Hani Mourra is the CEO and Founder of Repurpose, a tool that allows you create your content once and distribute it everywhere.

Hani is an expert is video content production and built Repurpose so that he could spend less time distributing content!

In this conversation we talk about:- How Repurpose came to life- What Repurpose can do- Automating Work- Working Remotely- The No-code Space- and much more

We hope you enjoy this conversation with Hani Mourra.Episode #41 | Hani Mourra

Tom Osman: Hey everyone, Tom here and today on the podcast, I'm joined by Hani Mourra. He's the founder of Repurpose. This the tool that allows you to create content once and distribute it everywhere. In this conversation, we talk about his background, evolution of Repurpose, scratching your own itch. What is Repurpose?

[00:00:18] Avoiding shiny object syndrome, APIs, descript, super users, why repurpose content at all, remote work, riding the wave of podcasting, the aha moment of automation, balancing work life and family time, how the pandemic changes using opinions, work as play, and some advice for his younger self. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Hani Mourra.

[00:00:42] Hani, thanks very much. Taking the time to talk to me. Welcome to the Makerpad podcast. How are you doing?

[00:00:48] Hani Mourra: Awesome. How are you? Thanks for having me here.

[00:00:51] Tom Osman: Good. No, good to speak to you. I've been a fan of the tool as it's starting to serve a use case where we've actually recently rolled into. So we're going to get to that in a minute, cause I'm really intrigued.

[00:01:04] So she deep dive into how this came about. before we do that, let's give everybody a bit context. Who are you and what do you do to earn your money?

[00:01:14] Hani Mourra: Yeah. So my name is Hani Mourra. I'm from Toronto, Canada, and I've been creating software for content creators automation software for seven, eight years now.

[00:01:24]My background's in like computer engineering. So I've always loved coding, but more important. I've always loved video. And I think that was what kind of drove my passion to create a video of the software. I would love video. I started video blogging and then one day just said, you know what?

[00:01:39] This blogging thing is cool. And I'm teaching people how to make videos and et cetera. But I need to create a tool. Like I'm a creator. Like I didn't realize that later great content I'd like to create tools. So yeah, that kinda. Just tools. Creating a software video guy does make a video tool and that's, we started seven, eight years ago and we're about four or five tools into it now and we're having a blast.

[00:02:03] Tom Osman: So is, repurpose, which is the latest, iteration, so to speak, if it's going to change, is this the latest version of something which you've been working on for a long time?

[00:02:14]Hani Mourra: not really it's, like this mission has evolved. We started, I started in the WordPress space, automation, basically taking YouTube videos, putting them on your blog automatically.

[00:02:25] That was the first tool. for software first plugin for WordPress that I created with the help of a contractor. and it was scratching my own itch. I was doing a lot of video blogging and I was like, okay. I hated the fact that I got to make a blog post copy the embed code paste it here. I just gotta be away.

[00:02:41] I'm like, maybe I can automate this. And that's how I built that first, YouTube to a blog post tool. Then we grew from, it grew from there, like it was helping a buddy of mine launches podcasts. And I showed him my YouTube plug and he's Oh, this is great. but then he said, can you make one for a podcasting so I can publish a podcast and have it go to my blog automatically.

[00:03:04] I'm like, you know what? Yeah, we can re spin that up. So we responded it into a new tool, so that could publish podcasts to their blog. And then we, Facebook live came about. Same thing. If you're like, Hey, can you put my Facebook lives or Facebook videos on my blog? So we've always been in the WordPress space and iterating, creating new tools, our spinoff tools.

[00:03:24] And then it was just building a customer base and a user base. And then they told us, they said, listen, we love what you're doing. You're going from content to WordPress. Can you go from. No, sorry. Facebook to YouTube. What can you go from audio podcasts? YouTube. Can you go across different platforms? And the first answer was no, we do, WordPress is all we do.

[00:03:44] And then it just, many people kept asking and asking him like, you know what? I think we need to dive into this. And that's how repurpose was born is that it just came in an extension of our WordPress plugins. It became its own separate platform, but it was all driven by user requests and just enough people asking for it that it triggered me to take action and build it and get it done.

[00:04:05] Tom Osman: So a couple of interesting things to touch on that, which is most, I think, is a common thread with tools that ended up sticking around is it always starts by scratching your own itch. So I really enjoyed hearing about just noting it for yourself first and then more people. Excited tagging on, and then you built features for those people and then it evolves into a product.

