Paul Davenport:
Hello and welcome to What The Tech from Boast AI, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world.
Today, I am thrilled to welcome to the show, Weston Baker, founder and CEO of Morphic, and an overall force in the startup ecosystem. At Morphic, Weston has created a no-code SaaS platform that empowers businesses to create their own high quality websites. The solution uses an advanced design logic with integrated best practices to create pages that can be easily edited and managed using the integrated CMS, site editor, and asset library.
So along with being a founder in his own right, however, Weston has extensive experience partnering and mentoring startups, tech giants, VCs, PE firms, real estate companies, fashion houses, and brands throughout his career. His startup studio, 15 Finches, has worked with dozens of successful founders in various industries and with different business models to help find product market fit, consult and design product, rebrand, and propel growth at various stages.
He's got a wealth of experience in the field, folks, and I'm excited to pick his brain on what's next for Morphic, his journey within the startup space to date, and his take on what the future has in store for the startup community. So now, without further ado, welcome to the show, Weston.
Weston Baker:
Awesome. Thanks for having me. That was a great intro.
Paul Davenport:
I hope so. I mean, you have the experience-
Weston Baker:
I'm happy to be here.
Paul Davenport:
... you got the CV. But, I mean, first things first, Weston, tell us about yourself. Tell us where you're located, what your background is, and how you got into the startup space to begin with.
Weston Baker:
I'm just outside of New York City now. Moved out of the city right before COVID happened. Lucky timing for us. Our whole team is remote at Morphic. So we've got people in Seattle, LA, New York, New Jersey, Colorado, building a tech startup, a SaaS platform where we're trying to automate design solutions to basically level the playing field for small businesses looking to get a super professional website and marketing materials.
Paul Davenport:
That is awesome. So I think we were discussing too, recently, how it's refreshing to talk to somebody who's on the East Coast in the US again. I'm so used to that remote lifestyle. But what's it been like leading your remote team over the past few years and just steering through all the many myriad business challenges that have risen?
Weston Baker:
So it's interesting. We were in a tiny office in SoHo, in Manhattan. It's one of my favorite neighborhoods. So it was really cool to be located there with our team. We're all in, basically, one small room. So we could brainstorm together, turn around and ask someone if they saw that movie that just came out or whatever. And that kind of interaction I think is really valuable. That's what we miss now.
There's definitely an efficiency to the working remote situation. We had actually joked about it in the office. We heard of one or two companies that were fully remote and were surprised by tha because they were fairly large at the time. And we were like, "Yeah, what if we just all went remote? What if we just never came back here, took our computers, go work from Hawaii or whatever."
And people laughed and it was like, "Yeah, yeah, that'd be pretty cool." And then of course we were basically forced into that situation with COVID. I think it's a blessing and surprise a little bit in disguise where now I get to see my kids all the time. It's actually really easy with all the technology now. Zoom calls, Google Hangouts, Slack. Communication's pretty easy.
I think it's just those human interactions that we miss. Unfortunately, that's just the reality of it, but luckily, it's pretty easy. I can be cooking dinner and Slacking our team on the West Coast because they're still on or whatever. It's been pretty good.
Paul Davenport:
That's awesome. I can so relate to everything you just said. At my previous company, we were just going to do a trial work from home in March of 2020. We just never came back to the office. Everyone went home one Friday with their laptops. It was like, "Prepare to test all the systems on Monday."
Now talking about Morphic in particular, tell us a little bit about what makes Morphic unique, how it came together, and what just unique innovation you guys are driving over there.
Weston Baker:
Just to rewind a little. I started a creative agency back in end of 2014 in New York City. We did a lot of branding, marketing material design, websites. Like you said, we work with a lot of startups, and help them with their product design, user interface, user experience stuff. So across the board, just did a lot of design work, creative solutions.
And actually, right around the time that COVID was starting, we had a few different things that converged at the same time. We kept all of our team members when COVID happened, even though the agency, we had 16 potential clients about to sign off, all of them just went on pause because of COVID.
And so we were left with our staff and instead of laying anyone off, we decided to build this thing that we had started building internally as a client dashboard, we were calling it, but we had all these other ideas for it. And this is the thing that eventually turned into Morphic. And then we found that it was working so well for customers that we started doing that full-time instead of the agency.
But basically, we found that we could automate the creative solutions that our clients were coming to us for and basically productize a service-based business. Which when you think about what service-base is and how it's pretty limited for how you can scale it, you can work with one client at a time to solve their problem, but it's hard to expand that out over a wider audience easily. And with the product, if you build those solutions into it, then you can offer those kinds of solutions to however many people sign up for it.
