Live in St. Louis, it’s The Marketing Gateway!
If you have ever wondered how software development relates to sketch comedy, how to keep people looking for information in the age of zero-click searches, or how a few simple questions can build a lot of trust, this is the interview for you!
Today, we have Dan Gower, VP of Marketing at Sketch Development!
About the founder of Sketch: https://appdevelopermagazine.com/from-snl-to-software/
The blog post Dan mentioned: https://www.sketchdev.io/blog/build-ai-agents-without-coding
Dan’s plug: https://www.sketchdev.io/
Contact Dan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gowerdan/
About Dan: Dan is the VP of marketing at Sketch Development Services, a software consultancy based in Webster Groves, MO. His meandering career previously included roles in account management, five years of self-employment as a marketing and sales consultant, and a stint as an IT business analyst. Now he’s working to get the word out about Sketch, which has used lessons from sketch comedy troupes to become a top US-based software firm serving some of the world’s largest organizations.
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
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Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:08)
Hey, it’s Sean and St. Louis and welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. And I’m so excited for you to get to hear my interview with Dan Gower from Sketch Development Services, which is a software company here in the St. Louis area that does custom software for all kinds of different organizations. And one of the interesting things about them is that they were actually founded by a guy named John Crewson, who used to be on Saturday Night Live. So he brought a lot of his
expertise and knowledge from being on that program to the world of software development. And as you’re to get to hear in the interview, they are able to apply those lessons in some really interesting ways to serve their clients. Now, Dan is the VP of marketing at Sketch and he’s someone who he’s a wealth of knowledge and he has a lot of great information and insights to share. So you’re going to enjoy this interview. Here we go.
Sean Jordan (01:04)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. I’m of course Sean in St. Louis and I have with me today Dan Gower from Sketch and Dan, welcome.
Dan Gower (01:12)
Thanks, it’s good to be here.
Sean Jordan (01:14)
Well, you know, I’d like to begin this show always asking guests to tell me something surprising that I don’t know. So tell me something surprising. It could be anything that you’d like to share.
Dan Gower (01:23)
Okay, well, I’ve got a fun fact that’s been, ⁓ it’s had me riding high for the last, ⁓ week and a half or so, which is that the Indiana Hoosiers are the last team to go undefeated and then win the national championship in both basketball and football. So, ⁓ for, don’t know if, ⁓ you know, lot about how Indiana’s football team has been historically, but just for context, they won one game in my senior year. So, this season has been amazing.
Sean Jordan (01:52)
That is fantastic. I had a high school teacher that was a big fan of Indiana for Bobby Knight way back in the day. He had Bobby Knight pictures all over the classroom. then ⁓ when I was in St. Louis more properly, I grew up in the Metro East. So I started hearing people talking about Hoosiers and I just assumed they were talking about the Indiana sports teams, right? No, apparently in St. Louis, calling someone a Hoosier is a bad thing.
Dan Gower (02:18)
Yeah, it’s funny. ⁓ I have some family from Indiana, which is how I ended up at school there, just from visiting my cousin who went to school there. And the first time that I went to one of my cousin’s travel softball tournaments and I heard my aunt screaming, come on Hoosiers. I was just wondering why would she say that about herself?
Sean Jordan (02:36)
the lessons you learn sometimes. Well, you know, in this series of the Marketing Gateway, we’re really focused on the St. Louis area. So tell me a little bit about how you came to live and work here.
Dan Gower (02:48)
Sure, I grew up here in the area and I’ve lived here most of my life. So there’s not too much of ⁓ a story there. The work part might be a little bit more interesting. My career has been pretty meandering. I started in account management for an agency in Midtown. So doing a lot of client services worked. I was the resident Excel nerd there. So just on that alone and no other IT experience. ⁓
I got the opportunity to move into the IT department and I was a business analyst there for a stretch. Shortly afterwards, I started doing some freelance writing on the side and that kind of snowballed. One thing led to another. I started taking on more clients. So I actually quit my day job. I was self-employed for years as a marketing and then a sales consultant. And eventually I realized I wanted to go back in house because ⁓ running my own business was just not.
not that fun for me. had to do a lot of things that weren’t interesting to me to keep things going. And I got to a point where I either was going to have to hire people or just accept that I was on a plateau and I didn’t really want to do either of those. But unfortunately, I had developed pretty high standards when I was self-employed because I got to say no to any work that I didn’t want. So it took me a while to figure out where I wanted to be for the long haul. But ⁓ I found Sketch now and I’m really happy there.