[00:04:28] So that's great to hear just to clarify exactly what repurpose is. Can you just give us like the high level version and then we'll dive into the weeds on

[00:04:38] Hani Mourra: it. Yeah. it's a platform that lets you repurpose your videos, your audios, and your are your live streams and, or your live streams to multiple platforms.

[00:04:50] So it takes everything after you're done uploading them and. you decide where you want them and it automatically pushes them there. it's almost like the Zapier for content. That's my, not unofficial tagline. It's Zapier for content. So you make rules, you set up workflows and then it kicks off.

[00:05:08] It does what you wanted to do. And when you want it to do.

[00:05:12]Tom Osman: if you were to explain it to somebody in the no-code space is familiar with Zapier. Exactly. If it consent.

[00:05:17] Hani Mourra: Yes, exactly. That's like like it's unofficial, but people get it right. People in this space. Get it.

[00:05:22] Tom Osman: Yeah, absolutely. Because we've run into this problem quite a bit, where you have a zap that you presume will work for anything you want to do or nickname your automation platform.

[00:05:32] But then you run into a initial requirements of things like file size, or they like timeout. If you have any like big files and stuff like that. So it was interesting where repurpose came up with, Oh, you can take this like entire video and then do a bunch of things with it. After the fact automatically.

[00:05:50] And then that kind of removes the need for, things like VA's, which another, but it's like the more traditional routes to go down. what, like some of the most traditional workflows that you can do with repurpose and then what, some of them, the more niche, the niche ones.

[00:06:07] Hani Mourra: Yeah. And the most common, and this is, we purposely started off as doing one thing.

[00:06:12] And the first thing it did was take an audio piece of content. I can audio podcast and turn an audio into a video and making it look nice. So overlay a way form, but title, but the key was always automation. So it's not like you had to go in and just, be a video editor or designer. You just pick a template or upload a template one time.

[00:06:33] Hit a button and then boom, every episode from your podcast feed turns into a video automatically and gets pushed off to YouTube. So that is the most common RSA that used to be the most common probably is one of the most common and traditional ways to use repurpose if you're an audio podcast or, and then the second thing would be that's it, that's all it did in the beginning.

[00:06:52] Like almost four years ago now. And then Facebook live or on four years ago was a hot thing. So a lot of people. They go live on Facebook and then they're done. They download the video and then they upload to YouTube because YouTube search engine and, et cetera. We're like, why don't we automate that?

[00:07:07] So know another second, most common workflow is, Hey, after I'm done my Facebook live, I want you to download it. I don't want you to send it to YouTube automatically. And I sign it to this playlist. I add these keywords. you can set that all up. So that's probably the second most common. and then it was like that for a while, for maybe half a year or so.

[00:07:26] Before we started evolving into what people really want and it is I want to be able to cut, a little clips and snippets. I want to be able to take a horizontal video that I shot or Facebook live and yeah. make a vertical or square and burn in the captions below what a title. So more people can see it.

[00:07:43] And, so we started adding those features. a lot, now you can, the goal here is we have a training that basically it shows you how to take a single video like Facebook live and turn it into think 25, 26 pieces of content. And, I don't want to say a hundred percent automatic, but it's 95%, there was a few clicks here and there.

[00:08:03]and an end and whatever shape and size you want. So for Twitter, you can do a two minute clip that's square. And for Instagram TV, it can be vertical with the captions burnt in. So you decide what's, how it looks like and where it goes. and the software automates a good chunk of that. Almost all of it.

[00:08:21] Tom Osman: Amazing. So you always get me thinking, like, why isn't everybody doing it this way, but I can imagine it just being something that once you discover that it's possible, then you dive in and then it's just kind of discovery point. Like, how have you found the route of people were picking up a repurpose and like, how was that like acquiring the customer and then coming into the ecosystem.

[00:08:46] And then how does that content evolve from there?

[00:08:49] Hani Mourra: Yeah. So a lot of people, we're not heavy on all, very little, outside promotion ads, et cetera. It's all been just internal word of mouth customers. we started with our WordPress customers. Then we, we told him, Hey, we have a new product.