And so yeah, that was an exciting thing. It was a little bit of a happy situation that happened because we were then freed up to work on ... And we had done other internal projects before too. We had launched our own apps and stuff. We had worked with so many startups helping them from their idea up to building a final product, even through exiting their companies. So we knew what it took to design something, build it, market it, get it working, how to user test.
Morphic, I think of it more as an automated creative agency that brings those high quality solutions to customers, but it's very easy to bucket it as a website builder because that's what people know right now. So I think that's one of our challenges is, how do we explain to customers that, no, it's not just a website builder? The designer that you would probably hire to use a website builder is actually built into the product.
So you can plug in your company info. You don't have to know what you want or how you want it designed. You don't have to be the designer. It will do it for you, and make those recommendations, build it, and then explain it back to you. So that's the biggest difference there.
And I was just thinking about this. One of the things that I liked about Boast is that I didn't have to be a domain expert to basically maximize the output. And I feel like that's one of the things we're doing with Morphic is you shouldn't have to know design at all.
It's basically the equivalent of hiring a creative agency, go through onboarding, and then it does the work for you, and it explains it to you. And I feel like that's what we got with Boast. I still have no idea how it works on your end, but it worked perfectly and it's an amazing thing to ... You get the benefits of it, but I didn't have to become the domain expert.
Paul Davenport:
Oh, absolutely. It's not a solution if you're putting the onus of work on your customer to do the heavy lifting. Not to bring it back to Boast immediately, but a lot of people who come to us from other places, they're like, "At the end of the day, I put in so much time working on my R&D tax claim that I really just paid somebody to hold my hand. And it wasn't actually doing the work for me. It wasn't actually doing the solution for me. It was more just like, 'Okay, I'm your babysitter for this process. It's going to be painful for all of us.'"
I'm a marketer. I've been in the marketing space forever. My background's in journalism. There's a wide umbrella of what falls under content and what falls under content marketing. And I do not have that design eye. Everything you were listing out there in terms of being a full creative suite for startups in that position where they want to look established, they want the best of breed product and the best of breed digital real estate, but they might not have the resources to outsource a full design team.
Or they might have a ace journalist on their team who can do the standard content marketing, but how do they fill in the other end there? How do they get that design, that visual aspect that actually gets people into the finish line? And-
Weston Baker:
Yeah. Our customers, I think the underlying thing that is inspiring them is they want to build a business. Whether they're just starting out and they have an idea and they need their first website, or they already have a business and they're somewhat established and want to level up, they all aspire to basically be an industry leader.
They want to go out there and be super proud of their company and show everyone and have it look super legit, clearly describe who they are, what their differentiators are, what their services are, their product is. And we worked with hundreds of companies doing their brands and websites on the agency side.
So what we found is a lot of those companies, they get that excited feeling. Then they go out there and say, "Okay, how do we bring this to life? We need to get an awesome website and marketing materials and everything." And they look at their options and see that, okay, we could hire a creative agency. They chat with a few of them. A lot of times it's like 25K quote, 50K quote, and very quickly their excitement is shot down.
Sometimes they have the budget for it and they just can't warrant it because it's not an E-commerce site. It's a professional marketing site, like a business profile, and are we really going to spend that much on this? It's valuable, but that's a lot of money. So maybe we should look at the other end of the spectrum.
We have these really affordable no-code builders now, which is great. Anyone can go on and launch a site. But what they find is they log in there and realize that no-code doesn't mean DIY for what they need. And so very quickly, they'll take that template that a million other people have started with, try to tweak it.
Once they replace some assets and copy, it all of a sudden doesn't look so good and doesn't really tell their story. It doesn't give them that feeling that they were first thinking about when they wanted to go out there and be proud of their business.
So that's the thing that creative agencies can bring to them that they can't really get from using these existing products. When we can automate that offering from the creative agency into the product, but make it as easy to use, if not easier than those no-code builders, that's the magic of Morphic, where you go through that onboarding.
It creates your materials or website for you, and then you actually get that feeling like, "Oh wow, I'm super excited to blast this out on social media and show everyone this is my company." It's kind of an intangible thing we're trying to capture.
Paul Davenport:
Yeah, but it's something that founders can be so proud of, too. I mean, you don't want them to lose that energy and that momentum just because they're not able to present themselves well in probably the most important realm for them to, their digital real estate.
And I love how you put that too. It's been to date, you either have the option of doing the no-code standard template that has been rinsed and repeated across the internet and doesn't really shine a light at least in a positive way on your product or service, or you go and you spend your whole marketing budget on getting a design house. And I've been in both scenarios before and I wish I had that middle ground. So this is awesome.
