylee Williams: That’s really fun. Um, so Erin, are you from Iowa originally?

Erin Rollenhagen: I am. I grew up in Ames and, uh, I am a traitor to my hometown’cause then I went to school at the University of Iowa

Kaylee Williams: Well, as a fellow Hawkeye, congratulations to you for making the right pick. Just kidding.

Erin Rollenhagen: Thank you. Thank you

Kaylee Williams: Did you study code in college? Is that where you learned how to write code?

Erin Rollenhagen: It is, yeah. I was a double major. I did MIS and economics. Um, I, I did MIS’cause I knew I would like the job that came with it,’cause I had an internship at a company in West Des Moines that wrote code, so I knew I would like that. And I did economics’cause I knew I would never work in that field, but I thought it was so fascinating, uh,’cause it’s the physics of the business world. It’s how everything works

Kaylee Williams: Oh, I love that. That’s– I also majored in economics and I felt the same way. I just thought it was so fascinating. That’s the physics of the business world. That’s brilliant. So I would imagine that there probably weren’t a lot of people who looked like you graduating with an MIS degree or an economics degree from the University of Iowa. Um, did you jump right after college to starting your own dev shop, or was there sort of like a, you know, a corporate gig in between where you had the opportunity to work at a desk and, and learn what the working world was like?

Erin Rollenhagen: Well, you’re right that there weren’t a lot of people who looked like me. I, I, I, uh, learned in a big auditorium, and there wasn’t a computer in the room. That’s, that’s how old I am. Um, but I was one of just a few women in the class, and I remember having to go to the professor’s office to get permission to take his advanced class, and he said to me, “Well, it’s good to see a woman in here.” Um, which, which was kind of a funny moment, thinking-

Kaylee Williams: It was kind of a funny

Erin Rollenhagen: You’re welcome I’ve, I’ve been in your class for two years, sir.”

Kaylee Williams: sir. Oh, that’s really funny. Oh, man.

Erin Rollenhagen: That’s so funny. Oh, man. Um, but I, I was fortunate enough to work at a small company in West Des Moines, um, that specialized in corrections software, so the prison world, which was interestingly sort of a, a worst case scenario from thinking about security for applications. So I had that background of, you know, developing software that was aimed at an audience that had criminal intent and a lot of fair- s- a lot of free time on their

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. And gosh, uh, didn’t Tej used to have like a, an email for prison

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes

Kaylee Williams: he created? Did you ever work with him on that or are you familiar with it?

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes, Teja was my employer back in those days. I, I forget that you would know who I was talking about. Um, yes, Teja was my employer and, uh, and I did work on the email product. Great.

Kaylee Williams: Okay. Okay, so a quick question, and I know this is a sidebar and I apologize for my listeners if they don’t care, but I care and I wanna know. Was it like you, your product would like review the emails and then automatically redact things, kinda like they do with the physical mail in prisons?

Erin Rollenhagen: So I don’t know what’s happening in that world today’cause I’ve been out of it for about 20 years. But at that point, the way it worked was it was a whitelisting system. So, uh, if you’re gonna make a phone call from within federal prison or receive an email from within federal prison, you can’t just call or email whomever you want. You have to have pre-approved contacts that have gone through a vetting process. And so the way this system worked was there were particular email addresses that a, that a given prisoner would be associated with, and there was a processor that runs that checks to see if the incoming SMTP is from one of those approved contacts, and if not, it rejects it and doesn’t process it.

Kaylee Williams: Cool. Okay. Bloody simple, like so many really good startup ideas.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah. Yeah

Kaylee Williams: So you– Okay, so you worked for Tays. You did that for a few years. When did you branch out and start your own dev shop?

Erin Rollenhagen: 2007, so coming up on 20 years ago now

Kaylee Williams: Can you tell us what that was like?

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah. Uh, so 2007 was right on the cusp of the Great Recession, so I had no idea what was coming. But it was a really great time to start a business, I think, because I didn’t know any different. And so if I had started a business during a really strong economy, and then suddenly the bottom had dropped out a year or two in, I think I would’ve been in a lot of trouble. But because I didn’t know any better, I just had to get my process really down as far as meeting with clients and closing deals, learning how to turn that around quickly and with a high close rate, because it was a, it was a tough time to sell anything

Kaylee Williams: Cool. So your first few customers, your first few contracts were like founder-led sales. You went out, you met with them one-on-one, scoped out their need, and then gave them a quote, “I can build this for you and this is how much it will cost.”