[00:09:02] They fell in love with it. They'd love the automation pieces. So we've always been an automation tool. and then just people share people, talk about it, that kind of the funniest thing I was looking at, like some testimony I've been, I always take screenshots of testimonials or just people, what people will say in the group and just in public, I store them in a Google drive and then one day, like a few weeks ago I was just going through it.

[00:09:24] And it's just, it was like common thread. It's just like a lot of people were like, Where have you been all my life? Like I've been looking for this, it's almost like the Holy grail, this is it. I've been looking for something like this. Where have you been? I think, yeah, like you touched on earlier.

[00:09:36] People don't know that this is a possibility that I can just create once and be able to publish everywhere and automatic or semiautomatic way without having a whole marketing team or a dedicated VA to do this.

[00:09:53] Tom Osman: Got it. So let's put on the couple strings of your background as you're coming through, like being like an online video marketer slash which means like a content marketer.

[00:10:03] So if there is other content marketers listening to this, and I think we could all agree that video content, like with audio in the form of like interviews or, self produced videos for YouTube is the. a star level of piece of content because of the amount of pieces of subsequent content you can get from it.

[00:10:24] You can do break the audio or get the transcriptions, and it's a blog, post images, et cetera. You mentioned your site, you get like 28 pieces of content. I think you mentioned from one video, how would you. take a video to say this I'm interviewing you now and then use repurpose to break out into these piece of content.

[00:10:42] If somebody was coming in for the first time, what would be that flow through the first time round?

[00:10:49] Hani Mourra: Yeah. So first time using repurpose, it's almost like any other social media tool, like buffer and Hootsuite. So the first thing you need to do is connect your social accounts. you just got to basically click a button, say, Hey, I approve repurposed.

[00:11:01] I'll now uploading videos to my YouTube account. I approve repurpose. So it's just a standard connection. So you connect all the channels that you want to publish to. You have a podcast feed you paste that in there. Copy and paste. You have a YouTube account. You say connect, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.

[00:11:17] Yeah, you can even go with Dropbox, Google drive. we have a bunch of types of connections. He set those all up one time thing, and then you go in and you make a workflow. So if you're familiar with Zapier, it's similar idea. Workflow means you start with something, you choose my start point, you choose my action and then you choose my destination.

[00:11:36] So an example would be, take my Facebook video from this page. and then just upload it. I'll leave it at the video and upload it to, and step number three would be YouTube. that would be one workflow. and then in that action step, you can decide whether you want it to be the entire episode or you want it to create, clips or snippets, we call them, and that's it.

[00:11:59] And then you can make another workflow that said, Hey, take my Facebook video. And. Turn it into clips and send it to Twitter because Twitter has got a two minute 22nd limit. So you want to do clips. So you create as many workflows as you want. we have a diagram that kind of shows you all the different possibilities.

[00:12:18] We're actually working on re spinning up to make it easier for you so that you don't have to think about it. You can click the different available options, we're iterating. But the idea is that you can make all these workflows and you decide where you want, what you start from, where you want it to.

[00:12:32] And then the modes are basically three modes of operation. You can say for each workflow, you can turn on an auto, which means, Hey, just take the entire, every single video I've ever done and fired off to that channel. run that workflow automatically. He'll take your entire backlog and everything going forward.

[00:12:49] Say tomorrow I upload a video. Boom, it's going to show up on YouTube automatically. And so I show up on Twitter automatically, et cetera. So you can have every workflow to be on auto. Or you can go in and hit a manual published, we call it, you can just hit publish, and it published the lines that you want.

[00:13:04] And number three is scheduler. So you can say, Hey, schedule this episode to go out Monday morning, this one for Tuesday morning, from Wednesday morning, et cetera. So those are the three modes of operation that you can have different setups for different workflows.

[00:13:18] Tom Osman: Got it. And this is, this has been around forever for a while.

[00:13:22] So moving on to the no-code space in general. So you said you started off within WordPress, which is I'd classify it as one of the original, like no code tools, drag and drop builders. Everyone's site voting sites, pretty much like the O G so to speak along with say Shopify and it doesn't. Get classified as a no-code tool, but really it is like an online shop without needing any code.

[00:13:44] Seems pretty, no coded for me. And then now more recently we've had obviously like an influx and the trend is always up on the node code space as tools emerging every single day. how'd you view the space in general? And do you view yourself as part of that space or do you view yourself on slightly like the fringes.