Sean Jordan (04:11)
That’s fantastic. I think there is very little that would make me want to go back to a workforce where I couldn’t say no. I would have to take, there would be just something that would make me, I’d have to take an incredible salary or I’d have to have some kind of incredible position because the ability to be able to say, no, I want to work on this today really is important.
Dan Gower (04:21)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (04:37)
You know, there’s the St. Louis area where we live. There are a lot of fun things and interesting things to do. There’s a lot of cool attractions, things like that. What’s something about the St. Louis area that you wish other people knew?
Dan Gower (04:48)
Uh, something that I just learned recently, maybe this week, uh, that I got a kick out of was Soulard means drunkard in French. So I don’t know if you spent a lot of time in Soulard, but I thought that was pretty funny. Uh, they have a really good bar scene there. So, um, that was entertaining, but then a fun fact that I liked, it’s a little bit more, maybe reflects more positively on the area is that St. Louis had the first public kindergarten in the USA. kind of a leading the educational charge there a little bit.
Sean Jordan (04:56)
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Interesting.
Interesting. I did not know that. Well, it’s always fun to learn something new about St. Louis. Well, great. Well, ⁓ I want to talk with you a little bit about Sketch. So ⁓ you’re this software company, and you guys have your entire organization, from your name on down to your whole philosophy, draw from this really unlikely source, which is Sketch Comedy. So I got to begin by asking, how do software and Sketch Comedy go together?
Dan Gower (05:48)
Yeah, it’s absurd sounding, ⁓ especially because, you know, software organizations, especially within enterprises are, ⁓ you know, it’s serious work. ⁓ People are pretty, pretty buttoned up. ⁓ So to say, yeah, you should behave more like the cast of SNL is a wild take, but there’s a lot of crossover. ⁓ So there are some things that we, our founder, John calls it the Tao of Lorne.
Lauren Michaels from SNL. So one of the things that Lauren famously says is we don’t go on because it’s perfect. We go on because it’s 1130. So just this notion of, um, it’s kind of tied to like agile software delivery, I guess, where, know, if you wait until everything is perfect and you’re 100 % sure you’re never going to move. Uh, so just this, this idea of kind of delivering value.
in smaller increments more often. And then responding to market feedback is huge. The self organizing cross functional teams that are empowered to make their own decisions are huge. That’s something that happens at SNL. And then just the cadence of a week at SNL is ⁓ really well aligned with, with software methodology. And I can go into that a little bit more if you want. Okay. So it’s
Sean Jordan (07:07)
Sure.
Dan Gower (07:10)
Basically we call it like the pitch sketch stage test launch approach. So, ⁓ I’ll kind of run through it at, at SNL, how it works. And then, ⁓ you know, it applies to almost any business. So you do the show, everybody goes out and parties all night. And then you basically start fresh. You tear all the sets down to the studs, including the weekend update set that you’re just going to reuse next week. and you start with a fresh backlog because they never want anyone to be able to say like, well, we can’t really do it that way.
So they start totally fresh and they do this pitch meeting. put out like a hundred ideas for what could be the sketches in the next week show. Immediately they cut 50 of them. And then the 50 that are left, those kind of get sketched out. They write scripts for them. They do a little bit of development of the idea. And then they throw out half of those and then half the remain gets staged. So they actually like go produce the set. They get it like totally ready to go on the air.