Erin Rollenhagen: Yep. And if there’s anybody listening, this is my one tip that I would give any- everyone on sales. If you’re trying to improve your close rate, turn your d- your proposals around faster. So we would get proposals out the same day with a little sample graphic of what their website, which was what we were doing at the time, would look like, and we had a really, really high close rate with those.

Kaylee Williams: I love that. I love that. We actually learned something similar at Volunteer Local that when we would give a demo, if we sent the follow-up email, which included the quote to move forward with the product at whatever plan they were interested in the same day, we had a much higher close rate than if we waited two or three days or until the end of the week or… It’s, and it’s really easy to forget about the follow-up. That’s like a hard, a hard thing for– I, I struggle with it.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah. Yeah, and I was just reviewing data on this. Um, I, I just wrote a blog post about this exact same thing, that that’s borne out across industries. So if you turn the quote around the same day as the demo,

Kaylee Williams: Mm-hmm.

Erin Rollenhagen: that you have a double close rate as compared to if you wait seven days. Wow.

Kaylee Williams: Wow

Erin Rollenhagen: And it, it is the highest if you do it the same day, and it drops off every day after that

Kaylee Williams: That’s awesome. Great tip. Yeah. Thank you for that, Erin. So you hired your first employees.

Erin Rollenhagen: Mm-hmm.

Kaylee Williams: Wow

Erin Rollenhagen: When did that happen? So I hired my first employee within about three or four months. Wow. Yeah. That ended up not being a great hire.

Kaylee Williams: Well, you know, so it goes.

Erin Rollenhagen: you know, so it goes. Yeah, these things happen. Good start. Yep. Um, but we recovered from that and hired our second employee, and she’s still with us today.

Kaylee Williams: No kidding. Yeah. For real? Yeah. 20 years later? Yeah.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yep.

Kaylee Williams: Wow. That’s incredible.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah, it’s been amazing.

Kaylee Williams: How many employees do you have today?

Erin Rollenhagen: How many employees do you have today? So we have 20 on our full team, and 12 of those are our employees, and eight of them we share with our sister company

Kaylee Williams: Okay. And what kinds of businesses are you primarily working with today?’Cause I know of some of the startups, but what would you say is your bread and butter?

Erin Rollenhagen: We really have, uh, probably two kinds of products or projects that we primarily work with, and one is we work with a fair number of funded startups. We do very few MVPs, um, and I think the reason for that is that a lot of companies, rightly so, choose an inexpensive path to get their MVP out there. And, and that’s a good thing to do. It helps them get data, understand their market, know what’s really worth investing in. But then often when they get that first round of funding, they have some things they wanna shore up. Maybe it’s on the security side, maybe it’s on the look and feel, the user experience, and then we come in and work with them to help bring that to market in a way that’s, uh, in keeping with the standing that they want to have in the marketplace. Um, the other category of business that we work with are established companies that have an idea to do something special with their technology. Maybe that’s customer facing, maybe that’s even an internal play, but it has real strategic importance, and it’s something that makes them care about that user experience and how we drive behaviors with the technology.

Kaylee Williams: Hmm. Cool. How has AI changed the nature of your work? And I know we’ve talked about this a little bit already, so I kind of know the answer. But, um, for our listeners, can you talk a little bit about when it– when AI first started to, like, become a thing, it could write code, but not well. My understanding is it’s progressed to a level of maybe a junior developer. Do you use it? Have you seen your customers using it? And how has it changed anything from a business perspective for you?

Erin Rollenhagen: There’s, there are two ways where it’s been really impactful for us, and the first is on the development side. So you’re right, when it first came out, the code it wrote, the advice it gave was not very good, but it’s come really a long way. And so today our developers use it on most of our projects in some capacity to help write code, and it does a good job. My feeling on it though is if I had a, a brand new developer who did not have real world experience, I would be really cautious about their usage of AI. Where we find it’s most successful is people that have some experience. They know what they’re looking for, they know when it’s leading them astray, and they can correct and review that code really carefully

Kaylee Williams: This is a bit of a specific question, and it might be a dumb question. Have you ever pushed something to production that AI helped you build and then it– like something funny happened that you didn’t realize, but it was specifically because of the AI? Does anything come top of mind?

