Jon Moss-The Remarkable Business Show-Episode 8.mp3

Jon Moss: [00:00:00] This is The Remarkable Business Show on remarkable.fm. I'm Jon Moss and this is Episode 8 a very warm welcome to you from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. 

VO: [00:00:12] Cyclist, skier, international fugitive an all around curious guy. This is the latest edition of The Remarkable Business show with your host Jon Moss. 

Jon Moss: [00:00:22] Welcome to the show. I'm recording this in a slightly different location today. I'm in Chiang Mai northern Thailand and I've been working and living here for the past three weeks. [00:00:32] So Sawasdee Krab [1.3] or hello in Thai. Now you may have read or indeed listen to other podcasts or watched videos on YouTube about Chiang Mai being one of the places in the world where digital nomads flock to. But first of all, what's a digital nomad you may ask. Well it's someone who can work anywhere and is not tied to a static location. People often talk about location independent businesses and this is precisely what a lot of people in Chiang Mai are doing. I've met South Africans, Canadians, Americans, Brits, Italians, Aussies, Kiwis, and many more nationalities who are based here for a period of time working on their businesses. Now those businesses are generally online. And so whether they are a developer or someone selling on Amazon. So this is something called FBA Fulfilled by Amazon. These are very popular businesses here in Chiang Mai. So these people can be anywhere in the world as long as they've got good internet access and use their laptop. So this FBA term it's something that you hear quite a lot Fulfilled by Amazon. There are a lot of people here doing this and very very successfully. If you have a look online and search for FBA or For by Amazon there's a wealth of videos and information and blog posts about it. It's worth a read. It's fascinating. Now Chiang Mai happens to tick a lot of boxes for people like this. Me included. For the past few weeks. 

Jon Moss: [00:01:52] Firstly you've got the weather. It's very warm but so nice to step outside and feel some real heat especially in October. We are coming to the end of the rainy season now so November and December are very popular times here. It's slightly cooler, a lot less rain, and a lot of sunshine. Secondly, internet access. The Internet here is unbelievably quick. I've bought an AIS sim card, popped into my phone and have 100 meg plus up and down virtually everywhere even at the top of the mountain where I have been cycling in the morning. Cost How does 25GBP a month grab you for 14 gig of data. It's very effective and it's just cheap. It's so [00:02:34] good. There is also super-fast [2.7] WiFi all over the city including the night market would you believe and so the sim allows free access to that. So I'm sitting having dinner, having some nice delicious Pad Thai, and I'm connected to their WiFi for free getting crazy Internet speeds. Also every single coffee shop also has around WiFi by and so its incredibly easy to stay connected wherever you are in the city and even in the countryside. There are a number of very good co-working spaces here in Chiang Mai as well. I spent a lot of time at Pun Space Nimman which is a particular district which is 290 bar today. So around 6.5GBP which gives you a desk, decent office chair, rock solid fast WiFi and also free water, tea, and coffee. There is a big community of people and teams working from here and they have two locations one in the old town which is a huge one and the smaller space in the Nimman district which is where I spent most of my time. 

Jon Moss: [00:03:35] I've also been working in my room or my little apartment condo type thing and more on that shortly using tethering to the phone and it's more than okay. So Thirdly, cost of living. How does a decent room for around 10 pounds a night sound? 

Jon Moss: [00:03:50] Okay it's not the Four Seasons - although that is available here in Chiang Mai but it's absolutely fine for a clean bed and a shower. For not much more you can get some really nice places. A lot of people living and working here rent apartments or condos for a number of months. You are spoiled for choice here and you can expect to pay anything from 150 pounds upwards depending on the location, how nice it is, and also how long you sign for. Obviously if you sign for a few more months or even six months you can get some really good deals. The general standard of living and costs suddenly makes you question just how expensive the western world is. Which is why living here and working here for your normal clients makes so much sense. This is something that people call location arbitrage. So you have western clients but eastern cost of living and quality of life. So here are a few examples of costs of things while I've been here. So Thai Massage for one hour. Around 200 Baht or five pounds. Dinner for four in the night market 400 Baht or around 10 pounds. A wet shave and beard trim in a really nice barber shop three pounds. The most amazing fresh fruit and french toast in a beautiful café around six pounds. If you eat at the local places especially the night markets and street stores you are paying on average around two pounds of meal or less. The food is simply superb. 