[00:14:08] Hani Mourra: Yeah, I think, we have, I think we're on the fringes and we're trying to make it more. Accessible. So you can connect it to other things that you're doing in the no-code space. one thing we're looking at is into down the road, possibly a Zapier integration so that you can take anything that we output.

[00:14:25]we notify Zapier, then you can have it do other things. but the ability, the integration we have with Dropbox and Google drive, it gives you an interesting possibility. So we become like a piece that you can just. No drop in a file. And in a Dropbox folder, we will do our things, but out of vertical video with captions, whatever, and push it back out to a Dropbox folder, and then you can have another app, take it from there, do what you want with it.

[00:14:52] whatever you want to do with it, push it to here, push it today. yeah, we're on the edge of stay on the edge, but we're trying to get more, with integrations will allow you to do more and more things that connect more things in your chain of sequence.

[00:15:06] Tom Osman: Yeah, I think that's awesome with the, yeah.

[00:15:08]the Google drive and the Dropbox integrations. You can almost then just tie it into whatever you need. As long as you can get the file in and out of that, the Sarge how'd, you view that the influx of tools. So now obviously you're enabling people to do this sort of things maybe without.

[00:15:27] Definitely without code also without the need for like content marketers to maybe repurpose content. So I think it's in the same sort of vein as removing the technical steps required to do the things, but maybe in a different vein of not removing code, but removing the video editing and repurposing step that's usually needed.

[00:15:51] So what's your opinion on the growth of the no-code space in general?

[00:15:56] Hani Mourra: And I think it's just, it's helping people do more without having to hire extra people. Developers VA's, pushing files from here to there. it's definitely an exciting space. and the more automation tools out there.

[00:16:11]you can, build apps and build workflows within your internal, internal system, internal business. He's just, it just allows you to do more without having to worry about code. I'm a developer like much. I don't even call myself a developer. Like I'm I did computer engineering way back in the day and I just.

[00:16:29] I understand interfaces, but I don't code as my journey. I don't, I never really enjoyed the coding as much. Then the actual building, like building something was the exciting part, not the coding of it. So the no-code space just allows people to build. Build something from here and then see it come to life without having to worry about hiring developers or hiring minimal developers or hiring minimal assistance or helpers within their team to do the manual work.

[00:17:00] Tom Osman: Got it. Is there any Nokia tools that you use in so many? It repurpose either for like workflow management, project management, Blocking documents, processes and internal installations, et cetera,

[00:17:11] Hani Mourra: or internal within our team. we, we're pretty lean, like simple. We're just going to use Trello to manage everything and the Google drive a bunch of folders.

[00:17:20] So yeah, I guess we don't really have. internally are not using, we should be. we obviously use repurpose for our own content, but we don't, we don't have, we're not doing too much with a no-code yet. but definitely something I need to look more into because there's a lot of things that we're doing manually internally that we could just connect things up to Slack and Zendesk.

[00:17:42] I'm sure there's ways we can connect things more and be more efficient in the way we notify, when things happen on our

[00:17:48] Tom Osman: system. It seems like the Google drive and Trello too pretty again, OJI tools. And often I think it's easy to get shiny object syndrome and really Trello to in Google drive probably do 90% of the job.

[00:18:03] Hani Mourra: Yeah. Now I looked at no-code tools actually, before we built repurpose, I was just like, I want it to get like a prototype concept. I, to people I looked at again before, like before I even heard the term no code, like I just wanted the tool to build an app prototype app. And there was, I think it was called bubble something.

[00:18:23] I can't remember the name now. we didn't end up using it, but. Me as a creator, I've just, not with make her bad. It's just so much knowledge, information and tools all in one place. If I want to build something, I can just go and say, Hey, give me an example of how to build something like this.

[00:18:36] And I can just follow along. That's amazing because the building part is the final product to life. It quickly is the exciting part for all makers. I think it's not necessarily the coding part of it. It's okay. Idea come to life. That's the cool, that's the aha moment where you look forward to so make, NOCO space helps with that a lot.

[00:18:58] What

[00:18:59] Tom Osman: was the aha moment for repurpose either from an earlier version or the present version that's

[00:19:04] Hani Mourra: in now? for for me or for the users, like their aha moment or for me, it was just. Just the first time I saw a podcast, like an audio turned into a video. I just, I literally click the button and an audio turn into a video and it was on my YouTube account in minutes.