And then they test it in front of a studio audience in a live walkthrough before the show. And then again, half of those get thrown out and, ⁓ then whatever’s left is what goes and becomes a new hour of television. So as you go through the week, you start with this massive pile of ideas and you kind of like gradually shrink it. And as you’re doing that, the size of your audience is growing. like, as you have a lot of ideas, you do it internally, it’s very safe. You know, you can put something out there and if it’s a stinker.
You know, your coworkers hear it, but you’re not getting embarrassed on television. And then, ⁓ you know, as you refine, you invite more people to see it. And, ⁓ it kind of changes the way that, that we think about waste, at our business and for our clients. this, it’s this idea of like overproducing and yeah, you’re gonna, you’re gonna spend time on ideas that are never going to make it to production, but it’s also to, ⁓ it’s impossible to innovate.
if you’re focused on like perfect efficiency and never wasting anything. So ⁓ we talk about that method a lot and we try to instill that in our clients and it seems to work really well. And if you study agile software development or the scrum methodology or anything like that, there’s just a ton of crossover.
Sean Jordan (09:23)
Now, your company founder, of course, was on SNL originally for a little while. Does anybody else in the company come from a comedy background?
Dan Gower (09:33)
I don’t know if anybody has a comedy background. ⁓ Definitely sketch attracts a certain kind of person who loves to laugh and joke around. So it makes the office really fun. There’s a lot ⁓ of different shenanigans. We have our own samurai sword. People are always wisecracking in meetings. ⁓ So I think John’s probably the only one with a formal kind of like theater or comedy background, but. ⁓
It’s definitely a mindset that is pretty well distributed throughout the org.
Sean Jordan (10:09)
love that. You know, I’m a research professional and one time in one of our local research groups, we had a improv comic come in and teach us all how to use improv comedy for research. And you wouldn’t think those two things could go together, but actually it was one of the most insightful and useful workshops I ever attended. I think there’s a lot to learn from the world of comedy. And I’m so excited you guys were able to apply that in a way that it sounds so strange to say agile software development comedy background, but.
I can see how that really works out together. Well, one of the things I know you and I have talked about in ⁓ this collaborative approach you guys have at Sketch is not just having a collaboration among your internal team, but also your clients as well. So tell me a little bit about how you’re working with clients and how you make sure that that approach is the right fit.
Dan Gower (10:59)
Sure. So there’s a book that’s required reading at Sketch. It’s called Getting Naked. And I might butcher this, but I think the author’s name is Patrick Lincione. And pretty much everybody at Sketch reads this book, especially people on the leadership team. It’s in our library at Sketch. We talk about it all the time. And I’m actually due for a reread myself, but basically it comes down to vulnerability and transparency and leading with that. So I’ve been at companies before where
As soon as you enter their sales process, they just talk at you and they talk about how great they are. And they’re trying really hard to establish their own expertise. And that’s not really the approach at Sketch. We introduce people to our developers pretty early on in the process. And there’s a lot of question asking early on, which is, you know, vulnerable because when you’re asking questions, the subtext is like, well, I don’t know something, which a lot of people are afraid to say.
But we pretty much just get someone on the phone and we start asking them questions about what kind of problems are they running into? What do they want to achieve? Where are they trying to go next? And I’ve heard developers say on calls before, hmm, you know, I’m not sure how we do that exactly. That’s really interesting. Uh, I guess we could try it this way, or we might try it this way. I’m going have to do a little more research or I’m going to have to look at your code base or, um, you know, whatever it is. And I’ve never seen a prospect’s confidence get
shaken by that. It seems like they appreciate the honesty more. And I think it helps a lot that our developers are really talented. So they’re asking good questions. And when they express uncertainty, it’s not over things that they should know. ⁓ But it’s, ⁓ it’s been a it’s a really interesting sales process. It’s a little bit different than what I’ve seen other places. And then once we start the engagement, too, there’s a lot of transparency. So
We’re Atlassian partners. use Atlassian tools to make the work super visible at all times. We do daily standups with the client. So 15 minutes every day, they get to look at what we’re doing, react to it. There are no surprises. They know if stuff’s getting done. And then every two weeks we have a demo with a larger team from our client. And we kind of do like a show and tell of, hey, here’s what we built for you in the last two weeks. Here’s what we’re planning to go build next, but you tell us what’s the next most important thing.