Jon Moss: [00:05:13] So the fourth thing is access to other places. Once you're over here in Asia, hopping on a plane to Australia, New Zealand, Tokyo, Vietnam and a wealth of other locations is easy and really good value. I spent a little bit of time googling flights and things like that from Chiang Mai and I came up with these things within a couple of minutes. 

Jon Moss: [00:05:32] So how about Hong Kong 140 pounds return or there is Vietnam for about 150 pounds return so that's going to Ho Chi Minh city and here's a new room opening up from Chiang Mai direct to Ho Minh City soon. You've also got something like Tokyo which is 230 pounds return so it's just amazing the opportunities that are being over here have jumping off somewhere for a weekend. You've also got fantastic trains as well. So an overnight train to Bangkok in a first class private cabin is around 45 pounds and Bangkok is incredibly well-connected. You can also get easily a train or a flight down to the islands like Ko Tao, Koh Samui, or Phuket. Speaking of which I spent three months travelling in Thailand 22 years ago. I feel old. My three weeks here have been amazing and I'm so pleased I booked the flight and just got on and did it. It's not hard. Chiang Mai is a busy bustling city and I've hardly seen any of it while I'm here. Admittedly I've been working a lot more than I thought I would but it's been great and I'm going to be back. If you want to work somewhere remotely and you've got the opportunity to do so. Chiang Mai is fantastic. By the way, I also brought my bike with me to Chiang Mai because it's got a huge cycling scene here and a number of very famous routes and climbs. [00:06:51] Doh Suthep [0.9] is the mounting climb to the west of the city and I deliberately stay near here. So 7 a.m. I can roll out onto the main road and I've got a 16 kilometer climb. A few minutes later up through the jungle which is absolutely stunning. You'll never be alone on the climb either as people are cycling running and walking and there's a very famous temple at the top. Built originally in 1383 and the road to it was actually built in the 30s. So if you'd like to know more about my adventure, do drop me a line and Jon J-O-N at jonmoss.co.uk . I'd be happy to answer any questions. 

Jon Moss: [00:07:25] We've got a remarkable guest on the show today for you. He's had the most amazing career and he's now running a very cool start-up. Jeff Kofman is the co-founder and CEO of Trint. T-R-I-N-T - a London U.K. based tech company. Trint is developing a productivity tool that revolutionizes the handling of audio and video content offering intuitive editing and sharing of automated transcripts. Trint has developed a text editor that does the heavy lifting for you, the user. Jeff knows the world of video content. He's an Emmy winning veteran network television news and war correspondent with more than three decades of experience reporting from around the world. He's covered many of the biggest stories of our time including the Iraq war, the Arab Spring, hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill and the Chile mine rescue. With a track record reporting under deadline from some of the toughest places on earth, Jeff is a specialist in breaking news stories as well as finely crafted long form television. He's an experienced interviewer, TV and radio host and anchor, a commentator and analyst on world affairs. As a freelance journalist and commentator, Jeff is contributing repors and analysis to the BBC World Service, BBC News, BBC World, NPR, CBS Radio, and [00:08:37] Monocle radio. [1.0] He has received an Emmy award for coverage of the Libyan revolution and the special Emmy for coverage of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Our conversation is wide ranging and we talk about his background, Trint, what he's learned and the challenges he has overcome. Enjoy the chat. He's a fascinating guy with a remarkable business. 

VO: [00:08:57] Accessible, authentic, and useful. The Remarkable Business Show speaks to remarkable people. 

Jon Moss: [00:09:03] I am delighted to be welcoming the next guest to The Remarkable Business Show and that is Jeff Kofman who is speaking from London at the Trint headquarters. So Jeff welcome to the show. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:09:15] That's right I am on the top floor Trint tower. It's a twenty five story building that we just moved in to. No. OK. It's not true. We're 14 people, will be 16 next week and 20 by August. It's fun .It's a fast growing journey. 