[00:19:25] And I was like, Oh, that was the vision. that was the vision. And I was like, I didn't have to move things to design here, type of title, nothing. I just had to click a button, says publish and it went to YouTube and it had a title and it automatically, and it had the artwork automatically and it had my template behind.

[00:19:41] I was just like, it was just like, that was the moment I'm like, man, what else can we do? what else can we automate? Like you just became addicted from that point. When you see it, not only a video sitting on your computer here is it was a one from. Like I didn't upload anything. I connected my podcast feed my YouTube account.

[00:19:59] And I just went from here to here without having me to do anything with one button and it was on my YouTube account. I was like, wow. So yeah, that was my mom's but

[00:20:07] Tom Osman: yeah, it was that

[00:20:08] Hani Mourra: gender. we want to say four years ago, could we start over when we launched it in April? We started in November, so four years ago, so yeah.

[00:20:17] Yeah. We're almost in November. So like literally four years ago. Like around now, literally around now. And

[00:20:24] Tom Osman: it was just like people listening to this thinking I'm about to have this aha moment now. I like it to send myself full year's worth of hours. Yeah.

[00:20:36] Hani Mourra: Yeah. So it was just fun. It's addictive too. As a creator, As a maker, usual was like, what else can I make that can add value to people?

[00:20:45] Tom Osman: Is it your entire focus on repurpose or have you got, do you work on the other projects at the same time here using the term maker and creator? So I presume you have some other stuff going

[00:20:56] Hani Mourra: on. we have the, the WordPress plugins.

[00:20:59] When I mentioned earlier, they're still out there. They're still supported. they're still developed, not as much, not as heavily maintained, et cetera. but repurpose is. That's the thing I like about repurpose. It's almost, it has no end, no, that the possibilities are endless because it's not a tool that does one another.

[00:21:16] It's a platform that we can integrate more and more services. We can integrate different podcasts, hosts. We can integrate whatever new tool that has an API on there. We can integrate it to make. Our user's life easier connecting from point a to point B. So I feel like there's no limits to what repurpose can do.

[00:21:34] We could integrate transcription services. We can integrate the whole bunch more. So yeah, to answer your question, my focus is repurposed, but it's always what else can we integrate? As an input or as an output to repurpose, as new things come out, I'm like, Oh, did they have an API or does Pinterest have an API?

[00:21:51] So I'm always checking all these services. They have an API. So because my reason is connected to repurpose and then let people be more creative in what they can do and publish to more destinations.

[00:22:02] Tom Osman: I have strong opinions. If I start using a tool and find out it hasn't gone API, that's usually like straight in the bin for me.

[00:22:10] Hani Mourra: Yeah. It's I don't know. I'm, it's my favorite three letters API, because it allows us, it allows our software to grow and do more things. so that's definitely exciting.

[00:22:20] Tom Osman: Yeah. One of the ones that we, she started spending a lot more time with his D scripts. So I think it's pretty much giving them a shot.

[00:22:27] They've done some API work on their product. And I'm just wondering if they actually have, an API. I think they've got a Zapier connection. That'd be good to push videos through the scripts and to sorry, through any input through repurpose into D scripts. That might be a good transcriptions and some cool other stuff as well.

[00:22:50] Hani Mourra: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They launched something or new recently. I think earlier this week or last week. Yeah, they're up there. Awesome stuff. yeah, there's so much like I'm always on the lookout in the content space, what are the transcription servers of people talking about? What are the platforms people are using to record to upload?

[00:23:05]where are they, where do they want to push content to where they want to get content from? And then we just look into whether they have an API. And then we dive in

[00:23:13] Tom Osman: some of the favorite tools that you seen recently.

[00:23:18] Hani Mourra: Favorite tools, recently,

[00:23:20] Tom Osman: business old, personal fat game

[00:23:22] Hani Mourra: first. Oh my goodness.

[00:23:24] I've been just. A bit outdated in my tools, but let me see,

[00:23:30] Tom Osman: could be work related. It could be automation related or is it avoiding shiny object syndrome at all

[00:23:39] Hani Mourra: time? Yeah, I try to avoid it. I'm always looking for tools to help our users. So one thing we set up is, it's geeky, but it might be applicable to here, monitoring a lot of our, services and, giving users some kind of like way to know when, if something does go down and notify them.