Sean Jordan (13:25)
I think that’s fantastic. you know, when I think about kind of the broader world of marketing, like creative agencies and places like that, like a lot of times what happens is there’s ⁓ a brief or some kind of order that’s given and the team just goes off and creates something off in the darkness somewhere and then they come back and they pitch it and it either succeeds or it fails. And it sounds like you guys have figured out a much better way. I mean, I know with software, it’s a little bit more complicated, but a much better way to involve the clients in
seeing what you’re doing as you’re developing it so they can guide what you’re trying to put together, they can make sure that they have good input, and then there aren’t any surprises when something comes out, everybody’s had a hand in it.
Dan Gower (14:04)
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, um, I really liked the way you described that. And it’s something that we talk a lot about too. Like, um, we get into semantics sometimes, but one, one of the things where we get into semantics is, uh, like complicated versus complex. So the example we like is, um, building an airplane is complicated. You know, there are a ton of parts to go into it, but if you put the same parts together in the same order, every time you’re going to get the same result. Um, and flying an airplane is complex.
There are going to be a lot of things that you have to react to, like the weather, ⁓ traffic, maybe if something goes wrong with the plane, if you have to make an emergency landing because the passenger is having a medical emergency. There are just like all these things that you can’t know and you can’t just do the same thing ⁓ automatically every time. And we think building software is more complex than complicated. so it helps to have this constant
cadence of touch points where we can never get too far off course. And we’re always just, you know, it kind of goes back to the SNL method where we’re always just putting things into production as fast as possible and then letting our clients correct us and being open to that feedback.
Sean Jordan (15:18)
I love it. I think in the world that we’re in, things are always changing. And we have to get used very quickly to something that worked a few years ago not to be working today. And we have to listen to each other to uncover some of those things. And one of the things that you and I talked about as we were talking about what we’re going to cover in this interview was zero-click searches.
Before we get to those, I want to talk a little bit about ChatGPT, but these are just two examples of way things are changing, right? So ChatGPT is something that everybody’s using all of a sudden, and they’re using it kind of in place of searching. And I went in there today, and I thought, I’m going to look and see what it tells me about Sketch. So it told me, you guys are one of the best software development agencies in the United States, which I think is awesome.
I recently ⁓ put myself in there to see what it would say about my agency, RPG, and it we were one of the best in St. Louis. So hey, I love the accolades, right? But ⁓ how do you make ChatGPT say nice things about you? You guys clearly have figured something out.
Dan Gower (16:26)
Yeah, it’s, it’s been interesting. And like you said, it’s, it’s constantly changing, which is kind of like scary and exciting. It almost feels like the early days of SEO. But, ⁓ one of the things that I like about these AI agents, whether it’s, you know, Google’s AI summary or chat BT is that they cite their sources and sometimes they even cite their sources correctly. think we talked about that the other day, but, ⁓
One of the things that I did early on is I went and I started asking Chatchity and Claude a bunch of questions about how can I find a good software development company? What are the best software development companies that are 100 % US based, things like that. And I started opening up the sources and kind of seeing where they were pulling the information from. And from there, I just did everything in my power to make sure that Sketch was represented in those sources. normally for us, that means listing sites.
But it also means that every time we get an accolade, like we recently won one from clutch about like the most trusted IT service providers or something like that. And every time that happens, I want to make sure that we do a press release about it. And then that press release hopefully gets picked up by like a couple hundred other news organizations. And so now you just have all these data points on the internet saying, Hey, sketch is one of the best software development companies. And the hope is that.
⁓ the, the, AI tool people are using to ask these questions is gonna, gonna go look at all of that and consume it and, ⁓ reach that conclusion. And it’s interesting too. ⁓ like you said, people use it to replace searching. I’ve been thinking about this a lot just in the last day where chat should be T is almost more like a influencer marketing in a way, because when people do a Google search, they get like, you know, a list of 10 URLs that they can go weed through.