Jon Moss: [00:09:30] How long has Trint been going in can you just tell the listeners a little bit about exactly what Trint is. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:09:35] Trint began December 1st 2014 we were a team of four and Trint really for me comes out of my career. I spent, I'm originally from Canada from Toronto. Spent more than 30 years as a broadcast journalist starting in Canadian television, moved to American network TV in 1997. And I have spent, as a result thousands of hours of my life transcribing interviews I've done, news conferences I've attended, lectures that I've recorded, etc. And you know in the arc of my career starting in Canada and local TV in the 1980s, I have watched everything about media, about journalism, and the process of gathering and collecting disseminating information changed. I am old enough that I remember manual typewriters, teletypes in a newsroom that punched out the news on paper and rang bells when something big happened. I missed film but I experienced the first video tape - all that's gone. All off that just seems like ancient history to a lot of your listeners. But you know when I began recording I used to take a little mini cassette recorder with me to hold it next to the microphone or in my hand and I'd record the interview and then I would hit rewind and go to the top and heading back to what was then the vocal station, I would be listening to it, hit hit play, hit stop and scribble down the quotes that I needed. That's what we call the sound bites for a story because you know what people have said before you can write your story whether it's a television story, a print story, an online story, it doesn't matter. And that's not just a scenario for journalists. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:11:23] What's interesting is that you know 30 years later, people are still doing that. We use digital recorders, you know the technology for recording has changed somewhat but the actual workflow hasn't changed. What's changed for journalists and so many others though is that when I began in journalism in the 1980s, you did a two minute two and a half minute story for tonight's newscast and that's all you did. You went in tomorrow and you do another one. Maybe you had to do two stories for two different newscast. But that was about it. Now everyone in media is doing video, audio, podcasts, social media, all sorts of different sharing. One interview can end up going into six-eight different directions. And that person has fewer resources at more time pressure because everything is instant these days. And yet what stops that information getting out? You got to find the moments and to find the moments you go back to my mini cassette recorder in the 1980s. That's the problem that Trint set out to solve. In 2013, when I decided I was leaving ABC News as London correspondent, I was asked to teach some global journalism programs to create some programs for an American and a Canadian university for a semester abroad. And in the process of researching that I was taking the [00:12:39] Miles first [0.8] a big coding conference here in London and introduced to some really brilliant developers who had done this experiment with transcription, with manual transcription tethering it to text. And I was just amazed and I said well gosh couldn't you put like automated speech in there and find some way to make it fixable so that you could search and it would do the heavy lifting? A Lorian who became our senior developer I remember that first meeting. He said it's an interesting idea. We could try it and we did and it worked. And it was amazing. And that's how Trint was born. 

Jon Moss: [00:13:12] What a fantastic story. And it really came about because there you found in the field in real life. There's a real need for this. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:13:21] Oh yeah. I mean there are certain profiles of classic entrepreneurs and I'm the guy who's lived the problem you know. I, we as a team set out to solve. Absolutely. I think that it's fair to say that there are a lot of us have ideas for innovation you know. Coffee Party, cocktail party chatter so to speak. You know you meet people when you're an entrepreneur and inventor like I become, everybody tells you about their idea. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:13:47] This is not an idea that lends itself that someone graduating from UCL or M.I.T. and computer science is going to know about. You have to have lived this problem and even know it exists. And I've lived this problem. I wonder if I'm honest why nobody had found a way to use technology to make it easier. But if I'm also honest I didn't set out to do this. It was just a chance meeting at a time in my life when I decided I was going to leave broadcast television as a foreign correspondent, as a war correspondent, and move on to something different and a new challenge. I met these guys and I just saw an opportunity and I remember saying them. This is the future. Either we get together and see if we can make this happen or we're going to go our separate ways, never meet each other again. And we're gonna be sitting in a coffee shop five or 10 years from now and people be working on a platform that is very much what you've done and what I imagine it could become. And I don't think we should let that happen. And it was really that was what went through my mind it was you know those kind of that moment you see in the cartoons when the light bulb goes off over the character's head. So there was a light bulb over my head that day. 

