Growing Lean
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Growing Lean
Leveling Up Career Development with Tariq Ali and Kelly Rose Cayne of Pitch Play Co
Can you imagine turning your career into a game? Well, our guests today, Tariq Ali Cayne and Kelly Rose Cayne, have done just that with their innovative company, Pitch Play Co. They've taken inspiration from video games and sports to create an engaging and immersive experience that gamifies the often daunting process of career development. Discussing their personal journey and experiences, Tariq and Kelly Rose share how they balance their relationship while running a thriving business. They also explore how their unique backgrounds in tech and design have shaped their company's journey.
Looking to the future, Tariq and Kelly Rose have big plans for Pitch Play Co., aiming to broaden the reach of their data-driven platform to include universities and other events. They talk about the importance of music in their strategy, and share some advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and anyone looking to navigate their career path with a little more fun and strategy. They also reveal how they've learned from experienced entrepreneurs, and the value they attach to having a robust support system. Get ready to level up your career journey with Tariq Ali and Kelly Rose Cayne!
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Welcome back to the growing lean podcast sponsored by lean discovery group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm very happy to be here with Harik Ali and Kelly Rose Kane, co founders of pitch play co. Welcome guys. Hello, thank you, I'm excited to be here too, awesome, awesome. So to start, can you give us a little bit of a background of yourselves and how you ended up in business, and how you ended up in business together?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, for sure. So yeah, I'll start. So a little bit background about me. I studied at a few universities here. Well, for you, on this side of this side of the pond, I am in Atlanta. I studied at Georgia State University theoretical mathematics and with theoretical math, I actually was a teacher for Georgia State University, because the university is so loaded with all of the different students that needed a college algebra prerequisite that I was able to teach early, eventually worked in tech for about six years and I did a lot of analytical work, some cybersecurity work, created, created a few automation tools, but the most exciting thing for me was developing others. Growth and development was huge for me and when I left tech, I started a business called Kane creative and my wife, kelly Rose, is one of the best designers ever and because she has senior user experience design, which we'll talk a little bit more about her background, she knew that we had to rebrand to pitch play co and thank God she did. But yeah, talk about your, your history.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, so yeah, I am. As has been said, I am a designer. My background is in fine art, so I have my BFA from Kenesaw State and I do a little bit of everything. But now I have been working in tech for a few years, like three or four years now, started at Amazon and now I'm at Logitech and I do user experience design.
Speaker 3:So, yes, when he started talking to me about starting his own business, I had thoughts, but at first I was like, oh, just let him explore, you know, figure out what he wants to do. A lot of this came out of his experience of coaching and mentoring. So letting him really land on what that vision was then allowed me to come downstairs and say, all right, so now that you figured out the path forward, let me give you a little bit of my thoughts on the branding and the visuals of everything. We really wanted it to be clear what the business was. So, yeah, he's downplaying how nice he was about me coming downstairs and just being like so I'm rebranding everything and I know you're working with clients currently, but just let me, let me work and I'll see you everything.
Speaker 2:I mean, she's the end of the day, this is my real boss, so it's like All right, fine, let's remeran. So that's how we got the pitch right, yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, amazing.
Speaker 3:Together was he wanted to start the business, but we both had experience freelancing and doing different consulting work, so he started to talk to me about the idea and I had thoughts, and so it just kind of felt natural for us to work off of each other and support each other, especially in the case of the brand like. Design is my wheelhouse, so when I see him trying to make something for social, I was like let me just do that. You've got enough on your plate. I can do this in five minutes. So we play to each other's strengths that way as well.
Speaker 1:Amazing. It sounds like you've got a perfect partnership. I love to hear that. I honestly, I couldn't imagine working with my girlfriend. I think it's a very brave thing you guys have done and it's cool that you made it work. Have there been any challenges in obviously running a business together because you spend so much time together? Sorry if that's a bit of a personal one.
