The Interview: Myke Hurley and the Feel of It All
Today I talk to Myke Hurley, the co-founder of the Relay Podcast network, and co-founder of Cortex Brand, which grew out of the popular Cortex podcast. Cortex Brand makes premium notebooks and planning tools, and in this episode, we go deep on what that process really looks like.
We talk about why he once paid hundreds of pounds just to produce a sample notebook he never planned to sell, why “everything is a trade-off” when you’re making physical goods, and why he refuses to release products unless they genuinely “say something.”
If you’ve ever wondered how ideas move from your head into the real world—or what separates merch from a real product business—this conversation is for you.
Listen to this conversation: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Jason: Myke Hurley, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it. How are you doing?
Myke: I’m great, Jason. Thank you so much for having me.
I think people who would be familiar with you know you as someone who makes podcasts and runs a podcast network. But I’d love for you to just give us the one to two-minute version of who Myke Hurley is and what it is that you do. And then we’re going to spend the rest of the time unpacking one very specific part of that.
Yes, I guess first and foremost, I am a podcaster. I’ve been a podcaster professionally for 11 years. I’ve been podcasting for 16 years, mostly in technology, and then over time as well, and into kind of business productivity and stuff like that.
The company that I co-founded is called Relay. And the podcast that is the most popular that I do is a podcast called Cortex, which focuses on how creative people work. From there came a product company called Cortex Brand, of which I’m the co-founder and creative director. Primarily at Cortex Brand, our core business is around creating tools to help creative people work. Now, for us right now, that is materializing into various notebooks and planner-like products. And we’ve had some great products that have become very successful. And we’ve built an entire business around that now. We have more in the pipeline.
I actually was really excited about this conversation for a couple of reasons. This is the first time that you and I have met, but I’ve listened to Cortex and Connected, several of your other podcasts—Upgrade—for a long time. And you started doing this series over the last year called “The State of the Workflow” on the Cortex podcast.
And I had been dreaming for a long time about specifically this particular podcast, exploring how ideas get out of people’s heads and become something real in the world. And I thought, well, first of all, I really have to interview Myke. Otherwise, it might look like I just copied his idea. So that was one thing, but more importantly, you do a thing that I’m fascinated by because you make physical products. And I love good physical products. I have a whole stack of notebooks here. Everything from like Kleid Notebooks, Leuchtturm 1917. I’ve got a Theme System Journal here.
Thank you.
But I have no idea how these things become real. And I don’t have the tenacity to make it happen. So the first question I have for you is, how did you end up as someone who makes physical products?
Well, so one, it’s really frigging hard. Like, it is unbelievably hard, especially if you do not have a background in it, which I do not. So one of my—actually, my longest running podcast is a podcast called The Pen Addict, which I host with Brad Dowdy, who is like the guy on pens. Like, he is the guy. If you Google “pen and review,” you will get to The Pen Addict because that is his thing.
And so me and Brad have been making a podcast about pens since 2012, which is an unbelievable thing. And that is a show that has a small but devoted audience. We’ve done live shows all over America with The Pen Addict. So I have a real love of high-quality stationery. I have my whole life.
And over the years of doing The Pen Addict, I’ve been able to build even more kind of taste and opinion about how these products should feel. I started in, I think this is in 2018, 2019, I started journaling in a very specific way to kind of help get some of my thoughts into process.
I wanted to start reflecting on my day, and also reflect on some habit-based stuff. And I was using a product from a Japanese company, they make incredible products, but I felt like I was kind of hacking this notebook to do what I wanted.
So I started thinking about, “Well, could I do this?” And this was all focused around an idea that my business partner, CGP Grey, and I have kind of expanded over the years, called yearly themes, where instead of setting resolutions at the start of the year, you set a theme. So this can be broad, and it becomes like a guide that follows you through for a year.
The easy example that we always give, instead of saying, I want to read 50 books this year, make your year the year of reading. And so if, halfway through the year, you decided you wanted to start reading periodicals, you could just change to that. And then you just continue down and making decisions about, you know, I want this to be my reading year. What will that look like?
My year—this year—is the year of new because I’m taking on new projects and new products and wanting to kind of advance those. And that I’m making through the year are all focused around new things and new experiences. So I started thinking about how I could create a journal that enabled me to do my journaling, my theme-related journaling, more easily.