Weston Baker:
Yeah, it's interesting because with these marketing sites, if you design them with best practices, you usually shouldn't reinvent the wheel too much, like a layout design, for example, that's never been done before. That's probably not a good thing. Users or visitors to your website will probably come there and get confused about it because it's something they haven't seen before.
So we found also that a lot of companies don't need to reinvent the wheel, but they're paying to reinvent the wheel if you hire a top designer or a creative agency. And that's one of the things that's really nice about Morphic is it can actually automate those solutions using layouts that are best practice design, but they're highly flexible.
So they will adjust for the content of that business, it'll write the copy for them, and then it will style it with their brand styles. So it becomes unique and it becomes theirs and very professional, but we don't need to reinvent the wheel.
I think that's one thing that people think, if I don't go with a designer or agency, it's just going to be a template, and that has been the case. So that's one of those things we have to figure out how to communicate is it will be a custom design even though you're not having a human guide you through that process.
Paul Davenport:
That makes perfect sense to me. And again, I wish I had been having this conversation at a few jobs ago just to learn about what we were doing with Morphic. Now going back to you, Weston, a little bit. I know you didn't originally start necessarily in the tech space or the startup space. You were an architect and you worked on some pretty cool projects.
Could you both tell me about how you got from architecture to Morphic, but also how those skills have been applicable, I think? Because you're very focused in design, and I know that we started talking about it a little bit yesterday, but I'd love for you to unpack the simpatico between those two fields.
Weston Baker:
Just going back to when I was a little kid, I loved designing everything. So I liked designing cars, designing shoes. I wanted to design cars for Ferrari and shoes for Nike. I love designing houses. I think a lot of architects start out wanting to design the house they live in when they're older. So I did that a bunch.
And I was always into art. My dad was a commercial illustrator. I saw him doing a lot of design projects. And a lot of them were strategic. You had to figure out how to communicate some complicated system or message within a flat graphic. So I grew up watching that.
And then architecture seemed to be something that brought a lot of these different things together. I love the problem solving aspect. I was always really into math, actually. I'm left and right brain, probably equally. So architecture brought those things together, the creative side, building something, creating something that didn't exist before, trying to solve problems.
And at the same time, it's very technical. You can't fake it. You have to actually solve the problem or it will fail, which is a little bit different than doing an art piece, for example, which I also love doing, but it actually has to function.
I had my eye on architecture schools since I was 9 or 10. Ended up on the East Coast because I had pinpointed Cornell as the school that I really, really wanted to go to. So luckily got in, went there, absolutely loved it. And then moved to New York City to work at a big firm called SOM, where I got thrown right into doing massive projects. So worked on what is now the tallest skyscraper in Singapore, which was my very first project.
I got really great guidance there from the head partner, Mustafa. The whole team was awesome. And then luckily, for me at least, they picked my design for that building. And so right after that, I basically got put on all these really cool projects that had really difficult design problems.
It was a chaotic, fast-paced environment to work in, but there are a lot of parallels to the startup world, product design also, where when you really step back and look at it, take away that it's a building, take away that it's a logo or an app, you're talking about a set of problems that you have to find a cohesive solution to. It's always going to be a human who's interacting with it or entering it, whether it's that app or the building. The way that you design the flow of it is really important, the way that you organize things.
In architecture, there are adjacency diagrams, what makes sense to go next to different elements. There are wireframes where you create the wireframes of the building just in line work and the form of it. And you do wireframes in product design and web design, the site architecture of it. There's so many parallels actually when you really start to look at the fundamentals of it and take away what the thing is that you're designing.
So I found that a lot of the strategies that I used in architecture that went into a bunch of these buildings, you could actually apply to other types of design. I left the architecture firm, joined a couple of creative agencies in New York and found that those design principles work really well, and at the same time, they do solve the problem. Those strategies and techniques were completely applicable.
So I tell a lot of architecture students, they don't have to limit themselves to just architecture if they think they're interested in other things because there are a lot of skillsets that they have that they don't realize can be pretty valuable in other areas. And a lot of them end up finding that they really enjoy problem solving in other places and not just with buildings.
Paul Davenport:
That's amazing. And I love when you even said it, the site architecture. That had skipped my brain completely, but it's right there in the back end. And I also love how you said too, there's always going to be a human at the center of it all, no matter what, whether you're in the startup space, whether you're designing a website, whether you're designing a building.