Speaker 2:Well, I wouldn't say. I think the challenges that we face is what every entrepreneur faces. I don't think it's who the partner is, it's just that we got to make sure that this works. Are we doing the right things? The C-suite debates are a little different. I can't be as passionate at times. Sometimes I got to sneak it in there. It's easier because we know each other so well, like the clarity is there. If one idea gets shut down fairly quickly, it's pretty easy to bring it up later in a more battle-tested environment. We know what works and what doesn't work. So I don't think there have been any challenges working as a married couple. I just think it's the challenges as co-founders of a business. I think it's pretty normal.
Speaker 3:I admit our relationship was pretty well stress tested. We bought a house right before the shutdown, so we were working together in the same house for two years planning a wedding. I was planning our wedding at that time. So we'd already been through all of the trials and tribulations of. If we weren't going to find out that being that close and being that in each other's pockets and each other's lives would annoy us, we would have known before we even got to the question of starting a business. So by the time the business question rolled around, we were like yeah, we got this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:I think that's so amazing. I love that for you guys. And back to the business side of things. So what is the biggest challenge you guys have faced in terms of starting and running your business and how did you solve it, or how are you planning to solve?
Speaker 2:it the challenges. I think the good news is we've been surrounded by a ton of entrepreneurs. Kelly Rose comes from an entrepreneurial family. I come from an entrepreneurial family, so I think we kind of learned from watching others struggle or like, okay, that works, that doesn't. So early on we knew we had to partner with other people that were entrepreneurs, that were experienced. So we got fairly invested or invested in other circles fairly early into starting the business. That we've learned to find coaching. We've learned to find more experienced people and feed off of them and also not being afraid to pivot. I mean that's something that we knew that if we were to lock into an idea super early, we're already setting ourselves up for failure. So luckily for us, we've been around a lot of people that we got to learn from, for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I think the honestly, one of the most, I guess, stressful or challenging things that we've been doing is just coming out of that. We started the business, you know, at home. We work from home, we've done a lot of the work digitally, so probably our first few events, I would say, were some of the more challenging, challenging things to pull off. And not that they were inherently difficult, it was just it was new for us. We had to get a lot of collateral together very quickly and then we're there at a booth like talking to people all day which we're both kind of like introverted gamer people who don't like to go out and show off, and so we were just like, oh, how do we do this? Are we going to do this? Do we even know what we're going to say? But the beautiful side of it is that I think we we tend to overanalyze, we tend to overthink.
Speaker 3:So we were prepared, we didn't feel prepared, but we've done all of the work we really needed to do so that once we were in that position, for better or worse we were ready for it and even if we were anxious and stressed, we had a really good turnout.
Speaker 3:We had a lot of a lot of the people that actually he's mentioning. We've met from the very first event we did, which we felt a little bit was like a dumpster fire, because we were just like you know, you look back, I didn't say it's 2020, you kind of go oh, I should have done this, I should have done that. But we've met.
Speaker 2:So many amazing connections. We're amazing, the connections are amazing. So I think anything that that we stress out about like internally we get validated from externally it makes us feel better, yeah, just from doing the thing. So, yeah, you can.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I love that point you made about learning from entrepreneurs. I also come from a background of entrepreneurs and I've definitely learned from a lot of their mistakes, just to make sure I don't make the same and I think it's really cool to have that behind you, just so you know what what works, what doesn't work and when to, as you said, pivot. Yeah, so can you walk us through your your overall business strategy for pitch playco?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so. So the concept of pitch playco is to gamify your career and and I like the tagline. I love the tagline because the quicker we can wrap our clients head around business being a game, or it can be played like a game, the easier it is for us to empower the player. So our strategy is to focus on the people and not necessarily just the products. We have coaching programs and we have coaching courses, but all of it has been inspired by by by games like gamify your career is not just a thing that we're saying. We've been inspired by video games.
