The Habit Architect

THA S02 EP#22 - Why Great Creative Work Starts With Systems

• Michael Cupps • Season 2 • Episode 22

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Great creative work rarely fails because people aren’t talented, it fails because the system around the talent is chaotic. When files live in five places, naming conventions change by person, and teammates can’t find what they need, creativity turns into rework, delays, and frustration.

In this episode of The Habit Architect, host Michael Cupps sits down with Jessica Story, CEO and co-founder of Stockpress, to explore why systems and workflows are the real foundation of consistent creative output. Jessica breaks down what a digital asset management (DAM) system actually is (and why it’s not just “Dropbox with folders”), then shares how Stockpress is built to help mid-market teams organize, search, share, and collaborate without the usual enterprise cost or complexity.

They talk about the habit side of adoption, how teams build repeatable workflows when the tool is easy enough to use and how AI features like auto-tagging and facial recognition can teach teams the value of structure without forcing them to do everything manually. Jessica also shares her founder journey: running a busy digital agency with files everywhere, getting introduced to DAM through an enterprise client, building a simpler alternative, and watching it spread organically as clients asked to use it too.

The conversation closes on a personal habit that keeps Jessica grounded as a distributed-team founder: a weekly, non-negotiable training class with her rescue dog, proof that the right routines don’t just improve work, they improve life.

This Show is sponsored by TimeBandit.io

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Hello, my name's Michael Cups and welcome to the Habit Architect once again. We took a little hiatus there. We had a crazy ice storm in, in Texas and it interrupted a lot of things, so we didn't have a show last week. Very excited. And the sun's shining. You might see it in the reflection of my glasses. Back to normal here. So I'm really excited. Our guest today is Jessica Story, who's the CEO of stock press. And we're gonna talk about stock press, and we're gonna talk also about what a digital asset management system is and does and how it makes people more efficient. And you may say to yourself why is a digital asset management. Software company gonna be talking about habits and the reality is we are engaged in habits in any, in many different types of workflows. And this one happens to be around creatives and in your marketing department or your agencies and things like that. And we're gonna dig into a little bit of that because habits really are about workflows in the, when you're in a collaborative setting, and that means a lot. So we talk about habit stacking, we talk about habit cues and things like that for you individually. But what about if you're in a team and you have to get along and most importantly be productive then this is where stacking and habit cues and things like that come into play and they instantiate themselves through workflows. And so I'm really excited to talk to Jessica. She's exciting. I really enjoy her demeanor as well. I think you will too. So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about that. Before we do though, I gotta give the obligatory plug. Please go out to time, bend.io and look at our app, look at the book download do all those things that you can do. And on the podcast, please do and follow us where whatever your channel may be. So why don't we go ahead and bring Jessica around Flo, if you don't mind, and we'll get to, hello Jessica. Welcome. Jessica: Hello, how you doing? Michael Cupps: Good. We were switched there, and then we got switched. Now the right names. Good to see you. Jessica: Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. Michael Cupps: Absolutely. Very excited to talk about this and especially as we'll get through it, is the trajectory of how you started this business and how you, your philosophy out running it now, which I think is really liberating when we think about enterprise software and stuff like that. So very excited to do that. But why don't we start

by I, I guess I should say first off, we were introduced to you through Leslie Greenwood, who was a guest on our show back in, I think it was. It was either November or December. So if anybody's watching wanna go see that, go watch that episode. But we're so pleased that she introduced us, and I'm excited to say you're welcome and why don't you tell us about yourself. Jessica:

Yes, I'm happy to, and big thank you to her. I just joined Wednesday, women in December, and they have been amazing. Connecting me with great people and just really being a good support system for me as I'm trying to get more out there on LinkedIn and things like that. So they've been awesome and I really appreciate her. Referring me to you. So I am the co-founder and CEO of Stock Press. And Stock Press is a digital asset management system. We will get into that a little bit later, I'm sure. One of the things we're trying to solve is basically making digital asset management affordable for the mid-market. And my background is really in design and user experience and trying to make things easy for people to use. So I've been using that kind of background to try to make stock press a place that anyone can enjoy. Michael Cupps: That's

fantastic. That's fantastic. And so just a digital asset management is primarily used by marketing teams, is that right? Just to level set, let's give a quick de description of what a digital asset management system is. Jessica:

Yeah, I would say marketing teams, brand managers, anybody who has a lot of assets and a lot of things they need to organize or share or work on. With a lot of other people. And so yeah, digital asset management is different than, a Dropbox or a Google Drive or something like that with a folder structure. The idea is that things are organized and categorized based on tags and, different categories related to your business and things like that, so that you don't have to. Understand someone else's thought process in organizing files. You can just go and type in, Hey, show me all my pictures of Michael, and they should come up. And that really is the gist behind it. What we're trying to do differently is giving people the ability to organize things in that foldered structure and still get the value out of those digital asset management feature. So we've combined the two trying to make it as easy to use and self-serve as possible. Michael Cupps: And that's great because Yeah, you may have heard the introduction when I was talking about we, we talk about

habits a lot and habits that, that anytime we can get into a habit of doing it repeatedly, right? It's part of your system, it's part of how you work, and that sounds like what you're doing. You're building a workflow around maybe it's categorization or just who contributes how so everybody else can benefit from it. Is that fair to say? Jessica:

Absolutely. And I think there's two, two parts of that too. So one is the habit, and, getting people into the habit of using a tool, a new tool. But the other is making that habit so easy to adopt because there's not, you don't have to do everything yourself manually. And, we, I try really hard to not say, oh, we're an AI company, we're doing this ai, we're doing that ai. But of course we have AI features and those are meant to help people, form better habits, learn why. Here's a prime example. We have AI tagging in the tool and a lot of people will start out by enabling it and using it. And then once they realize how important those tags are to being able to find their files, they create their own structures and they might turn the AI tagging off. We see it more often than not really, is that people start understanding why those tags are important for, finding those

files and then they create their own way of doing it. And I think that's really cool and powerful. Michael Cupps: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's it that AI is helping them learn the system that's gonna work for their group, right? Jessica: Absolutely. Michael Cupps: So what happens if can you just tell us what the alternative is to stock Press maybe. Maybe, an older system or no system at all, does that just create chaos? Jessica:

Yeah, and I can talk about my own experience with that. We were using Google Drive, it's something that comes with our Gmails and we put all of our files in there and everyone has their own structure. And it was starting to become this thing where. I was getting asked for files over and over again from the team, even from clients of, where's this, where's that? I had a very intricate folder structure on my computer. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally deleted a folder full of stuff that I needed. So I think the alternative is people tend to come from another tool, another file management tool, Dropbox or Google Drive, or they're using a a enterprise DAM system. And they're looking for something that is more affordable, something that might be easier for their team to use, or maybe they've been

priced out of that market altogether. Michael Cupps: Yeah. And that's interesting because you just described me and I'm not sure if I should feel bad about this or good about this. I, it's not digital assets, but just my filing system is horrible. I don't know if I could find a file I saved yesterday, and sometimes I just, so I generally have 'em in this area over there and I have to start searching and things like that. But it sounds like you can help bring that kind of chaos back into, but especially for a group though, right? Because now you're talking about. Naming stuff that people can find easily. Jessica:

And I, you shouldn't feel bad about it because I think that's pretty much everyone, and that's what we're trying to help with. And I think, you know what we find more often than not is that people will say, okay, I'm doing this one way, I'm saving things on my desktop, or I'm using Google Drive and I know that it's not efficient, or I know that there's a better way to do it. So they say, alternative to Google Drive, and they find these digital asset management systems and they go through the process of learning about dam. Have some demos maybe with some of the big players in the space, and then they go, wow, this is like way too expensive. Or, wow, this is not what I really need, or,

oh, it's gonna take me months to get this. Stood up and with, used with my team. And then they say alternative to that and they find us. So that's where. We're trying to fit in. And I think yeah, you definitely shouldn't be embarrassed by that. I can say I also have that problem still on my desktop sometimes. We just launched a feature that hopefully will solve that, but it's nice. It's, everybody's got it. Michael Cupps:

Yeah. Yeah. It's strange. Anyway and, but I can't even imagine how. Applies when you have a team, let's say you have five creative people or 10 creative people on your team, and it just magnifies it. 'cause I think everybody always tries to reinvent their own wheel, right? So when you get into a job and you're trying to put everything where you want it. And then if somebody else depends on that, you could be. Actually being me, meaning less productive, right? Jessica: Yeah, it's a great point. You may have the most organized folder structure in the world, but if you're the only one who knows how to use it or knows how you've named files, how is anyone else on your unit team gonna find anything? And I think that's the idea behind stock press, is that you can still keep that amazingly organized folder structure, but just make sure you have some

categories and tags in your file. So if somebody is looking for, X, Y, Z logo. They can find it without figuring out how many folders deep it is. And I think that's, Michael Cupps: yeah, Jessica:

that's the idea here. We also offer unlimited users in all packages. So no matter how many people on your team, no matter how many external partners you work with, they can all go into stock press. And I think the reason we did that, and the reason why we don't charge per seat is because, digital asset management and file management sharing. It all breaks down if you can't bring the people to the files, it's, who's got this? I'm sending a share link there who shared it with someone else who has access. That's all kind of what we're trying to solve by allowing you to put everybody into one tool. Michael Cupps: Yeah, that's great. And I think that you're right, if there's gatekeepers to everything, it just becomes ineffective. So let's we probably, any of us that have been in business for some time and maybe even if you, you were self-employed, a person we've heard, I remember about it was like 2000 10, 11, 12, where SharePoint was the thing that everything was gonna house and SharePoint was gonna be a great experience. There were even SharePoint Saturdays, there were all kinds of stuff.

And I never saw a SharePoint site that I used more than. Twice if I could avoid it, because it just seemed like just this dumping ground of things and there was no order to it. And now that's not always digital assets. Like you're doing some very expensive type videos and stuff like that, but even that was frustrating. So how do you implement stock press with their customer to help them? On the right path, the right way and build that system and workflows and habits into the usage? Jessica:

Yeah, I think there's two different sides to it. So we have some teams who, as I mentioned, come from digital asset management systems. So there's one person who's owns it right, and says, this is something that I wanna make sure my team can adopt, so I wanna make sure it's set up in the best possible way. And because we really push stock press as a self-serve system. They can get in and do everything themselves. And that sometimes is like really mind blowing for them because in the past if they wanted to even change their branding in their workspace, they had to contact their, their rep. And we don't work like that. Everything that you can do, 99% of the things you can do you can do in the workspace on your own. And I think it can be overwhelming sometimes, but we try to make it as. Step-by-step as possible and really show everyone what's there. The other side of it is that people who have no idea where they wanna start and what they wanna do, but again, we're really trying to push people down a path. So here's where you start, and if you do this, and you do this, and you do this. You will have a good experience. And that's what we're trying to push. Stock press is very flexible. There's a lot of different ways you can set it up, but there is definitely a path to success of a system, and I think that's all we can do is guide people through that and hopefully if it's easy enough they can adopt it and they can see the value pretty quickly. Michael Cupps: And I, and now this may be the wrong analogy, but I'm gonna analogize it. If you don't mind what you just said there is to me, what, why, one of the reasons why all the fitness memberships in January fail, right? Because they come in and they subscribe to a gym, and the gym says, oh, there's over, there's the restrooms, and that's the weight room. And that's the, that and here's an app. Good luck. And they, and then, a lot of people will maybe join in there going. I know that I need to do

cardio and I need to do weights, but it really doesn't help me understand how to build a habit, right? And I'm not suggesting that gyms are necessarily bad, but there, there isn't a way to say, this is how you're gonna be the most healthy you if you follow the these patterns. Now you don't have to. If you don't like that, then change it with this, and it just doesn't feel like we instruct people. Not, and we instruct 'em on the facility, but we don't instruct 'em on how to go be healthy. Jessica:

Actually, that's a great analogy because if they did, and if they said, in the first week here these small little habit changes might make you start feeling better and you then you start feeling better, then you keep going to the gym because you keep getting that, that feeling over and over again. So I think we're trying to do that. Hey, put your files in here and tag them and then search for that file. Oh wow. It came up right away. Keep doing that and invite some team members. We really push people to invite team members right away so that the team members can see the value of the system. And so I think it's a great analogy. Michael Cupps: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting that so let's, you said AI tagging earlier because we have to talk about ai 'cause everybody talks. So what does that mean? AI

ta. Jessica:

Okay, so we have two a couple different forms of AI in the tool. So AI tagging and facial recognition and the way they work a little bit differently. So the way AI tagging works is once you upload files into the platform, they're scanned by stock press and we automatically ta add tags that we feel are associated with the, let's say the image that you've uploaded. Those can be removed, they can be adjusted, you can even block them. So we had an example of a company who had camper vans. And the AI kept tagging the camper vans with ice cream truck. And they came to us and we were like, we cannot get this to stop. And I said, look, it makes total sense. So we actually added a feature to allow people to block certain tags. So there's a lot of ways you can work around the AI tags as well. And we released facial recognition a couple months ago, which has been really great. It identifies all people in photos. All you have to do is go in and identify someone once. And every file that comes in afterwards is automatically tagged with that person's name. For a lot of our groups that are working with a lot of people with faces in their photos, they, it's really been helpful because they don't have to

go in and manually tag every time, and it allows people to find stuff quickly. So that's how we leverage it. It's all about. Saving time because now we don't have to tag everything and making it easier to find stuff quickly. Michael Cupps: Yeah. But knowing it could be imperfect. So you're there along a human in the loop, so speak, it'll be issue because now I, what I've noticed this week, and there must be some trend that somebody said go to. Whatever GPT and do a caricature 'cause now there's all these caricatures on the length end of everybody's, environment. So now you're gonna have to tag those as well. But Jessica: yeah, Michael Cupps:

so that, that's interesting on the tagging and the usage of that. And I could see where that would be helpful. I, 'cause I, yesterday I was trying to do a pro create something and I was using Canva a little bit in Adobe and it was just so frustrating 'cause the moving the files around it and I could see where it would help. Just because of those, just those tools, but which leads me to, I know you, you integrate. Stock press two various systems, can you tell a little bit about that and what, why did it, how does that help people? Jessica: Yeah we started doing integrations pretty early on in building stock press because what we were hearing from our customers, and I should start with that, is that I would say 95% of our features are based on customer feedback or potential customer feedback, because otherwise we're just building it for ourselves. And that's silly. We started integrating with tools based on request. So the most more requests we got, the quicker we did something. And we just feel like if you can go to one place and stop, press becomes the hub for all the content. Yeah, that's what we want. So everybody's using lots of different tools, right? We use tons of different tools. So the ability to get those files from Adobe, we integrate with Photoshop and in InDesign. At the moment, at Canva, we're just finishing up an integration with Canva. The idea that you can be working in those tools and, oh, I need this file. And just grab it. I had a customer yesterday I was talking to who was using WordPress and they said, hey, is there a way I can export my files from stock press to WordPress? And I said, yeah, there's a plugin. And she was like, oh my God, this is so great. And so sometimes maybe we don't do a good enough job of showing people all the connections we have. But it's just the idea that you don't have to go stop and switch from one thing to the other. It's all just

connected, is what we're going for. Michael Cupps: Yeah. And that's fantastic. 'cause I have no idea where I think I've probably created tons of things in Canva and I don't even know where they are exactly. Unless I use it right then it's probably stowed away and somewhere. And what about that Is storage done in the cloud? I'm sure. I'm guessing. Yep. Jessica:

Yeah, so we use AWS so that's where we're storing all the files. You, our packages are based on storage and features. So you're not just coming in and saying, oh, I want, X amount of storage. It's really based on what features you need. There's three different tiers, and then of course how much storage you need. But one of the things I think's really important to note there too, is that we do not have. Traditional contracts, so you can go on a month to month basis with stock press. If you wanna start with, 50 gigs of storage and work up as you go, you can do that. So you don't have to, start off on that high package and not use that storage immediately. That's probably to our detriment, but we feel like it's fair. Michael Cupps: Absolutely. Absolutely. Let's talk now, let's shift a little bit to great information about stock press. And I urge anybody to, to reach out to you after this, because that sounds like a

great package. But let's talk about building systems and particularly building a, being a startup founder, right? You're a co-founder of this and you mentioned that you were running an agency and this was beside to help support the agency and then it turned into a full-fledged business. Can you tell me about your journey and your, and the systems you used to make sure that things were successful? Jessica:

I have three co-founding partners and we ran a digital agency for 10, 12 years before we decided to go full-time with Stock Crest. And we were using all sorts of tools and it was chaos to be honest. We were working with anywhere between. Seven in 10 clients at once and for, a small team of four people. That's a lot. And we had files everywhere. For the most part it was me. I won't blame my team members for this, I would get all the files, I would work on them, I'd share them out, and then they would go on my hard drive. And that's, that was it. And then we had no system for anything. We were asked to take a look at a enterprise DAM for one of our enterprise customers. We had never heard of DAM before, and so we were messing around with this tool and we just thought, this is cool. This is a great concept, but it's a little bit archaic. The platform didn't have any folders at all, and it was just a stream of files and, everything was tagged and you could search for things, but it wasn't that easy. And basically they were unhappy with it and they asked us if we could build them something. And we thought that's not gonna happen. That's a huge task. But the more we thought about it, we're like, actually what they need isn't that complicated? Maybe we should build them something. And we did not necessarily for them, we just started doing it on the side and then we took it to them and said, look, it's done. And they decided they wanted to use it, which was great. And then we just started using it with all of our customers. And it was organic, how it happened, would put a customer's package of stuff we built in there, share it to them. Then after a while, they started saying can we use this? Can we put our files in here? And we were like, no, but you can have your own. And so then we started giving them their own workspaces and after a while we were selling stock press to almost all of our agency accounts. And they started telling people and then their clients started asking us. So I think it was one of those things where over the course of this doesn't happen in a month. This was over a couple of years. Michael Cupps: Yeah. Jessica: And we started realizing that there really

was this gap between that. Google Drive, Dropbox World and the dam world, and there wasn't anything in the middle that had all the features. There's a lot of things that you can use to collaborate with people on files, but that didn't have all those enterprise features that those people really needed. And so we thought we can do this and we can use our UX and design background to make it easy and fun. And that's what, that's how it, it started. Michael Cupps:

That's great. And that's the best kind of startup, is as there's a need for it and it came organically to you. Yeah. And so tell me about your habits as a, as an entrepreneur though. Let's get into to Jessica's story a little bit Jessica: besides the coffee. That's Michael Cupps: okay. Jessica: That coffee is number one. I never go to bed without setting up my coffee machine. It's ready to go and it's button I press when I wake up. No, actually, some of the habits I have are around my team. So we are a distributed team. Two of my partners lived in Poland, live in Poland, and I am online very early talking to them. Specifically my partner Bart. We, I can be online sometimes at. Six o'clock and we're having a chat and we have a video coffee together. And I love

working with him. He's been a friend for a really long time, and that's a habit I have is he's the first thing I do in the morning is even just a hello. And I've, we've done it for years. He's been here to visit me. I've been there to visit him. It's a great relationship and I think that the thing for me that's great about that early morning stuff is that a lot of the really what I feel is important work that I don't get a lot of time to do during the day. I get done in the morning. I tend to have a little bit of a crash out in the afternoon, so Michael Cupps: like Jessica:

around two or three, I'm like, I need a break and I need to take the dog for a walk or something. But I've gotten a lot of my stuff done before anybody else is even online. And so I think that's really useful. I would say conversely for him, he has the whole morning to work without me bugging him. And then I get online. So that's a habit that I really enjoy is just that kind of early morning time with him. Michael Cupps: Yeah. And we, and when we talk about a small business growing like you are, you it I'm using this word. You didn't tell me this word, but make, if it fits, let's use it. Okay. It seems like you're disrupting a, an, you've got a disruption opportunity here because you identified either people aren't using

anything or they're using something that is. Past this prime, let's say, and you're making it easy, more affordable. And it sounds like it's almost more fun to adopt because of the systems you've put in place. Jessica:

We're certainly trying, that's the end goal I think is, I. We, we see so many of our customers being happy with the tool and we are like religiously checking our G two reviews and we, we talk to people on the chat and we reach out to our customers to see how things are going. And it's really important to make sure that they're having a good experience. And I think we, yeah the idea is that this shouldn't be a nightmare. It shouldn't take forever. It shouldn't cost a fortune. It should just be easy. That's the Michael Cupps: idea. And talk a bit about the affordability. We touched on it a little bit earlier, but there, is it disrupting the structure or the entry price, or how would you describe it? Jessica: It's really funny. I don't, I, I don't wanna say that the tools that charge more aren't worth it. That's not what. I wanna say everybody, there's a need for those types of things. I think what we're trying to do is solve a problem for the people who can't afford it. And there's definitely a huge group of that. And I think these legacy platforms that have been around for a while, they have big teams, they have big development budgets, they have big sales budgets. I get it. That's why they charge more. But I think, we're just trying to solve for the people who. Don't I, how do I say this? I guess they, they don't want access to anything else. So they're either forced to stay in this thing that's too expensive or they're forced to get out of this thing that's too expensive and go back to using nothing. And I think for us, we wanna be that thing like that, almost that catchall. Hey, you can't do this anymore. There are still people who can, but you can't. We're here and we can make it easy. We have a lot of migration tools, so we've connected to a lot of the other legacy dams and it's not as painful as you think. We had somebody we migrated last week who is, came from a new platform we actually hadn't migrated from before, and he was trying to talk to me about his plan for getting all the files over, and I said no, we can do a migration. And he was like, what? And I said yeah, we'll just migrate all your files and then we'll figure it out. And he was just. Just to see 'em being happy, made me happy, Michael Cupps: yeah.

It enables people to get onto the next version of whatever they are. And same is correlation with habits, right? We tend to gravitate to areas that we know, and if we can apply something that we've had in the past, but do it in a different way, we're gonna get better results. Jessica: And not in a daunting way either, and something easy and, hopefully easy and makes your life easier. That's, Michael Cupps:

yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I love that. I real, it's interesting, this week in particular SaaS software companies took a beating on the, on Wall Street at least. But I do think it's not necessarily. The category of software. I think it's the opportunity now for people to use new systems that are different and more affordable and more usable. I think like you, you described that system, it, some people need it, but a lot of people don't and they're AI is giving us options. Jessica: Definitely. And we, it's funny, we there's another phrase we used to say. Is that we are configurable, not customizable because people are always saying, oh, I gotta pay for this customization. This customization. And

what we're trying to push is like we are a configurable tool. If you don't need to use something, turn it off. And I think that is one of the things that we value about stock press and how we built it, is that it doesn't have to be complex, but it can be if you want. Michael Cupps: Yeah. Jessica: So it's. Yeah. Michael Cupps: Yeah. For those that want complexity they got it there Jessica: or need it. Some people really need it. We have clients who have crazy setups and then we have some that use it very simply and get along just fine. Michael Cupps: And is there any particular industry that you see as really adopting it faster? Jessica:

Funny enough, we have quite a bit of nonprofit customers that have been coming to us recently. So we offer a really great nonprofit discount. It's 30% off all packages. So on top of our already very affordable pricing, we offer an additional 30%. IE spent a lot of my earlier life working with nonprofits and I saw like really firsthand how budget constrained they are. And again, like a lot of these people are using these legacy dams and it's. It's like amazing how much they've been spending for something that they're not getting the most value out of. So we really push that. But we also find a lot of man manufacturing companies that are using

it. Education. We have quite a few colleges and universities as well as e-commerce brands. So a lot of assets, a lot of things that need to be shared in different sizes. A lot of different external partners that need to be able to access various things. So those are our top four at the moment. Michael Cupps: Yeah, absolutely. And I could see that for the nonprofits, 'cause they use their best marketing tool is showing how they're helping people or the process of helping certain situations. A lot of videos, I'm guessing a lot of stuff like that. That's awesome. Jessica:

And a lot of things contributed from external people. And that's something that we, I only learned as we started working with them is that they work with so many people, out in the field and there's nowhere for them to contribute. And so that's why it's been helpful for them. Michael Cupps: Yeah. Great. We're just about out of time. I was just gonna ask you, 'cause I ask everybody, what is the one habit that Jessica demands every day that you do? And you already said coffee, so let's rule that one out. Jessica: Okay. I was gonna say coffee 'cause that is definitely a demand every day. Actually, can I say every week? 'cause I have a new habit actually. Michael Cupps: Absolutely. Jessica: I adopted a dog about seven months ago, and she's awesome. She's about a year and a half. So she was already a little bit older when we got her and I have started taking her to classes. So training classes, mostly for me, they really train you versus the dog. But I do it every single week. There are six week classes. I am booked out like through the end of the year. It's like a non-negotiable for me now. So like once a week I go for about two hours. Middle of the day, no calls, no talking like I'm at this thing. Right now we're doing dog agility and it is hilarious. I never thought I would be like doing agility with a dog, but she absolutely loves it. And it's also clearly I love it too. But it's like a good break, from as much time that I spend sitting here. And it's like literally a non-negotiable for me. Once a week. It's on my calendar, booked out through December. Michael Cupps: Yeah. That's fantastic. That's great. And I'm sure the dog loves it too. So tell us about the dog. I'm a rescue. I was on a board of a no kill shelter here in, in North Texas a while ago. And I adopted a dog from there, and he's still with me. And Flo our producer, talks about Oliver all the time. So tell us about your dog. Jessica: No I locked her outta the room for this because she, her new habit is like climbing in the back of my chair and like looking over my shoulder. But it is pretty, it's pretty funny. I should have left the, let her in. I actually adopted her recent, like I said recently because my dog of 15 years passed away last January and I really went into like a. Spiral, like of just like never leaving my desk. And he was such a big part of my work from home life and I really needed something else to help me get over it, I guess not get over it, but you know what I mean. Forward a little. And so we adopted her from a shelter here in, in South Florida. And she is just an absolute joy. She really is. She had never been in a home before, so she was like a little bit shy and, but seeing where she's come from, the first week we've had her to now is just. Amazing. And she's actually really helped me a lot with my work. And what I mean by that is that, I am taking the breaks I need, I'm, happy I'm doing things with her like this class. And it's, she's great. Yeah, she's making a lot of appearances on my LinkedIn, so hopefully you guys see her a few. I Michael Cupps: will, I'll look out for that. There I have another LinkedIn friend

who, every now and then he has does his thoughts from his dog walk every morning, and so it's great. Yeah. May maybe we need to get a a digital asset management system and have all our guests put pictures of their dogs in it. Jessica: Okay. You can have one. I will send it up. Her name is Charlie, by the way. I didn't even say her name, but her name is Charlie. What's her dog's name? Oliver. Love it. Michael Cupps: Yeah he's snoring right now, so this, but he's always in the office with me, so Yeah. Jessica: Yeah. She's got a bed right over here and it's either the bed or sitting in my chair, but I'm sure she's laying outside the door right now. Michael Cupps:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. She's ready to get in and get to work. Jessica: Yeah. Michael Cupps: Just, Jessica, thank you so much. Anything we didn't cover today that you wanted to share? I really appreciate the. The fact that you're making it affordable, easy, and there's a system that, that people can adopt and share and collaborate with without kind of too much overhead there. I'm not talking about money-wise, I'm talking about just there's not overhead, it sounds to get it implemented and get productive. Jessica: No, I think you, you asked some amazing questions. Thanks for letting me talk about stock price for so long. As you can tell I'm very passionate about. File management and digital asset management, which is a little

bit weird, but also just more so helping people solve an issue and form good habits and good habits around not having to repeat work and redo things because they can't find it. And I think. That's the biggest takeaway is saving time, energy, focus. Michael Cupps: Yep. Jessica: By using a tool that's easy to use. Michael Cupps:

And I love that it's sized to, for the middle market too, because I think AI is gonna unleash the middle market to, to be really, I think there, layoffs at the top end. I think the middle market rising is a huge opportunity. And I'm glad you're supporting it too. It's it's exciting to see there. So congratulations on your journey founding great stuff. I want everybody to go check out stock press.co, I think. Yes. Not com co stock. Yeah, there it is. It's on the tick there. Thank you so much for joining us and for everybody. We've got another show next week and hopefully no more ice storms and all of that stuff but really excited to continue to host people like Jessica here and talk about their journey as a founder, as a business person, et cetera. And to learn about the dog too. So wish Charlie the

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Michael Cupps

Host
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Reem Metawei

Co-host