Erin Rollenhagen: Nothing comes top of mind? Nothing’s coming top of mind, yeah. I mean, we’ve had it make some funny suggestions that we were like, “Yeah, that, that is not going to happen. We No, We’re not doing that

Kaylee Williams: We’re not doing that

Erin Rollenhagen: that’s not a good idea.” Um, for example, one time we were having a problem with a, a domain thing, and it recommended that we just open up Port 88, um, which i- if for non-techies out there, that’s a really bad idea. It’s a security hazard to do that. Oh. So it probably

Kaylee Williams: you see my blank stare? Thank you for that.

Erin Rollenhagen: It’s

Kaylee Williams: it probably-

Erin Rollenhagen: too much like Yeah. Thank you for that. So it, it probably would’ve solved the specific thing that we asked about, but was not generally a good thing to do. Okay.

Kaylee Williams: Okay. Okay. So it, every now and then it’ll throw out something that you’re like, “No way. Not gonna do that.” Um, okay, and then how are your customers– What is the sentiment you get from them on how they’re thinking about AI, and are they afraid of it, and do they, uh, when you tell them that you’re using it, what’s their reaction to that?

Erin Rollenhagen: Most people are very much in favor of development costing less. I, I think if you could kind of pool all of the complaints that people have about software development across the industry, and the way that complaint has worked for the last 10 years is it costs too much. People are trying to figure out all sorts of ways to make it cost less, whether that’s offshoring. You know, now AI gives them another way to try to address that cost problem. So we haven’t had any people concerned about our use of it, especially on the startup side or small and medium-sized businesses. You start getting into larger enterprise organizations, they’re more oriented at controlling risk and being aware of their risk. And so they have, in some cases, you know, entire roles devoted to keeping an eye on how their vendors are using AI and making us, you know, fill out questionnaires or… So that they are protecting themselves from their potential risk with AI, which makes a lot of sense

Kaylee Williams: Where do you think– What, what does the future of AI look like and, and how are you preparing your business and your team for that?

Erin Rollenhagen: I think what’s really great about AI is that l- it allows us to solve some problems that were far too expensive to attempt to solve previously. So if you even think about, um, the problem of you want to greet someone every time they open your app Maybe you wanna say, “How are you today?” There are so many possible responses to that question that if you were to try to handle it with deterministic programming, it would cost entirely too much and you’d never do it, right? You, you would just give up on solving that problem. And so that’s how you ended up, um, as an industry, how we ended up with things like tap the pill for I’m good, I’m okay, not so good. That’s a response to that problem, right? We’re trying to get people to fit themselves into boxes’cause that’s how traditional code works, is fitting things into boxes. AI lets us communicate with people in a more natural way, so it just feels better to people. Um, if you think about the difference between one of those IVR phone systems where they’re saying, “Press one for this, press two for this, press three for this,” and inevitably the thing you want is not one of those choices. Never. It’s never one of those choices, right?

Kaylee Williams: Mm-hmm

Erin Rollenhagen: It’s a frustrating experience. With AI, we can communicate more naturally with people. We can let them just tell us what they want instead of feeling like they have to adapt themselves to fit into one of the boxes. So I think it’s really exciting in the quality of experiences we can deliver without creating a huge price tag on top of that experience.

Kaylee Williams: That’s a really… Thank you for that. It’s an elegant answer, and it’s one that I feel like you described in a way that any layman could understand, that so much of the world that we interact with is driven by the progress technology has made, and we are adapting ourselves to fit into that box, whatever it is, the limitations of the technology of the time.

Erin Rollenhagen: Exactly

Kaylee Williams: And it’s so as the technology progresses, that we have to change less, and it is conforming almost more to us and how we naturally communicate.

Erin Rollenhagen: Exactly

Kaylee Williams: is so cool. I had not thought about that before. C- I did. I remember saying to someone once, I– we were talking about cell phones and how, like, they had changed so much, and I was like, “Isn’t it funny that we still call it a phone?” When it’s like, I don’t even know, less than probably 5% of my time is spent actually talking to people on this device, whereas the rest of it is everything else that I can do.

Erin Rollenhagen: Right. Whereas when it, when it came out and they first started offering features that were not calling, It seemed kind of insane, right? Yeah. You know? It’s like, Who would want to do that? Yeah. Who’s gonna spend their time- looking at email on their phone? Right. You know? And now more than 50% of email is opened on a phone

Kaylee Williams: I believe it. I believe it. And it’s just, it’s because, like, it evolved from a telephone. That’s– So that was, like, the limitation of the technology at the time. So kind of, kind of the same thing, but in a different, slightly different way. Um, I think that’s really exciting. Are you generally optimistic about the future of AI and technology, or do you have a little bit of a dystopia bend to you where you think maybe it could all go bad?

Erin Rollenhagen: I think there’s, I think there are ways that it can go well and ways that it can, you know, f- free people from drudgery in their tasks and free them up to do things that are more fulfilling, providing more value, and I think that’s great. I think there’s also a risk of becoming intellectually lazy in certain ways, um, due to use of AI and, and I can feel it happening to myself sometimes. There are certain things that, for example, I’m used to having AI proofread all of my stuff. If you had to tell me to go back and proofread my own things manually, it, it feels really difficult’cause I haven’t been flexing that muscle.

Kaylee Williams: Time-consuming, slow. Yeah

Erin Rollenhagen: Time-consuming. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there’s a, a real risk, and we’ll have to be intentional about not becoming intellectually lazy with it. Um, the other thing that I think everyone was worried about was that, uh, creative pursuits are, are all gonna become this AI slop and, you know, there’s gonna be no room for the, the true artisans of the world. I’m not very worried about that. I, I think there, there is always this brief moment in time when a new technology comes out when it’s exciting,

Kaylee Williams: Mm-hmm

Erin Rollenhagen: and some of what AI allowed people to do felt like accessing certain things that maybe, um, conveyed a little bit of status or allowed them to convey a trust signal. Think about the number of people who use AI to develop LinkedIn thought leadership posts. And there was this brief period of time where if you were using ChatGPT to write your thought leadership post, you were killing it on LinkedIn, and that was over in about three months.

Kaylee Williams: That’s right.

Erin Rollenhagen: And then everyone realized it was AI, stopped seeing it as, you know, this person is on this unattainable level, realized everyone could do it. That’s how trust signals work. As soon as you make the thing attainable to everyone, it loses its power as a trust signal, and the trust signal reverts back to the thing that not everyone can do, which is that messy human creativity.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Right. Gosh, and it’s so cringey too, the LinkedIn… I know what you’re talking about. And it’s like, “I went and I bought sausages today, and here’s what that made me think about when I do biz dev.” I don’t know. It’s so weird. It’s so weird. They all have the same, like, pattern and cadence.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes

Kaylee Williams: I– So the– It’s funny you say that, that it’s like the, the more human things, um, are what drive that trust signal now because, uh, I got an email the other day from someone and it had a typo in it, and I was like, “Oh, good. Not AI.” Yep.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes. Yes

Kaylee Williams: Whereas a typo would’ve been just, you know, the… I, I would’ve just been like, “Oh, no, they’re not serious.” Like, you know, you get an email with a typo and you’re like, “Ugh, that’s terrible. It’s a bad signal.”

Erin Rollenhagen: I, uh, occasionally will leave some clunky phrasing in something- Hmm just so people know it’s really me saying

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. sure. Yeah. A little run-on sentence here.

Erin Rollenhagen: Exactly.

Kaylee Williams: A little grammatical error there.

Erin Rollenhagen: error there.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah, I– So I also, I studied English in college, so I have a hard time… If I see a typo or like, it’s hard for me to let that go. I have to– I feel like I need to fix it. It’s like a compulsion. Um, so what I– The reason I was excited to interview you, Erin, is because, and we’ve talked about this a little bit with your background, you work with builders. You are yourself a builder, and you’ve– Y- I mean, Entrepreneurial Technologies now People Friendly Tech, tech is a startup, was a startup. So I’m curious if you have any insight or lessons learned you can share with our listeners about how to build a company that has staying power. I mean, 20 years is a long time. Most businesses don’t even make it two years. So why do you think yours worked, and what are the things that maybe you would do differently if you could go back and do it all over again?

Erin Rollenhagen: I, I think there’s a real danger when you have been on, on the right side of the ebbs and flows of giving yourself a little too much credit for, for that good fortune. And I have to say that there’s definitely a large amount of good fortune involved in, in being able to be around for almost 20 years, and I’d be lying if I acted like it was all some sort of grand plan that, that I had in my head. Um, I think a few things that I’ve learned along the way, though, and maybe some of them that I wish I had learned a little bit earlier in the process is, you know, it took me about five years into my business to get serious about understanding the business’ financials. Um, I think a lot of people shy away from that. I had the classes in college, and yet it still didn’t really click for me as something I wanted to be deeply involved in all the time. But i- again, we talked about econ as the physics of the business world. You know, this is the nuts and bolts of how your business runs and what’s gonna enable you to keep running. If, if you look at why do businesses shut down, most common reason is they just ran out of money. Yep. And when you run out of money, things are gonna start going wrong very quickly. And so, if I could go back, you know, and, and talk to myself as a fresh, budding entrepreneur, I would say, “I know that the numbers are really tiny right now, and it doesn’t seem like you need to be doing all of this financial reporting, but it’s gonna be good for you to do it, and you need to learn how to make that a part of your process.”

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Yeah. And, um, did you get pretty good at forecasting too? So not just understanding the retroactive financials, but trying to build out what you think the future could look like?

Erin Rollenhagen: So, you know, I’m not sure how, what you see with the businesses you work with, but for us, the expenses are quite predictable. Most of our expenses are salaries. Everything that’s not salary is, you know, typically some sort of recurring expense. So it’s easy to forecast your expenses, and that means you have a target. There is no reason that I can’t know how much money we need to bring in four months from now, right? Because I have a pretty good handle on the expenses, and if anything weird’s gonna happen, I’m gonna be the one who okayed it, so I should be able to work that into the plan.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah

Erin Rollenhagen: So that means, you know, one side of your equation in the short term anyway is fixed, and so you just have to work on the other side, which is the revenue side. And I find that for myself, if I have a target, I can hit the target. If it’s this sort of vague thing in the ether of, “Well, just try to, try to bring in more revenue,” that’s squishier. That’s harder to hit. But a specific number, I mean, show me an entrepreneur who doesn’t get excited to go after a specific goal,

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not vague. It’s like we… This is exactly what we know we need to go get.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. So two years ago you did a rebrand from Entrepreneurial Technologies to People Friendly Tech. Love it. But can you talk to us about the logic behind it? You know, how did you know it was the right time for a rebrand, and then how did you begin the process of trying to figure out what is the right rebrand that will reflect to our customers who we want to be and who they want us to be?

Erin Rollenhagen: Mm-hmm. So I think anytime you, you do a rebrand, you have to understand that you’re giving something up, right? That old name has some level of recognition in the community and amongst the people who know you, so there’s a cost to it beyond the, the check you’re gonna write to some firm. In our case, we did it in-house, so it was our own time rather than a check we were writing someone. But there’s, there’s a cost there, and so you better make sure that it’s worth your while in the long run because you’re gonna lose a little bit of recognition there for a bit. Um, what we found that made that seem worthwhile is, for one thing, it had been, you know, close to 17 years at that point, and people still had trouble spelling it and pronouncing it. If people can’t spell or pronounce something, they have trouble remembering it. So that was a, a good signal to us that even though there was meaning in that name, it maybe wasn’t the best name overall. The other thing about it is it didn’t really speak to our, our secret sauce. It talked about who we served, but not what we did for them. And so calling it People Friendly Tech and, and the way that that brand evolved, I think is an immediate message to people who encounter us that this is what we do and this is what it looks like. Mm-hmm. I love that. Yeah.

Kaylee Williams: a great explanation. And entrepreneurial is kind of a hard word to spell.

Erin Rollenhagen: It’s a tricky word. Yeah. It’s a tricky

Kaylee Williams: And my mom used to teach, um, an entrepreneurship class to middle schoolers, and she would end it by giving a prize to the student who could spell entrepreneurship correctly. Which I always thought was kinda cute. There’s like a sneaky U in there and a sneaky E.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s tricky and it’s great

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Has it gone well, the rebranding? I mean, it’s been long enough now you should have some idea of how, how it’s been received. Are you pleased?

Erin Rollenhagen: I am so pleased. It’s been received really well. Um, people remember it. They like it. We get a lot of people reaching out and saying, “Oh, that’s, that’s so creative, and I, I know exactly what you mean.” And I think the unlock moment for us was when, you know, we’d been working on this rebrand and, and by the way, we are the worst clients ever. Um, you know, it’s, it’s a funny thing’cause we’ve– we have clients that we, that we perform this service for, right? So you’d think we would be fantastic clients, and we’re the worst, and I am, I am at the root of the problem. Um-

Kaylee Williams: makes you the worst? Are you indecisive?