[00:23:57] So there's, there was a tool we used a better uptime.com. It's not an automation tool, but it was just like, it just, it made it simple for us to add a heartbeat to our system and monitor things quickly. And our users can monitor as well. Small little tool by not my favorite tool in the world, but it's just some, I love the automation and the simplicity of that.

[00:24:17] I just had to go click, boom. All right. I already have a status page that shows me all my services are alive and how long they've been up for, if anything goes down for a period of time, it shows it in a nice visual way and stuff like that. Like we'd like to integrate things that. We don't have to do a lot of work.

[00:24:32]like on, we're adding an onboarding process, we're using an external tool for that. and that allows us like, need the mind now my marketing side to go in and tweak things without having to go into my developers, let them focus on adding integrations and anything marketing related user related.

[00:24:48] Front end related. We can, I can change quickly update without having to bother a team. we're using something for onboarding as well. We're playing around with that, which is going to be cool. And it is no good. You can just put a JavaScript piece in there in the front end, then it tracks everything and, lets you.

[00:25:05]customize it from their own backend and without having touch code. So I guess we are using Nalco without it. I didn't even thought of it, but that is so yeah, we are using no code on our front end stuff, marketing side of things, for sure.

[00:25:17] Tom Osman: Nice, putting your content marketing hat back on for a moment.

[00:25:21] So we, with no code tools, it obviously allows you to build your products very quickly. But on the flip side of it, we see. Some things from like traditional product building being missed. Sometimes one of which is a natural design and iteration phase based off like customer feedback, because you go from prototyping to design two changes, and then eventually you get select built and then iterations, et cetera.

[00:25:50] So with no code, you're coming straight in a build. And then you just try to find users straight away being in like the content marketing space. What are some of the things. people missing it repurposed from your point of view?

[00:26:06] Hani Mourra: I think people. It's partially our fault point.

[00:26:10] Mostly our fault is that they don't see the full potential of repurpose. They look at it as a one one-to-one I can go from my podcasts, YouTube. Great. But then there's really, you can turn a single podcasts into 25 different content and publish it to seven or eight different places. And they don't know that.

[00:26:28] They're not aware of that, or it's not clear to them. So that's something we're working on internally to bring that awareness when you first sign up, like, all right, we're going to show you all the different possibilities so that you're excited. You're going to build your first workflow quickly, there's a whole lot more that you can do just as easily.

[00:26:42] So I think people miss out on the potential of free purpose by just doing one or two things. And again, I take responsibility cause we. We got the app out there and, we're at a stage now where we're iterating the, the onboarding and the experience of the user based on, we probably should have done it earlier, but we were busy building integrations, but we definitely want to get people the most value.

[00:27:04] We have a training, which helps a lot, but nothing beats, a nice onboarding process where you can see all the potential opportunities right in front of you, the minute you sign up. And that's what we're working on right now.

[00:27:16] Tom Osman: There any like really good use cases or examples of people using repurpose, which you could say, Hey, this is, they use it in a way which is dead in line with what we dreamed of when we created repurpose.

[00:27:30] And can you expand or talk about those directly?

[00:27:33] Hani Mourra: Yeah. yeah, it goes back to those first two workflows that we talked to earlier. So a podcast or someone creating audio only content, we. They create the content. And if they do one step in the beginning, they can save with repurpose and sit in a lot of time.

[00:27:50] And that step is if they go into their, what they call the show notes page, when they upload the episode to their podcast, if they have their editor or themselves pick out five key takeaways and just write down the times like one Colin's zero, zero, Hani shares about this or. To Colin's zero the soup.

[00:28:07] Cause almost like putting timestamps in the description. If they do that in the beginning, then repurpose will do a lot more automation, meaning it will create those clips for you at those times so that you don't have to do any user intervention. You can have everything. Showing up in your repurpose dashboard, meaning going to YouTube, you can have five clips go to YouTube, to Twitter, to LinkedIn, to, et cetera, all ready to go.

[00:28:33] All you need to do is go ahead and hit schedule and publish. Back to your question. Yeah. Audio podcasters who save a lot of time by getting their content onto YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. they, that's still the most common, workflow, but it's also, it's just the most, it's just. it's a wild moment because it's quick and fast for them.