Speaker 2:I'm a gamer, kelly Rose is a gamer, and and my sister, who's an entrepreneur, when we were rebranding, she asked us. She asked me hey, why is your brand so corporate? She's never worked in corporate, so for her it was like boring, why is your brand so corporate? I don't get it. She's like you love games, right, and you love sports and you've you know you've done all these different things. Why don't you just make it more like you? Okay, so we played around with a few different strategies and eventually we came out with gamify your career I mean the name pitch playco and we left, got it. Well, we were in Costa Rica.
Speaker 2:We were in Costa Rica one month and we were talking to a sales VP or a sales executive I can't remember her title, but um, she said, hey, you're super smart, but I think you're like here, and she had her arm spread out, saying like you're too out there. If you can narrow the path, it'll make it so much easier for you to take off and so much easier for you to involve the business. And too much later we rebranded to pitch playco.
Speaker 3:And then we figured it out. It felt like everything fell into place. Once we had that vision, then the rebranding was easier.
Speaker 3:Talking to it has been easier, and so much easier because it's about video games and we can just immediately start nerding out with people over stuff you know mutual interests. People really get excited when you tell that I feel like career coaching by itself is not as an exciting concept and Working on your resume and all that it's not fun. So gamifying it is a great way to get people excited about it. And then just knowing that like everything's based on a game, like we can tell when we're talking to people they're kind of like oh wait what it's based on, the I love that game.
Speaker 1:It's cool, 100% I love that and it's it's quite a common Concept that I've heard doing these interviews is that a lot of entrepreneurs start off with such a wide range of products or services and then they realize they actually need to find a niche and just stick to that. And that's super inspiring, because I'm hearing that from so many people and it's obviously a common denominator in entrepreneurship. So how do you guys, what's your? What sort of interface do you use to gamify the process? And is it only for Helping people Get the career, or is it Coaching through their career as well, to be good in their career?
Speaker 2:So you ask a question that's going to get me in trouble Because my chief creative officer is not a huge fan of the platform currently, but but it's good to call out because we're thinking about every evolving currently. To gamify it, we have a, we're using a third party and it's essentially a course that is a core setup. So it's very difficult to gamify a core setup to a third party. So how we do it is we make it as we simulate it as much as a game as possible. We have a marketing research intern and he found out that people are nostalgic through video games from music. Sonic, you know the music, you know the sounds. Mario, you know the music, the sounds like. People know those sounds and that music so is Zelda, you know they're popular, the we I mean my the way everyone knows that music. So so we caught our music director who lives in Texas, here in the States, and and he made music as it.
Speaker 2:As you go through the levels of the course, the levels of the course as the subject changes, the music subtly changes. So it's the same melody, different beats, different music, yeah, different instruments, different pacing, exactly. So now you're psychologically learning the process of getting a job initially, because that's what current tycoon is about, and then, as the music subtly changes, you're thinking about building your brand, keeping that job, leveling up your career, building your network. People don't realize that when you go into a role I'm going off on a tangent but people don't realize when you go into a role that that you're building connections and building everything inside that company and no one can see what you can do. So when you leave and try to interview somewhere and and start over, your resume to them is just a piece of paper. They will never understand the six years that you put into five bullet points. They're not going to get that. They're not going to know your network. They're not going to know how talented you are. You're essentially starting over.
Speaker 2:We call that new game plus in video games. You're essentially starting over. So we are trying to wrap people's head around business as a game and when you leave, you're doing that new game plus. You're starting over. You got good stats, better stats, better equipment, but you're starting over that and that's the reality. We have treasure chests inside the course. So, like, as you get to a point, you get a treasure chest. You probably get an assessment or you get resume templates or portfolio book or interview tips, or whatever the case is inside the be treasure chest. It's helping you learn, and their missions are quizzes, all right, so so our plus.
