On our latest episode of the GoWP Digital Agency Owners Podcast, we welcome Travis Buck, Co-founder, and CTO of NorthWest Media Collective. We talk about his experience as a web designer before college, awards won as best web design agency, leadership, his survival skill during the pandemic, and much more. 

Read the transcript:

Morayo: [00:00:00] Welcome everyone to the GoWP digital agency owners podcast, where we talk shop, and we talk life with our colleagues in the WordPress community to find out the truth of their talents and the tricks of their trade I’m Morayo Orija, GoWP director of creative services.

And at GoWP we create happiness for digital agencies and we help them become more profitable by joining others on our incredible, valuable weekly happiness hour calls, or by helping them grow their team with a developer copywriter designer or project manager, whatever they need.

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Now I’m ready to welcome today’s guest. He is a great man, he’s a friend. I mean, we were talking so much before we started recording. Our guest prides himself on having a small social media footprint which could make researching him for an interview, a tad difficult, but I was able to pull together some questions and welcome him.

The co-founder and CTO of NorthWest MediaCollective, Mr. Travis buck. Welcome, Travis.

Travis: [00:01:32] Yeah. At this point, we go way back.

Morayo: [00:01:35] I know like babies in pacify. So Travis created his first website in 1994 and soon after began creating sites for businesses. He’s been a developer programmer and he’s founded several companies, including Northwest media, which he founded with his partner and CEO, Abigail Spiker in 2013.

Now we’re gonna get to this, but Northwest media is a multi-award-winning full-service digital agency offering everything from web design to e-commerce, video production and the team is located in Vancouver, Washington. So welcome Travis buck.

Travis: [00:02:11] Thanks.

Morayo: [00:02:12] Where do we begin? Let’s begin at the beginning.

Your path to creating Northwest media. During my sleuthing, I found that you had various professional experiences and you’ve worn lots of different hats, like a lot of agency owners, but you started studying audio and visual communications at Collins college. Just knowing you and knowing how interesting you are and how open you are to using green screens and filters.

I was wondering, what your plan was by studying audio-visual. It was the nineties, so you could have wanted to be the next Tarantino or so what was the plan back then? Like, or, you know, when did you stumble into websites and how did you find you could use those skills in your career?

Travis: [00:03:00] Well, yeah. My experience started even before the college because really at that time, I have a degree that’s a failed shell college and I think a lot of people are the same way I fell into this field. So even before college, you know, I built my first website in 94, so it was early mid-nineties. And I also started a small hosting company, like outta my own closet.

Like I’ve seen a bunch at this point in web development. Back in the before times, I started building websites with no training. So in the nineties, the internet really was this whole beast. I was just sort of like self-taught HTML and PHP. I was on what you would call online forums back then, or like Yahoo chat rooms.

And we were just people sharing code. So you’d figure out how to do a little popup or a widget. And you’d be like, Hey, I built this cool thing. Here’s some code. And people were just swapping code at that point. And even when I went to college, this is a graphic design degree I went for because they didn’t have tracks for web development.

So it was a graphic design degree and they went more to video and graphics and then it touch on some HTML. It was like a side course of each. It was actually just one teacher who had just learned how to do wifi in his house. so he could be out on his hammock in his backyard. That was super cool technology back then.

Morayo: [00:04:30] Little did he know that society, I guess 30 years later, everybody will be working from home from their hams and HTML is everywhere.

Travis: [00:04:42] Yeah.

Morayo: [00:04:42] So, you started your company and then, well you landed in the field like you said, and you started a company. You’ve said about yourself, that you are the guy people go to when they’ve been through at least one developer and they’ve spent X amount of dollars.

And that you’re the guy that comes in and builds the custom functionality the other developer couldn’t. That sounds a lot to me, like ability and know-how, but it also sounds a lot like customer service and you and I were just talking about the way things used to be. And I feel like a focus on customer service is the way things used to be.

