Episode 49: Creator of Stunning (a Stripe add on) Richard Felix – Tech Success and Audience Reach

A Doctor's Perspective Podcast

Richard Felix talks to Dr Trosclair on A Doctors Perspective Podcast Web app developer of Stunning for Stripe, Richard Felix walks through the computer programmer life and how an audience matters. Learn about hiring, lessons to scale business, why Ruby on Rails and how solving your own problem can lead to success. Starting in middle school he was already building computers for other people and once he started Louisiana State University he already learned 30 computer languages. Listen to Learn why he says all students should learn Ruby on Rails as well as Swift for apple and iPhone developers. Swift Playground is an iPad app where you can play with code and see in real time what changes. It’s a nice way to get immediate feedback on if your code is good or not. What is the difference between a website versus a web application? Learn about how he created a music exchange website which taught him many things and how he used that knowledge to build on new projects. He scratched his own itch with Hngry.com because he and his now wife had the age old question: What genre of food to eat and then Where? The web app conquered these questions and even got him flown out to NYC. Listen to find out more about this inspiring entrepreneurial story and why it eventually was shut down. www.richardfelix.com is his portfolio of projects Listen to hear how he fixed his marketing problem so that initial interest wouldn’t fade, why he partnered with better front end programmers (people who make the site pretty vs the code that makes the databases run correctly), csstricks.com and his relationship with Chris and more. Aremysitesup.com When you have a business that can lose money and sales when your website is broken because of some server issue, you want to know immediately (not 8 hours later) so you can fix it. This site checks for you. Learn how and why he co-developed this site. How valuable is building trust and giving free information for building an audience AND an audience willing to pay for a service you offer. Richard Felix greatest success is Stunning for Stripe credit card payments. Again he solved his own problem when making it and now huge and small companies use it. The gist is: you have either recurring payments or credit card of customers on file. Stunning lets you know when someone’s card is 30 days till expiration, payment was denied for some reason and a few other options so you don’t lose customers OR keep customers who haven’t actually paid for the service. Stunning also sends out emails letting people know about the expiration, email to the business about failed payments, chargebacks and also very customizable receipts along with web hooks that can trigger certain emails to let you know what’s going on. All very easy to set up too. Plus he talks about why use stripe vs a 3 tier PayPal system which has more headaches than you might want to deal with for recurring payments. We chat a lot about Stripe and what it is used for, how it can help you and how stunning makes it even better for a business. How do we find that One Thing that someone will say “ I”d rather pay you then figure it out on my own.” Why did he hire someone for customer service? Did he wait to long? What was the number one quality he was looking for? He even discusses team meeting for FAQ’s. Mr. Felix gives talks and presentation especially about how to make money with recurring payments and web application development. Also because of his building server experience and scaling to customers who have hundreds of thousands of clients, (creating workers) he has a unique skill set to talk about. Why does he go to comic con and find Phoenix artwork so appealing? As an African American Male Tech Guy, how has that affected his job prospects and contacts in this field? Tips for people looking to score a job: especially showing projects that use the skills of the job and jobs that have been completed and projects you have worked on at github.com