Jon Moss: [00:14:52] Yeah. It's so good. I've been using Trint now for probably two months and two of the shows we're on episode three at the moment. So you're being recorded for a future episode right now. And I love it. Absolutely I was searching literally for transcription software, Trint came up, I was up and running within a couple of minutes and just blown away especially by the user experience. How how did you get to that? Could you tell people a little bit why that's so special. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:15:23] First of all let me say thank you. This just makes me smile because you know I have now put three years of my life into this project. And some of our early team members have to hear you describe it doing exactly what we imagined and hoped it would do. It just it's really really satisfying. I can't tell you how much work this is. It's really hard to do this but when you hear that people get it and it works and it solves a problem for them, it just all feels worth it. Of course these start-ups are about making money. But you know what. It's about the impact and it's about the journey. It's it's about making a difference. And when you say that it just you know it makes my heart smile because these have got to be driven by passion by belief because if you just set out to get rich, good luck. Yeah. If you set out to have some impact and do something revolutionary. You just it's so much richer. So you know thank you on behalf of the team for saying what you just said. I should say for the listeners who don't quite understand what it is that you're praising. The core innovation of Trint is that it takes the flawed output of automated speech to text which has become better and better. But but is by nature imperfect because we don't speak perfectly and noise interrupts etc.. You get this really good speech to text like Siri and Alexa and Google. They're great but for me as a journalist, for an academic, for a lawyer, flawed transcriptions are of no value until you know you can trust them. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:16:48] The key innovation at Trint is the marriage of a text editor to an audio video player. So we glue the source audio to the text on the screen and we allow you to instantly search it. And if there is an error you can instantly correct it so that within seconds you have transcripts you can trust. You can then select the moment you like and instantly times it. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:17:10] That's a process I have done thousands and thousands of times in my life and with Trint we've reduced what is half an hour an hour two hours work just minutes. So that's I presume Jon why you're a fan and that's why we've grown so fast so quickly we just solve a problem. And we do it. You need to give us good audio. You know we're recording on good audio equipment here. I'm recording into my my laptop and you're getting a proper recording not out of the speakers. You give us bad audio, You like this. When Trint doesn't work. It's because it's got bad audio or I should be honest and also say, heavy foreign accents are not great to machine learning just as the truth. But otherwise we can deliver as you know transcripts that are 95, 98, even 99 percent accurate. 

Jon Moss: [00:17:57] I was astonished at the accuracy. And also for me it's about software that makes me smile. If I'm smiling, I'm liking it. And if I'm liking it, it's generally t just works. You know Trint for me was exactly that and it was just the user experience the player which you just talked about. I would absolutely encourage people to go and try it because it is. Once you've actually seen it and actually experienced it everybody would smile. So I'm glad that I've started using it. B delighted that we managed to connect and appreciate your time today. And what were the biggest challenges for you and the team probably to get where you are now. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:18:39] At the core of the original team was three developers and me and I have zero business experience zero technology experience. They are. They're really smart developers. They haven't done a commercial product on a commercial product they're open source guys. So we brought you know they brought a really smart innovative understanding of putting technology into new bound, into new territory. And I brought a deep understanding of the problem. But I'm not a UX UI guy user experience user interface guy none of. And they weren't either. So we kind of hacked it together. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:19:09] We started December 1st 2014 in an AirBnB in Florence because my co-founder lives just outside of Florence and we spent a couple of weeks holed up in there calling out to news organizations and journalists and podcasters and technical people asking what is the problem. Let's define how this works for you and what your solution would look like. That was really good because it got all four of us on the same page. Then the guys had to gather what they thought was the solution. And we did something else that was really it turned out to have been really smart. We didn't have much money but we paid an external user testing consultant to come in and run an independent lab on the first prototype. And it was a little it was a little bit like watching your kid get up on the stage for the first time and forget his lines. It was it was a little bit humbling. Shall we say to sit. We were sitting in another room watching on a monitor as people struggled and they would say things like I wish it did this. And we looked at each other and said well we could do that or why doesn't do that doesn't make sense. It won't work like this. It would be better. So that day of testing as dramatic as it was really saved us because we started to understand how people what people's expectations were, what how they interact and what the assumptions were. The thing that was reassuring was that the six people who were our guinea pigs all said this has amazing potential. If you can fix this and make it more and to have more and more accessible you can change the world. So we went back to drawing board. We completely redesigned the player and the editor and we created what was our first alpha of which came out in June of 2015. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:20:52] Through my media connections we had some really strong testers at the BBC at National Public Radio in the US a bunch of independent journalists and others. And they got it and they were patient enough with us to say we'll work with you and help you define how this can work because people were so excited at the possibility. And so those real world testers continued to feedback and say Guys it's freezing on this when I put in too much data and it causes a problem. And that led to a revision of the whole back end of the product so that it wouldn't crash and burn when it had too much information on it because a browser based cloud computing software and then we came out with a work which was work what was our first date at the end of 2015. And that's essentially what the Trint you're working on it with tweaked it a lot we refined it and we're about to release a major upgrade to be called Trint 2.0 this summer. But the Core Editor won't change because after a lot of testing and iterations we essentially got show that it works and it does what people wants. Now we're working on the features around with the journey in and out to make it simpler easier clearer to add better search tools and some incredibly exciting innovations and features as we move forward. 