Speaker 3:We're working working within the constraints of the other, but trying to make it as as much as interactive as possible. And then for that reason, also right now, that very first course career tycoon is free, because we do want people to give us feedback, mainly on the content. But we have visions of a future more interactive application, either on your mobile devices or in like a 3D modeled space on computer server something. So we have a lot of ideas, but we decided to not let the platform restrict us from launching and getting that initial kind of beta test out there so we can just find out is the information Bible like to people? Like this cadence to people? Like the style of the content? Do people enjoy the activities that they're doing along the way to give us more user data for our next iteration?
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. So is it currently? Is it a website where people go to?
Speaker 3:Yes, it's a website. It's a course based like sorry, like he said, it's a course with like classes. So it's each module is a different set of videos. And then, to his point earlier, also there's those little treasure chests in between. So that's how we have it set up today, and then also trying to just get people into our CRM so that when we do want something new or bigger, better, greater, they will be able to find out that way.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, pageplaycodecom slash courses, slash career tycoon.
Speaker 1:There you go, there you go. Thank you, I love that. It sounds amazing. I'm going to check it out after this call. So how do you guys measure the success of your business? Do you have any specific KPIs or metrics that you use?
Speaker 2:So it's about empowering the player. So we have tangibles and intangibles. So the tangibles are if people come in to look for a new job and they get a new job. The intangibles is the confidence that they leave with. So so a lot of people don't realize how much impact they are making on a company or they are making on a team or they're making on a project, and they just think they're there to do their job and they go home and they're not tracking their progress or their experience or that they're leveling up.
Speaker 2:For us, if people leave better than when they came, that's a win for us. So we can track some things based off their testimonies or based off their ratings. You know, like you know, we'll, we'll, we'll attribute that to to stuff that we can track. But for our courses like Career Tycoon, their progress bar, we have points based off the activity logins how far you've gotten through the progress and we do a leaderboard. We just started the leaderboard every month now, Eventually, we're going to give out prizes soon to. You know, help out more people if you're at the top of the leaderboard. I was thinking and this is brand new, only on the Lane Discovery podcast is brand new I was thinking of pitch, a pitch play box or something that the winner wins. It was just something that they get, yeah. So we got different ideas and we're tracking it, based off, obviously, the data that we're collecting through our through our platform, but also through immediate feedback.
Speaker 3:That we're getting from our clientele. So that's just a lot of customer satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing, that sounds awesome. I was thinking a mystery box, $1 bill or a mystery box. You know that.
Speaker 2:Which one?
Speaker 1:do you want? Exactly so? Your company is still pretty new, right. So where do you see yourself being in four years? What is your dream state in four years?
Speaker 2:More heavily involved in the universities for sure. I'm not going to say popular, but we definitely are making waves here locally. We're in Atlanta, Georgia, so we're making waves in the local universities here and some local events. We were in a pitch at the Georgia World Congress Center, which is a major venue here. So we're making local waves. But we'd like to expand that four years from now. We would like more universities to understand and be partnered with us, understand who we are, understand that, yeah, we can help professionals in the corporate setting, but we can also help the next generation of the students.
Speaker 3:That's feedback we've been getting a lot Like. Our course is designed to catch a lot of different user groups. It's like we have on there disgruntled employees of the kind of person that's just been at a job forever and wants to leave, but doesn't know how.
Speaker 2:Tilted worker.
Speaker 3:Tilted worker yep, that's the name for it. Then we have the. Now you're making me remember the names.
Speaker 2:Recent grads.
Speaker 3:Recent grads, so I'm fresh to the market. I'll similarly don't know how to navigate the job market and comfy professionals.
Speaker 2:Comfy professionals.
Speaker 3:Yeah, someone who has truly just been out of the market for a long time, so it's pretty broad. We want some future courses to be a little bit more specific and narrow in both specialty but also in terms of the type of person it targets. But every time we give our pitch without fail, somebody says you should be in schools.
Speaker 2:Recently.