Your company Northwest media, you’ve won as I was saying at the top, you’ve won numerous awards back to back Vancouver journal, best business award, the best of Clark County business, top SEO company. And I think I was seeing on your blog, but I didn’t take note of it, you got another recognition more recently?

Travis: [00:05:43] Yeah, actually just like this month. Well, we have the local paper here, it’s like a 2 million reader paper and they actually vote every year. So they do it’s best web design company in Clark county in our county mm-hmm and they first start out with like, people can nominate, so readers can nominate, you know, best restaurants, best hotels, best bowling alley, best web design company. So we get nominated, then we’re in the top five and that’s when it goes to like the readers can actually vote, so then the readers vote among those top five. So we’ve been super fortunate. I mean, we’ve done good emails, but yeah, we’ve done good work and people, our readers, our customers have voted for us.

And so this year we are just listed as the best web design company in Clark county. So it’s a pretty big major like award or like little bragging right in our area. So super cool.

Morayo:[00:06:41] Well, you know, I’ve known you for almost a year now and seeing how you operate, I know that leadership counts for something.

You’re a great leader and I think Abigail is also a fine leader too. Is it something about the team you put together or you know, products you take on?

Travis: [00:07:00] I’ve always wondered that I’ve worked for, you know, two or three agencies at this point. So like off and on throughout my career, I’ve worked for other agencies and I picked up things that I wanted, like in my own agency and stuff that I never got. Like, I was the guy at a previous agency where they kept the mattress up against the wall. And you slept behind the server like you pulled the mattress down because when we would FTP files, like 200 megabytes of files, it would take overnight sometimes.

Yeah. And if that internet stopped or failed, you had to re-upload again and get it going again. so I very much, I wasted my twenties, like grinding and like basically sleeping behind servers. And I’ve always known I haven’t wanted that. So when I hired people, I wanted people to have regular, like nine to five.

And I guess that’s what I’ve always strived for in this thing where we’re like in a 24/7 world, the web world, people just expect they can email their web developers 9:00 PM at and you will drop everything at work. And so I’ve always wanted, yeah, my employees and like this company to have somewhat of a real nine to five thing and finding talented people.

 I think that’s huge. I’ve been so fortunate to hire, you know, my team goes way back. I have employees gone back five plus years and it’s just like, honour, it seems like I’ve grown up with them. Like I’ve been in business with them for so long. You don’t wanna say, oh, it’s like family, but it really is like family.

Yeah. And I think what I’ve really tried to drive home and I’ve said it a lot. I always say a lot, like we’re rats on a ship. And so the idea of like, Hey, we’re all on this same ship together. So I’ve always tried to humour that away with everybody. And I think everybody gets it. If like something fails in this company, it’s gonna become a sinking ship.

And sure, Some of us will be able to swim away. Those of us with gray hair will never get hired in this industry again. So I think I really hammered that down when I’ve found really skilled people and they get it. We’re all in the same boat, we all get the same paycheck from this company. So like delivering good products and like you know, even seeing now my web developers going out of their way for clients, like, I would always bend over backwards, putting in security, plugins, and backups. And now I see that even when clients haven’t asked for like fixes on their website, my web developers are spotting things and being like, oh, we should fix that.

And then fixing it so that we can like look after clients, even when like they aren’t asking us to.

Morayo: [00:09:47] They’re not being forced into that. And you know, recently I’ve been reading about a phenomenon with speaking about the generational divide something called quiet, quitting, and what you just said made me think of that.

The younger generations are being more insistent on just putting in the nine to five. They don’t want you, they don’t give their employer the demand on their time that a, a lot of us older folk or middle-aged folk that we had. So that is a way to appeal to that younger generation. So, you know, I have to ask you this, how many merit badges do you own?

Because it seems like leadership skills is well baked within you.