Jon Moss: [00:22:04] That sounds terrific. And is there anything you can share with us today a little sneak peek or do we need to keep still and have you bang on the show again. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:22:13] Well no I mean I haven't been telling you that Trint 2.0. It's been a fascinating journey. We did another testing lab when we when we. So we launched Trint September 5th 2016 as a commercial product and it's just been an amazing ride. We have had user growth in the double digits every month. It's been incredible. And you know almost every week we break sales records. Yesterday we broke another big one for our daily set sales record and yesterday we made almost as much as would be made in the entire month of September in one day. I mean that's how fast we're growing. It's really great. Thank you. I mean you know it's it's really it's really fun. But now the pressure is we've got companies saying to us you know we have some of the biggest news organizations in the U.S. using us and they've got a couple of dozen people who are saying you know we could scale this to 2000 - 3000 people. But you've got to build the enterprise integrations. So we just closed a big funding round. We raised two point four million pounds. We just announced it this week and now we're doubling our development team from five to 10. We're adding a marketing team and improving our base customer support. We'll be 20-22 by the end of summer. Having been 10 were moving into new offices. It's really a it's a really fast growth but you've got to respond to the market. We have some small competitors but nothing directly like us. And so you know that the job in the industry is we have first mover advantage. And so you want to move with it you want to respond in. We want to meet demand where it's where it's real and that's what we're aiming to do. In terms of a sneak peek. I like our interface now but I think that it's not as clean and clear as it could be. And as we start to rocket fuel innovation into the platform we felt we needed a more intuitive and an adaptable piece of software as our foundation. So Trint 2.0 which is just finishing its build will be that product. It's been based on a lot of testing and talking to users about what they like and what could be made better. And when that comes out this summer we will then start to do some things that really I think are pretty magical and the first is the Trint player which will take up a video or audio posted on YouTube and allow you to post it as an HTML document on your website so that you can actually follow, read it, follow it as a user like a karaoke and just select a moment and instantly share it on social media. So for a guy like you with a podcast you're talking about interactive podcast transcripts with a couple of clicks. There's no precedent for what we're doing. I mean it's really really exciting. It's incredibly simple on one level but it's really really radically revolutionary on another. So that being unveiled in Vienna at one of the biggest journalism conferences in the annual calendar of the Global Editors Network Summit at the end of June and it will be released at some point this summer. We're holding it back for a little more testing before we actually release it broadly. But as you say indulge me while I do the commercial if you sign up at Trint.com you'll know when it's released. 

Jon Moss: [00:25:23] That is great. That sounds absolutely terrific Jeff and really look forward to seeing that in the future. If you had one piece of advice for someone starting out in business or running their own start-up who's had an idea like you've done and like you like you had or that you know those years ago what would it be on maybe not just one piece of advice any advice. 