Luckily, over the years, I’ve made a lot of friends in and around the industry, and I started working with my friends Tom and Dan at Studio Neat. They make incredible products. Their pen lines are amazing. We actually work with them on a custom-branded Cortex Mark One, which we sell on our store.
And I worked with them to help me create the first version of the Theme System Journal. And this was based on a great product of theirs called the Totebook, which is like an A5-ish notebook. We ran that for a couple of years, and it became very successful—we couldn’t keep it in stock. And I wanted to make some changes to it and decided that I wanted to be much more hands-on because I saw, like, oh, this could be like a business. And I had some other ideas.
So I started looking around for a manufacturer that could help us produce this. And this is actually really hard to do. With all of our products that we’ve started, you get a surprising amount of no’s when you go to manufacturers. You say, “Hey, I want to make this journal.” And they’re like, “No, we don’t want to do that.”
And it’s like a very strange thing and it can be based on they can’t produce it, they don’t want to produce it, or the volumes aren’t what they want. It can be really difficult to get started, but we found a company in Poland that wanted to produce the product, and we started making them there, and then that kind of carried on. Then it came time to create another product, which is my absolute love, which is called the Sidekick Notepad. It is a landscape notepad that sits on your desk, typically between you and your keyboard, but you can take it to meetings and stuff like that.
It’s a very particular construction. It’s very sturdy, and it’s basically to take notes and keep to-dos. I keep one on my desk the whole time. It sits between me and my keyboard, and I take notes and do whatever I need with it.
This product was really hard to produce because I had a lot of very particular things that I wanted to do in its size and shape, and construction and materials that I wanted to use. This took a really long time to find someone, and I actually found a manufacturer in London, which is where I’m based, that would help me produce this. It ended up being great because from the time that we signed them, it took a year and a half of going backwards and forwards and working with them to produce it the way that we wanted.
That’s now become our most successful product, and we now have a bunch of varieties from there. So a long way to answer. It’s incredibly hard to produce physical goods, especially if you do not have the language, which I don’t have. And I’m picking it up as I go along. But you have to try and find a company that’s willing to invest in you as well, so that they are willing to put the time in. And I’ve been lucky to find now two manufacturers that are really willing to do that and to help me through. And then it’s paid dividends for them because we order lots of product from them.
I have so many questions, but I also just realized listening to you that you have subliminally gotten some things into my brain over the last, I don’t know, eight or nine years, because you mentioned a bunch of products that I realized I’ve purchased.
The Mark One, I have my Lamy Studio fountain pen, which I’m sure fountain pens did not enter my brain until I had listened to the pen addict. I have the Sidekick Notepad sitting literally where you described it—right here in front of me on the keyboard. You’ve cost me a lot of money, so I’m really glad I finally got a hold of you here to talk about.
To make me answer for it.
Yes. But everything you said makes total sense to me. And merchandise feels like a fairly common diversification strategy for people who have an audience, whether it’s a podcast, a YouTube channel, or just public speaking, whatever it might be. But you mentioned something, well, two things that I think make this feel a little bit unique. Because, for example, Cortex had T-shirts, I think, before you had paper products.
Absolutely.
Yeah. So you had merch. But this is more than just merch. You talked about tools to help creative people work. That’s what I wrote down. And it feels as though what you described is that you first wanted to make a product that fit, that solved the problem that you had. How do you take that and turn it into a business? How do you solve a problem that you have and then figure out, do enough other people have this problem that there’s a business here?
I mean, we are in a lucky position that we have an audience already to begin with. So we were able to, when we started our product business, we had an inbuilt base of people that we could talk to and could start it that way. But I think for me, when it comes to the products that we develop, they do start from the insight that I have a problem that I can’t find something to solve.
And I am genuinely of the belief that if you feel that way, there are other people like you. You just have to find a way to get to them. And these days, people use Instagram and services like that to market these products. And we do that too, but we were able to start off from this base of having an existing audience that we could talk to. And you mentioned merch. And, you know, a lot of people look at what we do as creator merch. And I understand where that’s coming from because the products that we produce have the Cortex logo on them.