Travis: [00:10:29] Well, yeah, that’s super ironic, cuz yeah, I was a boy scout for a super long time. I only have one merit badge, like one official merit badge. I actually stayed you know, like a, a troop leader for a number of years where I actually stayed leadership of like 12 to 15 boys and we would do all the stuff and we’d keep all the things. 

But in terms of merit badges, I kind of rebelled against having to do all the stuff, like go swim all the miles and like do all the stuff. I liked the idea of like leadership and, you know, hiking out five miles, setting up your camp, taking down your camp and like surviving or staying out, digging a trench under a log and building a shelter, like all that was cool. But the thing to earn, like the merit badge parts, I kind of rebelled against and I was actually nominated. So one of the coolest things in boy Scouts is there’s a nominate where your peers nominate you to something higher.

It’s called the order of the arrow. So not every, not every boy scout gets to evolve into like the upper order of the arrow group. So I was actually nominated by my peers. They, they voted in, you know, two or three people a year to continue on and you could go into order of the arrow. And then as an adult, as you get older, that group stays on.

So that was like pretty cool to like, I’ve always looked back at like, oh man, the fact that like, they thought highly enough of me. You know, and these are 14, 15-year-old kids and the fact that they’re not highly enough of me to vote me into this leadership position was like super cool.

Morayo: Well[00:12:15], I’ve seen other people in our space who think highly of you and your skills and I’ve talked to members of your team who also value your leadership. So it’s, that was a lesson well learned by young Travis buck. And probably some skills that you applied during the pandemic. I heard you say, you know, survival skills and boy Scouts have to adapt. The last two years, businesses have certainly had to adapt to the unforeseen future during the pandemic. What If you look back at that time, over the last two years, what has this experience taught you about leadership and how has it influenced how your team evolved over the last two years?

Travis: [00:13:00] So many things. I mean really like grit and like flexibility. Cause yeah, the last two years have been super rough when the pandemic first hit, we definitely were like everybody else. We’re a web company, we have active website projects, we have monthly retainers where they pay us for fixes and hosting and all my clients that got hit industry-wise, the photographers, the wedding photographers, that wedding stopped, the hotels I had, where people weren’t travelling anymore. A number of restaurants, people actually, weren’t going to restaurants at the beginning of the pandemic. So I right away, the first two months of the pandemic, every single day was picking up the phone like a grown man, crying about his company going outta business. And at the same time, him telling me, like, I have to cancel paying you either for maintenance or hosting.

So like, in my mind, I’m like, I’m kind of going outta business too. So it was so surreal to kind of be in that moment of having, yeah, people kind of struggle, going down on business. We went really down on business. Like we’d lost a bunch of business, but then the grit. So the people who stuck this out, like I’ve got clients, restaurant owners now they stuck it out.

They managed and I just had a new restaurant owner. Mine are long-time restaurant owners, but you bought a brand new restaurant. So like now they’re growing and expanding and it seems like people now are already, they’ve already been down and out or they’ve experienced close to rock bottom. So they’re a little more like, okay, let’s market, let’s try new things. Let’s try TikTok and they’re more open to trying more things on the web.

They know their website needs to be more mobile-friendly. They know they need to like add videos and membership areas. And before the pandemic, I don’t think that was seen as such a need or I guess you so risk at the first back, then, then now going through this pandemic, you’re like, you know, I’ve already lost a ton of work and I’m ready to take a gamble. So I think, the leaders and the companies coming out of this, who’ve just been through this for the last two years are coming out way stronger than they were.

Morayo: [00:15:24] I definitely agree with everything you just said. And when you look at your own team, would you say the same about your own team? Like what new opportunities have you all had, are you taking now that you might not have taken pre-pandemic?

Travis: [00:15:37] Yeah. Well, one of the random things that came out of this was a ton more videos, so, and a ton, more like goofy videos.

So me pandemic, we started doing, my copywriter, he writes amazingly, I’ve got two people on staff who write videos and we were just kind of like making goofy, like Halloween cartoon videos and videos that were like, Hey, you know, we’re done now just like you are, but like, keep your head up and keep going.