Jon Moss: [00:25:46] For a long time in this journey when I was giving speeches presentations would get up and say I'm the most unqualified person on the planet to be talking to you about this. I have zero business experience. I still get intimidated by Excel spreadsheets. You know I was a foreign correspondent, a war correspondent for American TV for a very long time. I covered the Iraq war, Libya, the Arab Spring.And what's interesting is that I didn't realize it when I began this but some of the things that made me effective at that job have really helped me here. You when you're a war correspondent and you land in tough places and you've got to get hit air and your deadline it's not flexible because you know ABC World News goes on at six thirty p.m. in New York. That means you got to be there ready to roll in some form. You can't say hey I'm going to be 10 minutes late so you learn to be decisive and not second second guess your decisions. I think it's a really important quality for a fast moving innovation. And you make mistakes and you don't beat yourself up you just learn from it. You don't point fingers. As long as they're not sloppy mistakes you know you just say okay well let's fix it. Let's move on and you learn not to second guess yourself and others. You learn to let people do their jobs because there are too many. Too much has to be done too quickly for you to try to micromanage every one you know all of these are really core to probably any business any leadership role. But it's really interesting how those kind of things are really important. When you're in a dangerous zone, you need to be honest about what your limits are, where you are out of your comfort, when do you feel like you need help, when do you think it's time to turn back and admit that. And all of that applies to entrepreneurship. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:27:29] I wish I could say that I knew I knew this would be helpful. I guess partly just in my DNA but it's really really helpful to have been in situations where you just have to learn how to move things forward. You know there's some cliches about the journey that Trint is on and one of them you'll hear constantly is 80 percent perfect, 100 percent fast. You can't go for perfection or if you wait to release a perfect product you waited too long. It's true. You have to accept. We know Trint can be better. I know I look at things I look at our website I look at you know in our help papers and I think yeah I really wanna make this better. Well we just closed a funding round. We're hiring some people and working to improve our help pages. We're hiring five developers so that we can do some of the things we know need to be done. And so you know you just have to accept that on the entrepreneurship journey, it's iterative. I guess one of the things that I've really learned that I didn't know was test your assumptions. You know for some reason we did do that. And I don't know that it was an overarching strategy but somehow I had this idea and I guess I was given good advice. Don't move too far without letting real people test you and validate it. And that saved us a lot of errors. 

Jon Moss: [00:28:45] That sounds like great advice absolutely brilliant advice Jeff. And I know you've been very humble about your background and career. If I'm right in saying you won an Emmy didn't you. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:29:00] Yes. 

Jon Moss: [00:29:01] And like you're saying you've covered stories. The Iraq war, the Arab Spring, and the hurricane Katrina as well. Just stepping away slightly from Trint but was there anything that you remember any one of those things where you thought oh my gosh this was you know one of the most incredible experiences of your life is there anything you could share about. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:29:22] Oh you know Jon I consider myself an incredibly lucky guy. There have been dozens of those. I remember going to do a documentary in Patagonia and Chile riding down [00:29:32] a river on [0.9] the top of a fishing boat and just feeling absolutely giddy. The sun was shining, I was with a crew and my producer and there were sea lions frolicking on the coast and I just remember turning to my producers saying I can't believe I'm being paid to do this. This is just beyond thrilling. And you know I went down there a number of times I spent a week on an island in southern Chile doing a documentary on an unknown part of blue whales that was just beyond belief. You know I've been all over and I've done stories like that. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:30:05] I've also seen horror of unspeakable portions in Iraq and Libya and Haiti. I've witnessed a lot of things that just weren't nice. Just a lot of bad things. But you know one of the humbling things about war is you actually see a lot of good things to people doing extraordinary things to protect their families, to help their neighbors, to feed their families. You know war is not quite like it's portrayed by Hollywood. It's actually a lot of hardship normalcy punctuated by moments of sheer terror. But it's not like it's always bang bang. In fact it's rarely that but when that happens that is really really terrifying. And then you just see bad things. So you know I I guess you know I have a different perspective on terror than a lot of people because I've been truly terrified and had With good reason. So you know the idea of this current journey frightening me. I'm not cocky about it. I'm humble about it. But at the same time you know I don't use the word terror just because I have a different perspective. I will tell you that probably my favourite story of more than 30 years of journalism was the Chile mine rescue. I was the first foreign reporter at the site when they found those men. After 17 days of being trapped half a mile underground. I happened to be heading to the airport. I was home in Canada visiting my family and was heading with the airport to go to New York for meetings when I heard that they'd been found and after a lot of back and forth ended up lying on the overnight's flight to Santiago Chile and spent most of the next seven weeks in a very hardscrabble desert of Chile covering what was the most dramatic reality show you've ever seen. It was unbelievable. When I arrived at that mine site, that scruffy mines I remember it so well. There were a dozen dozen and a half journalists and technicians from Chile and Argentina there on the day those miners came up and all them alive which was seven weeks later. There were over three thousand journalist in that desert. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:32:05] Wow it was incredible. You know it's one of the few times that not the only time in my life where everyone was on the same side. You had Russian TV, Chinese TV,,Portuguese TV, you have reporters from every country in the world. You know the world was riveted by that story. And you know so often you worry about balance as a journalist in that case there wasn't another side. Everybody was hoping these men could be brought out alive and it wasn't clear that that was technically going to be possible. And so to have been there and met the families that very first night when they'd been found through a six inch bore hole and then as they try to figure out how they were going to dig a hole deep enough to actually get a human up you know in unstable rock. It was so dramatic it was so powerful. And just everything about a great story you know human drama, ingenuity, technology, leadership, was all consuming as a story and you know when you have a front row seat on that and you're talking with the people at the head the engineers, the families, the children, the wives, it's just such a privilege. I mean it's just it is what. No what I got in journalism to do. 