I push back on it because creator merch, when we do some of that, like we mentioned our T-shirts. We work with a company called Cotton Bureau. They produce this stuff for us. They also actually ship all of our products, but we ship those into them. And there are other companies that exist, like Fourth Wall is a very popular company now that helps creators kind of start brands.
But in those scenarios, you are typically putting your logo on something that’s off the shelf. The products that we have produced at Cortex Brand, our paper goods, they are wholly owned designs of ours. We started from zero and produced products from design and built them out that way.
So I do see Cortex Brand as more of a product business that happens to be run by two content creators as opposed to a creator merch business. I think that creator merch businesses are much easier, by and large, because if you work with people like the folks at Cotton Bureau, or Fourth Wall, and other companies like this, they have the expertise and they will go out and manufacture this stuff for you wherever it needs to be manufactured. But for me, I just wanted to be a part of the production process. It’s very exciting to me to be able to work with a partner, a manufacturing partner directly, and really create this thing from my idea, my vision.
Well, and to buy merch, all someone has to be is a fan, right? I buy a t-shirt for a podcast I like. I could buy the Cortex pin or whatever it might be. But to buy one of these products, someone else has to have the same problem as you and think that this will solve it for them. So it is a very, very different thing. And you describe, you started with paper products. I think you said that because you really liked fine stationery, fine paper. What is it about paper products that you really like?
I mean, I, since I was a kid, you know, I was one of the kids of which there are many. and as time has gone on, I hear from more and more of these people who really liked going back to school because I could go buy all my new stationery. That has just been a thing that I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid. I really enjoy the feeling of pen and paper. For me, nothing enables me to ideate better than a pen and paper. If I’m trying to work through a problem, if I’m trying to write, if I’m trying to come up with some ideas, if I’m trying to even just trying to get my feelings out, A computer just doesn’t cut it. There’s just something about that connection between my pen and the hand that does not match my connection between my fingers and a keyboard.
And so this type of product is just very meaningful to me. And I know there are lots of people like me. One of the things that maybe helped with this is just being involved in the pen and paper space with The Pen Addict Podcast for long enough opened my eyes to how many people care about this kind of stuff.
And so it felt very easy for me to see the potential market fit for the Cortex brand for our goods because I know that there are lots of people who really care about the experience of pen and paper. There’s a company I love called Field Notes—very popular brand—and they either created or popularized the saying of “ I’m not writing it down to remember later, I’m writing it down to remember now.”
The idea being, I just take notes, and in the essence of taking notes from a meeting, it helps get something into my brain. I don’t need to refer to it later on, but that act of note-taking really helps kind of solidify ideas and stuff like that for me.
Yeah, and I think there’s actually more people like that than we would realize. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that most people would benefit from pen and paper because it forces you to slow down and think about something and it imprints something on your mind when you go through that physical act of putting ink on paper. Most of us are just in too much of a hurry to get to that point. But that’s a whole other podcast. You did mention, though, that it was a challenge. It is a challenge. But one of the reasons is that you didn’t have any training, any background in physical product design. Talk about how you learned how to be good at this.
Well, I don’t know that I have. I know how to produce the stuff I want to make. And there is an element of, I do have ideas that I don’t know where to begin with, because they’re starting to branch away from this stuff. And so at some point, I’m going to have to try and start from zero again as we have other product ideas that we want to pursue.
For me, with pen and paper, it comes back to just having a lot of experience in this field as an enthusiast of these items, which made me understand there are preferences. It also helps that this stuff is easy to obtain lots of competitive products so when i was starting the sidekick notepad project i just bought lots of landscape style notebooks and was able to go through them and think about what do i like about this what do i not like about this and where do i feel like the the idea that i have can actually fit into the market.
And so for me, it is a very tactile thing. I have a desk in my studio, which is just full of our products and others. And I’m going through them constantly. I now have lots of sample books and swatch books. And that kind of material helps me to kind of ideate. But with the design itself, looking at the Sidekick notepad, it started from sketching. I was able to start illustrating a little—I’m not good at this—but I was able to kind of just draw out what was in my mind.
I have a friend whose name is Matt. He works at a brilliant paper company called GF Smith. They’re a British-based brand, and they’re a company that provides paper to manufacturers to make goods. I was able, through contacts that I’ve made through the areas that I’ve been in, was able to kind of talk through with him, what I was thinking about. Who do you think could produce something like that? And he was able to put me in touch with some manufacturers so I could then kind of talk to in more detail. But it is a slow process for me, much slower than it would be for people that have training because I have to try to communicate things in a somewhat rudimentary way.
So you said a couple of things that were really interesting. You talked about when you have an idea, you’ll start by sketching it out. And also, you’ll look at what already exists in the world and figure out what you like and what you don’t like.
I’m kind of curious about what that marinade is like. How those two things play together. How much of a finished product—let’s take the sidekick notepad—was ”this is the idea I have—I just need to find language so I’m going to go out and get all the options that are out there so I can sort of feel my way around,” versus how much of the idea was influenced by what you were exploring.
The idea originally came to me before I started exploring, when I was using products in this way that were not well-suited for this. So I was using notebooks and turning them on their side and having them on my desk between my keyboard and me. and they weren’t the right size or format. Either they had a binding on one edge, which made it uncomfortable for me. I’m left-handed too, so some products can be complicated for me that way if the binding is on the edge.
So I’d use wire-bound stuff, which was never good for me, for example. Or I’d have to turn it upside down, which was silly. It’s also not just because I’m left-handed, but there are lots of different ways in which left-handed people write, and I’m what’s called an overhooker. So my hand comes over the top of the page to write, and it can become very uncomfortable with some notebooks, which again informs my design process because I’m trying to find stuff that is simple.
And the Sidekick notepad, while horizontal, is top-bound. For this reason, it doesn’t get in my way. It’s really easy and comfortable to write with. So it starts with that need for me, like, this doesn’t feel right. If I were to make something, what would it be instead? And it’s like, okay, so I want it to be about the width of the laptop. And then I want it to be a little shorter than a notebook typically would be at this kind of horizontal size. And then start going through from there. Well, then what would I like the paper to feel like? How would I like the construction to be, et cetera?
Then I start buying up stuff that is in that category just so I can get a sense for what does it feel like at certain sizes, what the layouts would feel like, et cetera. But for me, the things I don’t do with our products, I don’t start like, hey, I need a new idea. Let me buy up a bunch of stuff and see what speaks to me. It comes from a need that I have first, and then goes out from there.
Similarly, my business partner, Grey, wanted a pocket notebook. He wanted to make pocket notebooks because that’s what he really loves. And this was on our list forever. And I just didn’t have an idea. because I felt like the pocket notebook space was really well covered. I originally was like, well, you know, we would do like a three and a half by five and a half staple bound pocket notebook. It was like, well, that’s just a Field Notes notebook. I don’t need to make those. I have nothing to bring. And so this was a product we were kicking around for years.
And then one day I was like, oh, what if we just made a pocket version of the Sidekick notepad? So we ended up doing that. It’s called Sidekick Pocket. But it took the, I don’t really feel like there is much sense in us just creating things that are just other that are just versions of other products. It has to come from a need that I have or that I feel like should be served, and then kind of start building out from there
Because in what you just described, you’d be basically just making merch. You’re just putting the Cortex logo on something that you could get anywhere else.
Yeah, like at that point I should just call Field Notes and say, "Can we do a collaboration?” Which would be the easiest. That would be the best way to do it in that scenario. Because then I’m already working with the people who do it the best and putting a logo on it. But that’s not what I wanted to do.
It felt to me that if we’re going to put a product out there, it should say something. And that one does. It brings everything that the Sidekick notepad brings in durability and flexibility, and just puts it in a smaller form factor.
Okay. So the hardest question I always ask, at least because it’s the one I can’t answer, how do you, Myke Hurley, decide when something is good enough? As in, this is good enough for us to put our name on. This is the product that’s the best representation of the idea that I have. Or this is the one that will solve the problem best for the most people. Is there an objective way to do that? Or is it just I know it when I see it? And if that’s the case, I want you to unpack that.
There’s not an objective way to do it and neither do I ever feel like something can be perfect.
Sure, but perfect and good enough are two totally different things.
Exactly. And even good enough can be complicated sometimes. Because, especially when it comes to physical goods, everything is a trade-off. Yep. You are making compromises constantly. And I’ve been lucky that in most scenarios, those compromises have ended up with better products than I expected.
Sometimes, and we do this often, what we are compromising is price. Our products are more expensive because they are really well-made. And they’re also made in London, which is like another compromise for me. That makes them more expensive. But that means that I know they’re good because I go and check them.
I work directly with the manufacturer. I’m not working through six middle people trying to get it to work, or they’re not being made on the other side of the planet. That works for so many businesses, but I can’t make it work for me right now because this is one thing that I do in my life, not the only thing.
So, especially with me not having the technical knowledge and language to be able to express to people who run manufacturing facilities in Asia, in the Americas, wherever. I like to be able to go and talk and go to the factory often. And when we’re in the production of a new product, I’ll be going to the factory multiple times a week to check in on how they’re doing to make sure everything’s going right. And we’re making on-the-fly decisions about materials and stuff like that. So I think that there is always a level of trying to find the right set of trade-offs to produce the product that works, that feels right. But for me, it’s a feeling thing. A feeling thing.
This is one of the reasons I was really excited to have this conversation, because making a physical product, I mean, first of all, you’re bound by the limits of physics—it’s a thing that is going to actually exist in the world. So at some point, you have to tell the factory to start making them, put photos on the website, ship them, as opposed to a lot of times, as creatives, we think about the unbounded limits of creativity. We can continue to iterate, edit, analyze, and go back.
I saw this post you shared about the £500 notebook. That’s an expensive iteration, and I love the way that you explained it. The point is you do have to make a decision at some point to say this is the amount of iteration or revisions or editing that we can do before we have to ship this, because even Myke Hurley doesn’t have infinite money to just keep doing that. So how do you figure that breaking point out?
Yeah, the 500-pound notebook, that was a sample that we produced where we were trying to move production at the Theme System Journal for various logistical reasons. And I was also looking at updating it. And I ended up having a sample produced. Sampling of these products is very expensive if you want it done to a final spec. You can have samples of products made all the time, and they’ll mostly be made by hand by a manufacturing facility. They make one or two for you with a rough approximation, and it’s not too expensive. But that doesn’t produce a final product.
And what I like to do, which is not typical, is to say, no, let’s turn on all the big machines that make all the noise, the final machines, and produce the smallest print run that we can. So you end up with an incredibly high per-unit cost because you have like 50 of them made. And instead of costing like three pounds to make, they cost 500 pounds to make because you’re not getting any of the scale benefit of producing an actual print run, because all of the money is basically boiled down to turning on the machines that will produce it.
So that is an important part for me because everything is so much about when it feels right. And for me, I can’t feel that something’s going to feel right unless I can actually feel it. And that product, the samples that we’d had made were fine. But then, when we had the final sample made, it wasn’t right. And that happens, that has happened to me multiple times now. And so it’s something that I always want to do.
But yeah, that kind of stuff is very important to me in the production process to try and understand that I’m going to get to where I want to go. And so, yes, you can’t do it infinitely. At a certain point, you have to pull the trigger and actually print the product. But I do feel like with just the right amount of preparation, you can get there.
Sometimes it can take you a year and a half to produce something, which is what was happening. I mean, I’m working on a journal now, it’s a brand new journal, I’m hoping that we will have it available at some point this year. I’ve been working on this idea for over two years because it’s complicated. And again, it was like it was a thing that started as an idea, but I couldn’t work out what the format of this product would look like. And then over time, it materialized. But then I went around three different manufacturers again, trying to get it done the way that I wanted because I am very particular about these things, about how something should feel and how something should look and work, which does mean that I think I can be a complicated customer sometimes.
Well, no, that’s actually good because I have two questions that just occurred to me. The first one is that you have very particular feelings about the products. There was another video on your Instagram channel where you were talking about the Sidekick Calendar. You noticed, I think, your wife was using it in a way that you had never anticipated, and you’re like, oh, we could do that—that is a thing that would still fit with the ethos of this product, but adapting in a way that would make sense for the audience.
Is there some kind of light switch that goes off? I guess what I’m getting at is how do you balance between what Myke Hurley thinks this is a thing you should make, versus feedback from an audience. Because I imagine you hear from a lot of people who think it’d be nice if you made this because there’s this problem in my head. How do you balance what you like versus what your audience wants?
I take what people ask for, and if it’s something that I feel like we can produce relatively easily, then I do. And you referenced the Sidekick Calendar. So we have four different layouts of the Sidekick product. We have the notepad, the calendar, planner, and freeform, which is plain, essentially.
So freeform, and calendar all came from various levels of feedback. So my wife was splitting up a Sidekick notepad into sections and was using it as a week calendar, which horrified me because she was just like writing over the to-do list area. And it’s like, I can’t have you live like this. And it’s just like, you know, the guy who makes these, maybe we can do something together.
And those were easy for me; they were easy for me to move forward on. And while they weren’t the products that I wanted, they were low risk because we’d done all the heavy lifting in producing the Sidekick Notepad and now it just meant that every time we did a run of the larger scale product the Sidekick Notepad, we could also include a small percentage of units in various layout options, which is very easy to do and you don’t really increase the cost of your production run that way.
The Sidekick Pocket is similar. It actually is produced very similarly, so we can do them at the same time, and we can get more economies of scale that way, which is very helpful for the overall business. But those kinds of things to me are simple because it’s like well I already know how to do this layout like this product I can just change what’s printed on the pages. It’s very easy.
Other products are much more complicated. Over the years, we have been asked by people to make all kinds of things. To me, it still comes down to do I think I have something that I can offer you that is different from what is already out there. If the answer to that is no, then I just let it go by because I just don’t feel like that’s adding much to the world. If I’m just like, well, here is just the Cortex version of a wall charger. It’s like I don’t have an idea for why this would be good for you, rather than what you can already buy.
Right, and it’s not like people who listen to your shows haven’t heard you just recommend products you like anyway. Just go buy those.
But it does feel like it has to be hard when people are thinking, well, I would love to give you money, Myke. Could you just make this thing? But the examples you used, if it’s just sending another PDF to the manufacturing facility and they just run different ink in different spots on the same format, you’re right, that’s pretty low risk. It doesn’t dilute the brand.
Exactly.
It continues to reinforce the same brand. Is that sort of how you’re making those decisions?
Yeah, and I have not made every layout that’s been recommended or requested. The layouts that we have produced have been the ones that I feel like I could make in an interesting way. And so with even the plain one, we kind of tried to jazz it up a little bit by putting these dots around the pages so you could divide them up if you wanted to. Unsurprisingly, the plain notebook is the one that sells the least, but that was exactly what I had expected. Honestly, I made that one for our accountant, which was one of the biggest surprises of my life, that my accountant wanted a plain page. I figured accountants would want the most structure.
Make it look like an Excel spreadsheet, please.
Exactly. That’s what I thought he would want. But no, he wanted it that way. So we did that one. But my favorite layout outside of the traditional one is our planner layout, which is essentially like a mission control kind of page. You’ve got schedule down the left. You’ve got to-dos on the right. You’ve got a priority box in the middle and a notes area. And that to me feels like the person who wants everything about their day in front of them. That one was really fun to produce.
And I actually, on that one, there were lots of elements that we could include. And I ended up getting a lot of customer feedback from Instagram. I was doing some live streams, showing different layouts to people and asking, what is the most interesting thing here? What would you want to see?
Again, that’s really great in having an engaged community like we do around the Cortex podcast itself. I can go out there and ask people, “What do you think? What do you want?”
One of my favorite things to do, which I wished I could do more, is when we launch a new product, we do live streams for them to kind of show them off. That’s like the best day. I love those days so much. And I so hope that I can do another one of those at least this year.
So has there been a product that you spent a significant amount of time and energy on that you just pulled the plug on that you’re willing to talk about and explain kind of why?
No, I don’t think so. I mean, the one would probably have been the thing that I’m making now because it was put on pause for a long time. It’s a journal product that, again, it’s got quite a heavy layout to it. But I don’t really talk about it now because the idea seems so obvious to me, but nobody’s made it. So I’m terrified because every day I’m like oh someone’s gonna do it. But luckily, nobody has yet.
I’ve listened to you long enough to know that you care very deeply about taste. When it comes to products, when it comes to software desig,n when it comes to all of these things, I am curious how you think about developing taste. Where does it come from?
I just think it’s strong opinions. I think that’s what taste is. Ultimately, you don’t have to agree with somebody’s taste, but if they really believe in something strongly and will display it confidently, that’s their taste.
My taste in these things is expensive, unfortunately, because I end up making notebooks with very expensive materials. But I love that, and I do kind of feel like again the products that we make are for people who also who want their product to be premium.
We hear from a lot of people. I used to work in the corporate world. And this is one of the things that informed a lot of my product-making was that even in places where everybody has a work-issued laptop, people would bring pens and paper to meetings. I think it’s a nice way to live a life. If you’re in a meeting and you’re sitting behind a computer, people don’t think you’re paying any attention to them. So again, the Sidekick notepad is made. It’s got a nice, strong, rigid back to it, so you can kind of pick it up. It’s also got a cover that flips over. It looks good in a meeting, and that was part of what we were trying to develop.
So when it came to producing these products, I was thinking a lot through that lens as well. And it was something that I really wanted to make sure that we were covering off, because that was important to me. In these environments, I think that there is something about having something that looks nice, that you’ve made a decision that gives an air of confidence to you, and also makes you want to use it.
So when I was thinking about the taste of my products and the fact that they’re expensive, they make a statement to people. We’ve heard from a lot of our customers who would take their Sidekick notepad out in a desk and they’ll turn it over and people are like, oh, what’s that? Like what you got there? It’s like it becomes like a thing. And this was always something that I experienced because I would use nice pens and nice paper when I was working in marketing for a financial institution nearly 15 years ago now, people would ask me questions about this stuff. And it looked like I cared about the meeting more because I had a nice pen.
Do you and Grey have the same taste in what happens when you guys disagree?
Similar enough. And often Grey will defer to me. If he really disagrees with something, he will share it. And we can have lots of very spirited conversations about why something should or shouldn’t be a certain way. But he trusts my taste when it comes to these products—the paper types that I want to use.
He doesn’t have that same level of care over the paper that I would because Grey uses more standard pens and pencils, whereas I’m using fountain pens. So the paper that I want needs to feel good with everything, but he wouldn’t care about that because it’s not the kind of stuff that he uses. But in the places where it matters, we do. We have very similar tastes, which is part of the reason that we’ve worked together very well for so long, is that we share a lot of those kinds of sensibilities.
So one of the other things I wanted to talk about is there’s more to running a business of paper products than just making the paper products. It seems like you had to hone a number of other creative skills. So photography, copywriting, video, social media. How did you approach that?
I found good people.
As in letting them do it is what you’re saying?
Yeah. And find people that I could trust. The marketing has taken on many iterations for us. And I’ve just been on the lookout for people in certain fields that I thought could do a good job. With the copywriting and stuff like that, a lot of that comes from my initial guidance.
But I worked with our chief revenue officer, Carrie. She started at Relay with us working on ad copy, and kind of moved up in the business. Carrie’s a great copywriter, and I got her help with Cortex Brand, and she helps me out. And then during the pandemic, my pandemic hobby was custom mechanical keyboards. That is a thing that I love as well. You know, I like to have a really nice keyboard in front of my really nice notebook. Like that’s perfect.
And so I ended up kind of by following this hobby, and through social media, found people who were very good at taking pictures of things on desks, which became very helpful for me. And then I started working with a few creators, and I found a two-man shop in Australia called Yuzu. And they helped and continued to help me develop the look of our marketing.
One of the things that I love and I think that they do a great job with is when we started working together, they said we want to produce imagery that makes people understand why your products cost what they do. That it would just, it looks so good that you’re like, oh yeah, of course it would be this because it’s a very premium item. And I think they do, they do a really, really good job.
And that’s how I’ve always worked. It’s trying to find in the places where I do not have the skills myself, just try and find people who can help you that do. And I think that’s been throughout the entire product process. I was talking a little bit ago about finding manufacturers who will work with you as partners and will help develop with you. And it’s the same as when it comes to people who help with our marketing and our social media. It’s people who understand how to do this stuff and can take my preferences, my ideas, my taste, my opinions, and translate that in ways that help kind of tell the story of our products.
My last question is kind of about the environment and the physical space, and how much that contributes to your creative process. I was interviewing an author last month, and he was like, I get up and sit in the same chair, and that’s when I write, and it tells my brain, this is what I’m supposed to be doing at this time.
It seems as though making physical products requires having some access to, like, your samples or drawers full of colors or paper types. How much for you does the physical space contribute to what you’re doing creatively? Just talk about what that means to your creative process.
It’s massively important. So I have a studio that I have been in for like six years. It’s set up in different ways depending on my different work. So I have an area where I record podcasts, and I have a specific desk for that. And it’s sound-treated. It’s quite a large open room. So it did sound terrible until I did some stuff about this space.
But then a couple of years ago, I created an area in my studio that was just for the physical products. Prior to this, I just had stacks of paper and notebooks just sitting on my desk, just getting in my way. It was a nightmare. But I ended up getting a standing height, very large desk. It was like a conference room desk. And it is just covered in all of our products, and then swatches, swatch books, and tests.
It’s so helpful for me, for my process, to be able to go to a physical space. I am now standing in the product design area, and I can grab things. I can pick things up. I have pens. I have scissors. I have cutting boards and knives.
I guess another part of the process for me, like when it came for the Sidekick Pocket, is I took Sidekick notepads and started cutting them to pieces to try and understand physical size. And I’ve done that with exploring other product types, which we want to do in the future.
A lot of it now comes from grabbing a craft knife and starting to cut pieces of paper up. It’s like when I was talking about the Sidekick Planner layout. I have a printer in my studio. I was having our designer—we also have someone who helps us out with layout design. His name’s David. He also does some web stuff for us too but similarly like I don’t have skills in creating the layout so I had to find someone who could help me do that. He does a great job. He would create elements that I would then cut up and arrange on a page in a way that felt good to me. And, to me, that is the only way any of this stuff works.
I bought an Epson printer that does A3 prints because our products are large enough that they don’t fit on an A4 sheet. And whenever we’re designing anything, I will print it out at actual size, cut it out, stick it on top of one of our existing notebooks, and start feeling how it feels. Similarly, the samples that we mentioned, the samples that cost me three figures per item, I use them as my own notebooks. That’s how I know they’re right. I was using a really early version of a Sidekick Notepad for nearly a year before it went into full production. And I actually have another video that we’ll put out at some point where I show the back of that one, which has a huge coffee stain because I spilled coffee over it one day. It’s like that’s how I use my stuff. I do believe these things are to be used, even though they’re nice to use.
Yeah, I have actually a stack of Ugmonk Analog cards that all have coffee on them. Because I just spilled it. And I’m going to keep using them now they have personalities.
I love Jeff’s stuff with Ugmonk. He’s an inspiration for me, too. I think he’s someone who really understands the visuals of his marketing and the brand, like their branding is so strong. I love that stuff.
Yeah, it’s great. Speaking of high quality physical products, they make some great stuff. So was there anything that we did not talk about that you think the audience should know about your creative process?
That it’s taken me a really long time with all of the stuff that I have been able to do in my life. And I think that that is something important for people who want to be creative is that there is a level of commitment that you have to be able to want to put yourself through. You know, I mentioned at the top that I’ve been podcasting for like 16 years professionally for nearly 12, which meant there were four years where I had a full-time job, and that this was my evenings.
And similarly, like with our product business, there are long stretches of development where something doesn’t exist. But I’m committed to it if I think the ideas are good. And so that is a big part of my creative process. If I truly believe in something, no one’s going to be able to tell me it can’t happen. And I’m just going to keep working on it until I get there.
Great. In addition to cortexbrand.com, where else can people go to find more about Myke Hurley?
So the podcasts that I produce are at Relay. You can go to relay.fm. That’s where you can hear me. And I also have a blog where I share things that I care about and what I’m interested in. And that’s theenthusiast.net.
Which, by the way, kudos. Single best domain name in a long time. It’s such a great name for what it is that you’re doing there.
That’s how I’ve always been. I consider myself an enthusiast. In all the projects that I do, it’s just I care about them. And all of the podcasts that I’ve produced, I end up being the person who I come to this not as the expert, but as the enthusiast. And I’m lucky to know a lot of experts in different fields.
Well, today I appreciate your expertise on the creative process. Myke, thank you so much for your time.
Pleasure.