[00:28:55] Instead of having, I was reading testimonies before people were like, I had to VA and they had to make a video for my a hundred episodes that I had done, in the past two years, no click a button, a hundred episodes, turned into a hundred videos in a matter of few hours using repurpose. And your YouTube channel goes from zero to a hundred videos and in a matter of few hours, so that's, it's.

[00:29:15] It's very powerful to get all your backlog content. and then the same for video creators, especially live streaming. People have a daily, a weekly show or a daily show or whatever frequency they want. They're going live on Facebook every week. Or some people go multiple times a week.

[00:29:30] The videos go out to YouTube, automatically clips go out to different platforms. So you're turning every single live stream into twenty-five videos or so, and. Come on repurpose doing it for you. Yeah,

[00:29:44] Tom Osman: exactly. Anyone you can name drop. So if someone's listening and they want to check out and they wanted to route around that channels and say Oh, okay, like here's the long form video.

[00:29:54] And then they can trace it through their social media channels and then knowing that, okay, this clip was created with repurpose. And so were these, they can get a visual picture.

[00:30:04] Hani Mourra: Yeah. from a podcasting perspective, EO fire, John Lee Dumas, he's doing the full Virgin on YouTube and he's doing clips.

[00:30:11] I had a full version on Facebook and he's doing clips on, on Instagram and other platforms as well. so

[00:30:18] Tom Osman: to

[00:30:19] Hani Mourra: repurpose, yeah, I'm trying to think of a video.

[00:30:24] Tom Osman: There's John. he's audio first. He doesn't do his

[00:30:28] Hani Mourra: audio first. Yeah, he does some videos. but those are done separately, but if you take his audio content, he connects his podcast feed and it turns it into videos for him.

[00:30:37] And that's why you see on his Facebook page, YouTube channel. and then the other social platforms as well. I think on Instagram, I've seen his clips.

[00:30:46] Tom Osman: that's a pretty good example. I think John

[00:30:52] Hani Mourra: Yeah. Yeah. So he's been, I got to know him over the years and it's just a good guy. We just met at conferences. And when I. One day, he was just using another software like this again, three or four years ago. And I'm like, dude, hello, we have this. He was like, wow, where have you been all my life?

[00:31:07]And it was the same thing. And we see the thing, like where have you been when you discover it? You're like, this is like the dreams offer I've been wanting for. And honestly, it's like my dream software, like I wanted when I was doing content is, it's cool to be able to have that feeling for yourself when you build something that other people are giving the same reaction that you would have for your own software.

[00:31:28] Tom Osman: Got it. And his question about repurpose that as a company, you guys, we, are you remote company. Are you small? Have you more recently became remote due to current situations? Yeah,

[00:31:42] Hani Mourra: no, we've always been remote. we're growing. I dunno what's considered a smaller, not small. we've always started off as myself and then one person, doing the development.

[00:31:51]and then now we're up to three developers to support people,  test team. So our team is around eight people or so, so yeah, I think in the past four years, so I think we've grown pretty quickly relatively speaking, but I still feel we operate lean in a way that. We react quickly, like when something comes up or new thing comes out, Oh, you know what, all this pause, this is cool.

[00:32:14]I want to integrate this, as we still had that kind of flexibility, because now we have more people on the team. I can keep people doing. Stuff, but if something new and exciting comes out, we want to integrate with it quickly. But zoom, we did a zoom integration. I don't know why we didn't do it earlier, but once COVID hit, everyone's using zoom.

[00:32:31] I'm like, what is wrong with us? Why didn't we integrate zoom? So I'm like drop what we're doing. We're integrating zoom in. And then with them, 30 days we launched the zoom integration. So anything you record on the cloud, like you can do a zoom recording on cloud. On their cloud, you can re you'll see it and repurpose, and you can chop it up.

[00:32:47] You can just push it out to YouTube, to Facebook. so sometimes it's nice to have that flexibility. I've always loved that about repurposes, that something cool comes out or just a ha moment. Someone says, Hey, how come you guys want to integrate this? When they. Oh, that's brilliant. Let's just jump in and do it.

[00:33:04]we don't have to schedule it when we schedule it, but we don't have to wait months and months.

[00:33:09] