-: So my name is Ben Ross.
I'm the founder and CTO of POWr.io
where we make tools to help small business grow online.
Sure, yeah, we make the whole suite of tools
that you need for a website to really supercharge it
or collect more visitors, sell if you're trying to sell.
So anything from a custom form you need
to collect information from your visitors
or a popup to try and engage them
to e-commerce tools to actually sell any kind of product
or subscription you have,
so really the full gambit of website tools
to sell more stuff and engage with your visitors.
The CTO is really ultimately responsible
for the technology
and so when you're talking about a website,
a tech business, it's about are the servers running?
Are they running fast?
There's kind of a core level that if something goes down,
if there's a fire, it's on me.
But beyond that, it's really about the team.
How do we grow and sustain a team of people
that are really smart,
that are developing the right products,
that are writing code effectively
and maintainably for the future?
And so ultimately, it's really about people engineering
and supporting a team of people.
There's kind of the language of a MVP,
or minimum viable product.
So when you're starting out,
it's really about figuring out
what do we need to launch with that we can do quickly
that can show whether this idea is gonna work?
And so we built a product that was very easy
to be able to customize a form,
to really look exactly how you want it look,
ask whatever kind of question,
whether it was needed a file upload or an image
or whatever it was.
And so that was kind of our,
we call lowest hanging fruit or MVP product,
and so we built that product
and got that in a few market places
that were available in kind of website-building platforms.
Developing relationships with other companies
and partners is a core part
of what being a founder is really.
And I have my CTO role hat,
which is more about the technology,
but I also have a founder role,
which is representing the company
and that could be toward the general public
or more often, it's developing relationships
with other companies that we're gonna work with.