And like stuff breaking in the background, tornadoes going. And they really were just like videos for us for like, in that moment of time. I went through The Dot Com. I worked for The Dot Com bus, I was also working for a company during the housing crisis. So I knew basically start pumping out social media. Like if anything, people just had to know you were still in business. So every week we were just pumping out content. We were just pumping out content in social media. I was pumping out on LinkedIn and I was just trying to do more posts. And some of them were just goofy, sarcastic posts of like, Hey, we’re in this moment with you and like, Hey people, aren’t showing up and we’re trying to get through this just like you are. And it resonated and we actually got so many emails for people who also wanted video marketing and we got more TikTok. So we had more people, we do a little bit of video stuff, but pandemic hit and then we had more people open to like, Hey, can you do videos and scripting on TikTok and mm-hmm one of our recent ones was a guy taking a bite to deodorant, like just random stuff on TikTok

And I think it really took a pandemic top, I guess, push us over the edge or like they trying new things. So that’s kind of been more video, more marketing stuff of where we’re putting stuff now.

Morayo: [00:17:36]I think and this just comes off of knowing you and knowing your company and your team members. I think you’re right and we have to venture out and try new things, especially on social media and developing new content. But I think, I want your opinion on this. I think at the core of it has to be something authentically true about you or your business. Like working with Northwest media in the past, we worked on case studies and one of the things that I heard time and time again about, Northwest media is.

The clients trusted you and your team may be because you focus on locals they know that you understood them and they, you understood their culture, but it put them at ease. So, I mean, would you say that before an agency ventures out into this, they have to find out what’s true and authentic about their brand or their mission before they go into the land of goofy storytelling?

Because if it’s not rooted in truth, you know?

Travis: [00:18:44] Absolutely. Like I really am a sarcastic person, multiple people on my team are sarcastic person. I’m slack messaging people the other day and I’m like, Hey, are you a lefty? And they’re like, no, why? And I’m like, I’m firing all the lefties. I really wasn’t.

I’m, I’m buying like ergonomic mice, and I gotta figure out who’s left and who’s right. But like, Yeah, the soul of your team really has to know like where they’re going with it. And I think I’ve always tried that like with my clients. So one of the pitches I’ve always had with our clients is we’re a local Vancouver, Washington company.

All my employees are from Portland, Oregon, or Vancouver, like in the Metro area. So we actually know the local area really well. My employees live here, we operate, we’re buying homes here, we’re in the economy. So I think that was always a selling point. Like telling clients, you know, you’re in this with them.

Like I wanna spend my money locally. I wanna do right by the community. And I think that’s always like been selling points. So clients, clients, a lot of clients eventually trust me. They know I have their best interests. I hate charging the money that I charge, but they ultimately know that like, I want their website to work and to be on. I want them to get the emails and the phone calls and yeah, it really is like, Hey, we’re trusting this web company to like mould and move our stuff.

And at first, when they first come to you, you don’t have that a lot. So you, you have to convey a little bit about yourself and your background. Like, Hey, I’m a local person. I know, you know, I grew up here. I know the way that people operate. I know what I want out of this and if I were you, I would go this route.

So it takes a lot of trusts. And I think you have to build that rapport. And eventually, once your clients get it, they get it. They, trust you with their dollars. Which to me is like an amazing honour. The fact that somebody would. Trust me with the amount of money and I don’t want to F that out.

Morayo: [00:20:54] Well, let’s talk about your knowledge of your community a bit more.

We’ve played the game once before. How well do you know Vancouver or it could, subtitles is sure it could all be true, but according to our research, Unfortunately, these are the same questions I’ve asked you before because I didn’t have a chance.

Travis: [00:21:13] I’d probably forget them.

Morayo:[00:21:14] I know, I can’t remember the answers we found before, but in today’s rendition, I’m gonna ask you again cause I thought it was a fun game. So how well does Travis know Vancouver?

Travis, according to amazon.com based on your residence purchases, Vancouver is the seventh, most blank city. Is it A entrepreneurial, B home improvement, C romantic, or D studious? I can repeat it if you need.

Travis: [00:21:47] It can’t be studious. It’s gotta be like an entrepreneur.

Morayo: [00:21:51] Is that your final answer?

Travis: [00:21:52] That is.

Morayo: [00:21:54] The answer is C romantic.

Travis: [00:21:57] Oh man.

Morayo: [00:21:58] Vancouver is the seventh, most romantic city. I guess in the country. I should have narrowed that down.

Two, by law, you can’t attach this to a utility poll unless you have consent from the utility company.

Is it A, a pet, B, a directional sign, C, a vending machine or D a small man?

Travis: [00:22:28] Man, I almost had to remember this, like being a small man, but I can’t really remember. I’d say vending machine.

Morayo: [00:22:38] Vending machine is correct.

Travis: [00:22:41] I remembered something weird. I remember vending machines and small men are both weird.

Morayo: [00:22:49] Okay. Three, by law you cannot walk around in public in Vancouver. If you knowingly, A, left your car running B, have a cold, C owes someone money or D failed high school gym.

Travis: [00:23:07] Oh, man, this is so random. Yeah, I guess I can’t walk around in public if I owe somebody money. I don’t know.

Morayo: [00:23:18] Well, I guess if it’s a mafia town, you probably can’t.

Travis: [00:23:20] I know.

Morayo: [00:23:21] The correct answer is, have a cold. Now, I don’t know the year of that statute so I can see like back in the 18 hundreds, it’s very possible.

Travis: [00:23:30] But I wonder if that was like, during the first pandemic, they’re just like lockdown.

Morayo: [00:23:35] That’s right. This is like a stay-alive type.

Four, and this is the final question.

It is punishable with a fine or imprisonment to harass A, women with names beginning with the letter J, B, men with the names beginning with the letter B, C, Sasquatch, Bigfoot, or any undiscovered, subspecies, or D the high school gym teacher who wouldn’t pass you.

Travis: [00:24:03] Oh, from the walking question. No, well, definitely from what I know out here, it’s like the Sasquatch, like Bigfoot gold.

I actually was camping up in my mountain. We went to a cabin last weekend and I almost fricking bought this big foot, like magnet thing I was gonna send to you, like, like he is like golden. So we aren’t allowed, I just know this one. Like we aren’t allowed, if you were to discover Sasquatch, which a lot of people here believe it, you are not allowed to like make contact with it.

Morayo: [00:24:36] Oh, really? You have to just, you have to just let him be.

Travis: [00:24:39] You just have to get blurry photos.

Morayo: [00:24:41] Yeah. Yeah. Always blurry photos. I’m like I just I found I have Roku and I just found unsolved mysteries. There’s an unsolved mysteries channel and I grew, I was grew up and was terrified by that show. I watched an episode with A Sasquatch and I’m like, okay.

But, the images are, so, I mean, having the theatre background that I have, like, that’s just a bad costume, you know, in the blurry picture. But I think in this day and age with you know, there, are movie festivals for films shot on iPhones. I don’t know that you can get away with that anymore, these blurry images of Sasquatch.

Travis: [00:25:16] No. Yeah. It’s like people purposely been out with really bad cameras. Yeah. And like, now that we have good, like visual cameras, we aren’t seeing the photos like that anymore. They’re like, oh, they’re too good.

Morayo: [00:25:29] So what do you think will happen to the story of Sasquatch? Do you think that it will be?

Travis: [00:25:34] I don’t know. So I’m in a group that, yeah, these crazy people who go out, searching for Bigfoot every weekend and I’m in the Facebook groups. I don’t actually go out searching, but I’m waiting for these people who do go out every weekend. Cuz they swear, he’s gotta be found here somewhere in the area.

Morayo: [00:25:54] Or, Hey Sasquatch, if he exists, he should have been caught on earth by now, you know or have one of those cars driving around would’ve captured Sasquatch.

Travis: [00:26:05] Oh my God. Totally. And we have the big Sasquatch UFO combination festival. I’ve been there, so it’s like, yeah, these people are like great fun, but I’m waiting there. Every weekend I see him posting about going and searching and they’re hardcore about it. Like dead of winter, they will go out and they’re gonna go find Sasquatch.

Morayo: [00:26:24] I’m surprised. Like how did Robert stack he’s passed on now, but how did he not make it up your way in like the eighties and nineties when unsolved mysteries was a big show.

Travis: [00:26:33] We have a couple from, you know, Oregon ’cause I remember that show being on Roski. I’m from that generation where like the parents sent you outside, you were not to come home until the street lamps turned off.

Morayo: [00:26:46] Right. Right.

Travis: [00:26:46] And the kids who didn’t turn home, they ended up on unsolved mysteries. It was just coming.

Morayo: [00:26:52] Yeah, we were that generation, but we can survive. I mean, you, we can survive stuff. Unlike many generations, but yeah.

Travis: [00:27:00] All the stuff from Oregon and watching the unsolved mysteries are all the ghost stories.

Like everybody up here is just a hippie happy go, lucky person. So they’re all ghost stories or somebody goes missing in the middle of the night and they’re standing by the side of the road as a ghost. That’s like all of our unsolved mysteries.

Morayo: [00:27:18] And those blurry photos of Sasquatch. So you did very well on those questions.

So I have a question about your future. You’re an award-winning agency with clients who sing your praises. What do you look forward to accomplishing with Northwest media in the coming year?

Travis: [00:27:36] Yeah, I guess I’m probably more excited to see like the new business owners emerging from this. So like we’re starting to get a ton more new businesses, especially like in the government demographics that we haven’t like gotten before. And so these are the ones that stayed up. They, they stayed in business, they survived this, maybe their web companies haven’t. So they are like reaching out. They’re also looking for companies like us who’ve survived this. So I guess what I’m more excited about is like that building up talking, we have like this shared experience, we’ve all gone through now.

 So hearing these other business owners where I’m like a business owner and like, Hey, you’ve went through this, I went through, and like the emergence of like conversation, like the comradery we get from that now, it’s like connected now with other small business owners that I haven’t had before.

 I wanna say a lot more stuff on video. I’m really excited about the stuff on TikTok. Now I just read recently that more people search TikTok than Google, like for things to do mm-hmm and I’ve got social media manager and at one point she was like, yeah, I search on TikTok more than I searched Google to like find things to do.

And I didn’t even know that was a thing I’m like, so boomer I’m like, how is that a thing? but it like, it makes me want to like, follow that platform more just cuz the idea of like video even YouTube is yeah. Still up and growing, even though it’s totally saturated mm-hmm but the idea that people can take a hand, phone or hand, like a cell phone in hand, do a small video, do some sort of promo ad for yourself.

Like before, if you wanted to do a small video commercial, it was like a multi-camera setup. Sometimes you had a green screen mm-hmm now it can, TikTok really makes it amateur. You can do a semi-decent video on your phone by yourself promoting something. It doesn’t have to just be a goofy dance. So I think that platform is still kind of growing into its own.

I think business owners are finally finding it and everyone’s testing out what things work on it, what things don’t work on it. You have the small gym owners testing out, showing off their work routines and their meal planning. Of course, you have the kids randomly dancing and you have other businesses who are like trying to legit show you, here’s some like cool life hacks of how we do things. So it seems like that’s kind of the new wild, wild west with like video and video on the web and how best to like, market with video and the fact that we can like put video on websites now so easily when that used to be like this whole thing about how to use video and how to integrate it on the web and embedding it and be hosts it on YouTube and like all this stuff. So, and I guess that’s where I see that.

Morayo: [00:30:40] And, you know, wait, just tag along with what you were saying. They don’t have to be perfect. You know, I think people appreciate, you know, I see lots of, I went to a chiropractor for the first time, a few months ago, and it was unbelievable the number of chiropractors that I could find through YouTube who would do a demonstration.

Travis: [00:31:01] Yeah. Yeah.

Morayo: [00:31:01] And I was a little nervous about going and, you know, there were so many doctors who just from a cell phone probably were talking about their process online. So don’t be afraid to not be perfect.

Travis: [00:31:14] Yeah. And before the pandemic, like we have a big, one of my ring downs here is there’s a big green screen. We’ve got a videographer. Before the pandemic, it was so common of like a local dentist or yeah, a chiropractor to call up. Okay. Well, we’ll drive out to you. We’ll go set up these cameras and we will make the perfect staged video.

But now it’s like, I think the pandemic helps that in a way of like no, the video doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be kind of amateur hour, it can be done on your phone, and yeah, you don’t have to edit it multiple times. If you just mess up, you keep talking and people get that. So like, we’re all just used to seeing that.

Morayo: [00:31:53] Like today on this podcast, I’ve gotten tongue twisted so many times.

Travis: [00:31:58] We shoulda been recording the whole time. Like there’s a whole chat before this episode.

Morayo: [00:32:03] I know. I was like, oh, we’re dropping lots of golden nuggets here. Well, we just recorded again.

Travis: [00:32:09] Yeah.

Morayo: [00:32:10] So, you know, our mission is to create happiness. How are you creating happiness for yourself?

Travis: [00:32:16] It’s totally ironic. So in the middle of like the pandemic, I found this whole community.

So I’m an average online game where I play random games. I found this average basically community of these thousands of adult players, like Fortnite dad players. So I found a couple of different Facebook. So these are parents that basically get their kids down at night, they get a beer, get some wine, and then you get up and you just kind of talk about your crappy day and it is like, I don’t know how I found it.

So sometimes during the pandemic, cuz we are all just going online, looking for each other. And so I stumbled across them. And so I found like these night and the gamers, and I’ve been playing almost every night for like two years. And like one of the people I met, she had never gained before in her life.

Just a local hairdresser, randomly bought an Xbox, downloaded Fortnite only because it was free. And yet it has chat abilities. So you can put headset on, you can put a mic on and you’re chatting in a whole area of just adult gamers. So like, you’re just in groups of like 16 people, just like almost in a chat room talking about your day.

So it’s, it’s been like this weird little COVID outlet of mine. So it’s kind of turned into this hobby of gaming and now I like found my people. And so every night for two years I hop on, I see who’s on, I catch up with these other parents.

Morayo: [00:33:51] Well and parents there’s no better way than to make one of these sites unpopular with your kids, like making them popular with adults.

Travis: [00:34:04] Well, what brought these people together is most of these are parents trying to get better at the game so that their kids will keep playing with them. Cause the kids they get better, you know, I play with like 50-year-olds, I play with 70-year-olds like grandparents and their kids don’t wanna play with them anymore.

Most of them are secretly on at night trying to get better at the game. So yeah. It’s so it’s so.

Morayo: [00:34:29] Stealth training.

Travis: [00:34:31] Yeah. It’s so random. And like you’re there with a common bond. You’re like, oh my God, like, yeah, I get it. Like I wanna be better. And I wanna play with my kids.

Morayo: [00:34:39] Well, I love it. You’re giving agency advice and parenting advice.

Thank you, Travis. Thank you so much for the conversation today. And if you would like to read more about Travis’s company, you can go to northwestmediacollective.com. That’s Northwest spelled out media collective.com/services. And I wanna thank you again for this and many other conversations that we’ve had. And thank you all for listening. Don’t forget to like, and subscribe. You can to this podcast and you can get this in other podcasts, other episodes, anywhere you get your podcast or just check with your kids.

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