Speaker 3:This is the kind of information people benefit from when they're new in their career. It's like the information that often you know accredited universities kind of skip over. They give you all the tangible skills, but networking they're like, oh yeah, just go to career fairs. They don't really tell you how to action on those connections that you're making, how to maximize your social media for networking in your business and your space, like that stuff.
Speaker 3:I even remember from when we were in school. It's just like here you can make the thing now go, good luck, get a job, but they don't really have the equipment to set you up for success in that space once you get in it. So that is something that has been it's come up enough times now but it definitely feels like one of our, one of our next avenues should include education. So, yeah, I would say that's definitely an area we're looking to be impactful in and even the video game space.
Speaker 2:We're a gaming company, a gaming education company. Be on the lookout. You might be playing. You might be playing one of our games one day. That would be amazing Is this?
Speaker 3:pitch play cut stretch goal.
Speaker 1:I'll definitely keep a lookout for that. So we're running out of time a bit. We've actually gone over, but no problem. But before we go, what advice would you give, firstly, to someone, one of your users? Let's say, our listeners are your ICP. What advice would you give to them? And what advice would you give to other business owners looking to succeed in your industry?
Speaker 3:I'll let you take the user question.
Speaker 2:So Well, I was thinking about other entrepreneurs. I say the best way to start is to start. Yes, I mean, you can think about it all day, you can plan it all day, you can strategize all day. You will never know until you actually do it Right. Like planning for tomorrow is hilarious because you don't know what tomorrow is going to be.
Speaker 2:You don't know 2022, I didn't hear a single person talking about AIs. Not one, Not one. Actually, you know, towards the end of the year, someone was like hey, have you heard of chat GPT? Oh, I'll check it out 2023, I hear it every day, I can't escape it. So how would you plan for that in 2021? You wouldn't. The best way to start is to start and don't be afraid to pivot.
Speaker 3:And then for our users it's kind of the same with one thing, we tell people actually is.
Speaker 3:You know, people tend to get pigeonholed. This is what we find with a lot of our clients. They get pigeonholed into a job They've been at X job with X title for you know a certain amount of time and they don't see a way out, whether it's in the same or similar role at a different company, or maybe they want a full on career change. And one of the things that we do that he does beautifully is he'll look at your skills kind of agnostic of your title, agnostic of your current role in position and help you tell that story and market and brand yourself in the way that would make you successful in whatever role you want to be in.
Speaker 3:So that can go a lot of ways, like if you just started this job and you're looking at your 30, 60, 90 day plan, thinking about your job in the future in your current role is a valuable skill. But if you're also thinking you know I'm here, but this is where I want to be, and it might be like up and over to the left, how do I get there? He can also help you sort of pivot your skills, look for new opportunities, have that in the back of your mind, but then also speak to your skills in a way that would make you the clear choice for this job over here. So it's a valuable skill from any angle, whether you work for yourself or work for a business you have to like. Stay ready.
Speaker 2:You might have to move you to sales.
Speaker 1:No, I love that. Thank you so much, guys. I really enjoyed this and I love your relationship and how you work together. You guys make great partners and I'm excited to see where your business goes. So what would the best way for you to do this? What would the best way for people to reach out to Tariq Ali Kain and Kelly Rose Kain If you guys have any offers for them? They want to check out your website or enroll in your courses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can go to pitchplaycocom If you want to learn more about the business. You can also connect with either one of us on LinkedIn. I think mine is Tariq Ali Kain and yours is by Kelly Rose. But Kelly Rose Kain, you can search on LinkedIn and then you can learn more about us from there.
Speaker 3:We're open books. We're on a lot of social. We stream on Twitch. We both have YouTube channels. You can find us a lot of places. However you want to find us, I'm sure we're somewhere.
Speaker 1:We're somewhere nearby Amazing. Well, thanks again for being on the show. I've really enjoyed it. Keep on, guys.
Speaker 3:Absolutely Thank you. Thank you for having me and I appreciate every opportunity.