Erin Rollenhagen: What makes you the worst? Are you indecisive? I, I give terrible feedback. You know, it’s- Uh, vague feedback and vague direction and too many ideas that don’t go together and all of that And so we, we kept working on it, and there were times that I felt like, “You know what? We should just release this as it is. It’s good enough. It’s an improvement.” But finally, one day, we said, Why don’t we have fun with this?” You know, we’re being so serious about this, and we always tell clients that they need to bring the emotion into it. Creating your own tech product, it ought to be fun on some level. That ought to be something that fires you up about that. Mm-hmm. You know? That feels really satisfying, and so what would we do if we had fun with it? Dogs in space, and-

Kaylee Williams: I was gonna make a comment about the corgi in the spacesuit. Yes It is really fun and really memorable. Yeah.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah,

Kaylee Williams: And now you have corgis, right? I

Erin Rollenhagen: Now you have dogs, right? I do. I have two. You have two.

Kaylee Williams: two. What are their names? Bruno and Scarlet. Okay. Bruno and Scarlet. Were they the inspiration for the people-friendly tech corgi?

Erin Rollenhagen: They were the inspiration. Um, if you look at the silhouette of the little corgi with the astronaut backpack on and the helmet, that is the silhouette of my dog Bruno

Kaylee Williams: Oh, that’s really cute. Oh man, we might have to have a, a photo of Bruno for the– when we publish this. That would be really cute

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes. I, I will send you– I have a great one that’s him doing the exact pose and you’ll, you’ll see it.

Kaylee Williams: Um, well, we’re close to time, but I wanna touch on one more thing before we go. Uh, so I, I know you write. You’re a writer, and you cover all kinds of topics, and so does Tej. And Tej has been doing a series on, um, entrepreneurs who have sort of this artistic side, this other part of their brain that they use. And, um, you’re an author and you’re a painter. So can you talk a little bit, as we kinda wrap up our conversation today, about how that part of your life and your interests have informed your business mind?

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah. I think that’s a great question. I think there’s a couple of answers to that. One is I think it’s great to have something to do to engage your brain that is different from what you do at work. Um, what we do is it’s highly success-oriented. We… Clients engage us to try to de-risk the process for them and make them more likely to succeed, which means we have to look at it with that lens. Um, but when I’m doing, when I’m painting, when I’m writing, I’m free to fail. You know, I c- I can try things that I’m not immediately good at. I– And there’s so much learning that comes from exploring without fear of failure. Um, you know, especially on the painting side, 80% of what I do no one ever sees, you know? But it’s me working something out- Yeah and, and learning, you know, how the, how the properties change, how to layer things to create depth, how to work with light, you know, those sorts of things. And that thinking, strangely enough, tends to come back in some way in my work

Kaylee Williams: Hmm. When you’re writing code, and I would imagine you probably don’t write as much code these days given the nature of your role and what we just talked about with AI, but when you’re actually in there and you’re writing code, are you thinking like a painter?

Erin Rollenhagen: Hmm. So I, I don’t write much code anymore, but I know when I did write code, I, I could tell that I approached it differently than a lot of people around me. And I think there is some left brain, right brain stuff going on there. Um, and, and I think it’s good for all of us to have those diverse perspectives and have someone who maybe comes at it from a different view. I learned a lot from people who think more with a traditional analytic approach, and I know that there were times when, you know, the conversation got moved forward because I was coming at it from a more creative approach.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a lot of data to back that up too, that the diversity viewpoints is usually leads to much better outcomes. Yeah.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yeah

Kaylee Williams: Erin, it has been such a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Um, I would love to bring you back and talk about your most recent book that you’ve published. Um, so maybe we do another episode when I finish reading it,’cause I’m only about at the third of the way through, so

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes, I would love that

Kaylee Williams: form like specific questions about the book, but we can, we can talk about that next time when I bring you back.

Erin Rollenhagen: Yes, I’d love that. Thank you so much

Kaylee Williams: This has been Erin Rollenhagen from People Friendly Tech on the Iowa Tech Podcast. See you next week.