Machachapi-T is almost more like a conversation. And so people are like asking for one recommendation. And I think fewer companies are getting looks maybe because of that. So ⁓ it makes it really important to make sure that you’re one of the companies that’s getting the nod.
Sean Jordan (18:41)
That’s such an insightful point that you make. I think, you know, I always try not to humanize these tools too much because they’re software. And I think if we start thinking about them like people, it’s dangerous, as we’ve seen in some of the national news that’s come out. ⁓ thinking about it still is kind of a pseudo influencer that is going to pick up on the things that, kind of through sort of a word of mouth process are interesting and important to what you’re looking for. That’s kind of what these tools are doing.
You know, I was thinking about how, so you guys are, you know, you’re based here in St. Louis and a lot of people wouldn’t think, I’m going to go to St. Louis for a top software company and yet there you are. So ⁓ it helps to overcome some of that built in bias that, you know, you might think of the Midwest doesn’t really where software development is happening. But ⁓ when, when it’s telling you, no, it is. And here’s some reasons that we know why and some sources that you can look at to see why.
it really gives a lot more credibility to it. Do you guys ever feel that kind of stigma of being a Midwestern software developer and ⁓ limiting your credibility in any way?
Dan Gower (19:45)
⁓ sometimes I think it’s, it’s almost more of an opportunity than a, than a threat being in St. Louis because, ⁓ just the cost of living here is not as crazy. So, ⁓ I think that we’re maybe not quite as expensive as some companies that are based in Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco, but all of our developers are a hundred percent us based, which people really like. ⁓
So I do think there probably is a little bit of a stigma, but there are also a ton of companies in the Midwest that ⁓ need software built. And so I think for them, it’s ⁓ as nice as anything to know that, okay, well, here’s a company, they kind of have that same Midwest. ⁓ I don’t know, I don’t want to say values. I think everyone has like can have values, but.
There’s like a certain ⁓ kind of camaraderie, I think, and being from the Midwest that I think people like about sketch.
Sean Jordan (20:47)
And my brother worked in Silicon Valley. He’s retired now, ⁓ younger than me and retired. A very nice life for him. But ⁓ just to start living there in a small house was over a million dollars. ⁓ the reason that there are a lot of software developers there is because they get paid well. But the cost of living there is so high that sometimes moving to the Midwest is ⁓ a good way to go if you want to have a good cost of living, right?
Dan Gower (21:10)
Yeah,
there are a bunch. Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say there are a bunch of huge enterprises that are based in St. Louis, too. And we’ve had the opportunity to work for them. So I think that kind of just the the laundry list of Fortune 500 clients that Sketch has is a great asset, certainly for me as a marketer, because it gives a lot of that credibility that you’re talking about where, yeah, we’re not maybe in Silicon Valley, but look at all these companies that we’ve done work for. And that kind of establishes a baseline of trust.
Sean Jordan (21:14)
no, good.
I love that. I love that. Well, let’s go back to zero-click searches for a moment. So these are a thing. And just for any listeners that don’t know, the whole idea of a zero-click search is that you go into Google, you put in what you’re searching for. And instead of going to the actual search results, what you’re seeing instead is like a card that gives you information, or you’re seeing an AI response that’s giving you information. So you’re never actually looking at the search results. You’re instead looking at some information that Google or the search engine provides.
I know you guys are really working on trying to get some organic traffic during this era of zero-click searches, and you found some cool ways to do it. So what’s been your strategy, and how is it working out so far?
Dan Gower (22:21)
Yeah, I was just looking at it earlier this week. Our organic traffic is actually up year over year. So that’s really exciting. And part of it is that I think that Sketch, we haven’t really been prioritizing SEO until more recently. So that’s part of it. It’s just that we were kind of, we’ve been putting more effort into it than we had, but it’s promising to see that we can get.
more organic search traffic as people are claiming for the umpteenth time that SEO is dead. So, ⁓ that’s good. But the other thing I think is just that it helps that we have a lot of really talented people who are software developers, cloud engineers, consultants at Sketch who contribute to our content engine. And so we’re creating this kind of long form, actionable, technical content. And that’s pretty hard to summarize in a little AI overview.
And, ⁓ you know, even if it is summarized, people might click in to learn more. ⁓ so it’s kind of about creating content that is hard to, to cram into any kind of zero click focused feature. And then the other thing, this is just a theory. So if someone tries this and it doesn’t work out, please don’t come for me. But, I have this theory that even if you do create a lot of content that
is getting gobbled up by these AI overviews and you’re kind of losing your traffic to that. kind of think that if the AI is constantly pulling information from your content and serving that up, when someone goes and asks for a recommendation for a company that knows a lot about this particular thing, the AI is going to like recall where it got all that information that it’s been serving up in these zero clicks searches or these AI summaries. So I’m running a few experiments on that. can’t
you know, validate it necessarily yet. But, ⁓ I kind of suspect that even if you do lose some traffic to zero click searches, if you’re putting out good content, that’s feeding, ⁓ whatever’s going into the search results, it’ll come back around.
Sean Jordan (24:30)
When you guys are talking with your clients or when you’re talking internally, which of these AI platforms do you find are really the most useful at actually giving good information?
Dan Gower (24:41)
Yep, wish I could give you a good answer for that because ⁓ it’s the worst answer in the world, which is that ends. ⁓ I think that I really like ⁓ perplexity if I think it’s pretty good at citing its sources. ⁓ I like ⁓ copilot agent builder if I’m looking for information internally because we’re on the Microsoft ecosystem. So.
Sean Jordan (24:46)
Mm-hmm.
Dan Gower (25:10)
The co-pilot agent studio, I can go build an agent that has access to all of our stuff. ⁓ I think that quad writes better pros than chat BT, but that’s just my opinion. I know a lot of our developers use quad code. ⁓ but one of the things that we talk about it is, ⁓ we’ve always prided ourselves on being kind of like technology agnostic. We’re like, we’re going to build it in whatever language is the best for this project. And now we’ve done a lot of work to make sure that.
The things we build internally and the things we build for clients are pretty, ⁓ like, ⁓ model agnostic to where if one of them really starts pulling away, cause right now it seems like they’re kind of just like taking turns leapfrogging each other. But if one of them starts to pull away, we want to make sure that, we don’t have to start from scratch to go switch the models and some of our technology.
Sean Jordan (26:02)
That’s interesting. Yeah. And you kind of have no idea where these things are going right now. And they probably will start to diversify at some point. But right now, they have to work. So being agnostic makes a lot of sense. Well, while I’m talking to you about tech tools, I mean, I’ve got to ask you. You work at this custom software company. So I’m sure you have all kinds of cool tech toys behind the scenes that everybody would love to have their hands on. So what kinds of tech toys are you guys using? it software or platforms or anything?
Dan Gower (26:31)
Yeah, sure. I love N8n. ⁓ It’s ⁓ like an automation, agentic AI workflow builder. ⁓ It took me a while to work my way up to it. ⁓ You know, just through like creating a custom GPT and then using OpenAI as agent builder, ⁓ playing around with ⁓ Zapier or Zapier and kind of things like that. But ⁓ now that I kind of understand N8n a little bit and ⁓ learned how to use it, it’s
My favorite, ⁓ it is very agent agnostic. can connect it to Anthropic. You can connect it to open AI. You can connect it to co-pilot and you can also ⁓ export workflows. So that’s something I’ve heard our developers talk about a lot. Like a lot of these AI companies, they’re not profitable yet. You’ve seen the cost of Ram skyrocketing. And I’ve kind of heard this theory that like, if, ⁓
If like, it’s like the drug dealer model where they’re like kind of giving us a free taste right now to get us hooked. And then they’re going to just start charging us crazy prices for, ⁓ utilization or AI tokens or whatever it is. So, the nice thing about N8N is that you can export your workflows to run them locally. ⁓ and then the models that you can run locally are always like a version or two behind kind of what’s available online. But I’ve seen one of our engineers.
run stuff on his local machine that just blows my mind. ⁓ So I think that’s ⁓ what I would recommend is kind of working your way up to N8N ⁓ if you can get there.
Sean Jordan (28:12)
Cool. And I think one of the cool things about software as well is that it’s always changing and things that are cool and interesting now, they may be the standard a few years from now. I know when I talk to other researchers like myself, ⁓ we’re all really interested in data privacy, making sure that we’re not accidentally training an LLM with proprietary data and things like that. we’re all looking at, can we build custom boxes that we could have in our offices that are not connected to the internet but are
still able to give us the benefits of an LLM and it’s very possible if you can afford the price of RAM. ⁓
Dan Gower (28:46)
Yeah.
Yeah, we’ve been talking about that. It’s like, man, I wish we would have known to buy RAM like, I don’t know, even two months ago for our own server room. But yeah, and it is great for that. You can do it, you know, all offline, which is it’s good for us to, ⁓ we would never use one of my tools for our clients. I’m mostly just building things for myself to use, but, we serve a lot of clients in like FinTech healthcare government. And so, ⁓ a lot of them, they can’t have anything going off off premises for processing. So, ⁓
If anyone’s interested in this too, I feel like an arrogant, arrogant jerk, kind of plugging my own, ⁓ work as an example, but I just wrote a blog, blog post for sketch called, ⁓ agentic AI development 101 or something like that. And it’s not totally comprehensive, but, it’s kind of about how I. Learned how to like work my way up to NA then. And I think that, if I can do it, certainly anyone who’s listening to this, who’s not a developer can learn how to do it. ⁓
and I’ve got some resources in there for outside learning. It definitely took me a few weeks to get comfortable, but it’s very possible now to just use nothing more than text-based prompts and create some pretty complex workflows.
Sean Jordan (29:57)
We’ll put a link to that in the show notes for anyone that wants to check that out. That sounds like a fantastic resource. Well, ⁓ speaking of plugging things, I always like to end our interviews by asking if there is anything that you would like to plug. So here’s your chance. What would you like to plug?
Dan Gower (30:10)
Okay.
I feel like it’s gotta be sketch. ⁓ it’s my job to market sketch. So I would be, ⁓ I would be missing a huge opportunity not to plug, ⁓ my employer here, but, obviously sketch does like custom software, ⁓ development and cloud consulting and things like that. But we also do a lot of consulting and like leadership, team dynamics, project management. ⁓ we’ve been doing work recently for a financial services company. We’ve done work for a marketing team at an enterprise.
helping them change the way they work together, get better tools to make their work visible. So ⁓ I would say anybody who’s in any industry who thinks that the stuff I talked about today is kind of interesting, ⁓ please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’ll connect you with one of our experts. And, ⁓ you know, like I said, we do the kind of like getting naked methodology where we just try to offer value upfront. So there’s a good chance that you’d be able to talk to someone for half day. We wouldn’t try to invoice you or anything. ⁓
You can just kind of learn how you would apply this stuff to your own life.
Sean Jordan (31:15)
fantastic. Well, Dan, thank you so much for being on the Marketing Gateway. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot about Sketch and many other things in this conversation. So thanks for being on.
Dan Gower (31:27)
Thanks, Sean, this was fun.
Sean Jordan (31:28)
Well, I really want to thank Dan Gower for being on the Marketing Gateway with us. I always love doing interviews like these because I learn so much and we have such a great dialogue. And I hope you learn some fun things too. If anything, I love the idea that we can take some of these rules from the world of sketch comedy and apply them to building meaningful client relationships and just hearing how they’ve been able to do that at Sketch and to provide such a substantial service to their clients is really, really awesome.
Of course, I’m always excited to talk more about where the future is heading. And we got a lot of that too. Well, be sure to check the show notes for all the resources that we mentioned. And we hope that you will continue to join us for future episodes of the Marketing Gateway. I am Sean in St. Louis. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
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