Jon Moss: [00:33:12] Yeah. I remember it vividly watching the reporting on the news and yeah it was an incredible story and must have been an incredible experience. So Jeff thank you so much for being on the show today. I am really looking forward to seeing how you grow as I'm sure you will in the future. And I'm just delighted that it's worked out and you've fixed a major problem and delighting people at the same time who are using Trint. So where's the best place to kind of connect with you online. So there's Trint dot com. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:33:46] With Trint dot com you can sign up and you actually get an e-mail from me and if you need to you can just respond directly. Everyone gets a personal e-mail from me to welcome aboard. You know I am a big believer of that every customer is a gold customer. We really emphasize at this early stage and I hope all the way through that the journey of this company just how important customer service and support is. You know we've done well by it because people really really value the fact that we answer our e-mails. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:34:13] We're not perfect. Just to set expectations and we don't have 24 hour support yet. But you know we really do try to help people solve problems and answer their questions. 

Jon Moss: [00:34:24] Thank you so much for coming on the show today Jeff. Really appreciate it and speak to you very soon. Thank you again. 

Jeff Kofman: [00:34:30] A real pleasure. Thanks for being so interested. 

VO: [00:34:34] The Remarkable Business Show. 

Jon Moss: [00:34:36] So again huge thanks for Jeff for appearing on the show. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. He's a remarkable person and they have a remarkable business with Trint. I actually use Trint for the show transcript and it works very very well. They get 30 minutes free. So zero excuses for not trying. Check it out at Trint dot com. 

Jon Moss: [00:34:56] This episode's quote is from Mark Twain and fits nicely with the travel that I've been doing lately. Travel is fatal to prejudice bigotry and narrow mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts broad wholesome charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth or one's lifetime going in seeing the world experiencing new cultures and meeting people is the number one thing I would recommend to someone who wants to be successful in life both personally and with work. I've met so many people who are clever on paper,have a good degree, good with numbers, or [00:35:34] excellent with [0.4] business but have no emotional intelligence, not much common sense and terrible social skills. Going in seeing the world can help massively with these things. I got a university degree but the best thing I ever did was doing two ski seasons, travelling through Asia, and living in Sydney in my early 20s. Travel is easy these days. Please don't miss out. Go and see the world and I don't mean it [00:35:59] Benidorm or a beef. [1.2] 

Jon Moss: [00:36:01] That wraps it up for Episode 8. So thank you very much for listening. I really appreciate your valuable time. You may know that I write a regular newsletter called The Bulletin. The subscribers are growing nicely and the open rate on the e-mails is just above 70 percent. When you first sign up you get an e-book too where I cover productivity, diets, nutrition and some of my favourite apps and software. Please give it a go. Head on over to The Bulletin dot email. I'm also on Twitter. Use a thirteen thousand five hundred one no less. So say hello @jonmoss J O N M O S S. If you enjoyed this episode please let someone know. Send them a message or email or tweet about the show. I would be really grateful. You can share this episode easily by clicking the share link at the top of the page if you're listening to this in the browser or if you're using an app you can use the share link. Also please leave an honest review of The Remarkable Business Show on iTunes or Stitcher. Ratings and reviews are super helpful and they make a huge difference for the show's visibility. Anything you write I promise I will read. So what are you waiting for. Isn't it about time you did something for the first time? Remote working in Chiang Mai has blown my mind and open my eyes to the possibility of really making the most of life, seeing the world, and still working and earning good money. Why on earth would you want to be shackled to the same place especially somewhere with a high cost of living and rubbish weather. It's not rocket science is it. So until next time, enjoy life and make every day count. 

VO: [00:37:31] Don't miss The Bulletin newsletter. Head on over to www.theappleofmyi.com/newsletter and sign and you get a terrific free e-book too.