I know that at Boast, we're really, really pushing on just how we leverage the latest technology. We use AI to make sure we're optimizing our strategies, maximizing your claims, but I truly believe that it's the people at the center of the company that make the difference here, because we have to be able to speak the technological language that our founders are speaking. There can't be a huge hurdle in communicating what your innovation is to us so that we can then communicate that to the CRA.
So at the core of all the AI that we have on our product and all the systems that we have on our end too, it's really intelligent people who have done the work. They have experienced building companies and also working in deep tech. What's your experience been like working with Boast so far?
Weston Baker:
So I had never thought of R&D tax credits, honestly. I'm assuming most startup founders haven't, especially the ones that are on the smaller side where of course you think about R&D, but you're thinking about what you want to build and the value you can bring probably to your customers, and not necessarily there's a byproduct of it, which is there's this value of the tax credits that you can get, but people probably aren't thinking about that.
I was first introduced to Boast through one of our customers, Radian Capital, who invested in Boast and they're a Morphic user. We saw the Boast logo on their site a few times, went to the site, and then realized we should probably talk to them about getting some of the value out of the R&D that we're doing.
Our first experience with Boast was actually jumping on a call, chatting with a human about what do we do? Could we extract any value out of that? We might be missing out on some of those tax credits, which we definitely were on in the past. It was really a easy process.
I know just for me, like I said, it's amazing that I didn't have to become the domain expert. I feel like with most things as a startup founder, you have to go figure it out. You have to be the head of sales, be the head of whatever, if you don't have a person for it. But with this, Boast just handled it for us.
So like I said, on your end, I still have no idea how it worked, but it did work. It's amazing. I think we worked with Jeremy who was awesome and helped us. Basically, we just filled out a sheet where I chatted with our engineers trying to identify what are the things that could qualify as R&D. Plugged that in, jumped on a quick call with Jeremy, went over that stuff. He walked through which things would probably qualify or not, and that was really it from our side.
And then there's these final papers that showed up. We submit that to the PEO and it's done. So I will a hundred percent use it again. I don't know why you wouldn't. We had a great experience. This is a great thing because I don't have to fake loving what we got out of Boast because it was actually great.
Paul Davenport:
It's music to my ears. My favorite thing about going to all the events that they've been sending me to over the past few months is that our customers aren't running away when they see me coming over with a Boast logo on my shirt. They're smiling, they are happy. They're like, "Oh."
They'll namedrop the TSM who worked with them. They'll be like, "Oh, Jeremy, helped me get this over the line," or, "Josh, who got me over the line." And that's unique. That is not something I've experienced in the startup space or in the services space at all. So I love to hear it, Weston. That is so cool.
Weston Baker:
I think a lot of the startups that aren't thinking about this will look into it and then realize there's something of value that they've been building that they didn't realize that Boast can help unlock for them. I think that's probably why those people are coming up, too.
First of all, it was great to work with everybody that we've worked with, but also there's this value or money that's there that we didn't realize. And so when you find out you can unlock it, then it's like this nice surprise. You know?
Paul Davenport:
Absolutely. Yeah, and that's the thing. So many founders, I think especially in the US too, just because there's a perception that the tax system right now isn't set up in a way that really benefits small businesses or startups, per se, at least compared to historical trends. But that's not necessarily the case. There is money available, there is money out there. We know where to find it.
We know where we can help you plug it into to make sure that you're extending your runway, and that you're working on R&D, that you can get a credit back on next year, that you're making sure that there's a return on these investments that you're getting from the money that we help you achieve.
Weston Baker:
So because we went through that process with Boast, we had to go back and look at the work we had done over the previous year to see what might qualify. So now we just actively, each month, we've just been noting down in a little bit more detail everything that we think would probably qualify. And it's good to do anyway, to document those things, but now it'll be even easier next time because we already have the whole thing right there and we'll just plug it in.
Paul Davenport:
Yeah, and a lot of those best practices too, just making sure that you're tracking your activities, they're good workflows for just doing R&D in general or for running your business, making sure you have all of that together. Sure, the Boast platform helps you sync it all into one place. That's going to be something we really push on in the next few months as we really announce some more product enhancements.
But as a business owner, be aware of what you could expense. Be aware of what could be credit worthy, and make sure that you're doing those activities often if it's something that's going to benefit you too. So that is great to hear.
And again, please, founders who are listening at home, follow Weston's lead on this. It makes your life a lot easier. We'll get you the R&D claims. We just want to make sure that you're not running into walls or headaches running the business every day. So awesome stuff.
All right, Weston, I cannot thank you enough for hopping on the mic here. Was there anything else that we wanted to include?
Weston Baker:
Yeah. Any founders out there who need professional website and marketing materials, go check out Morphic.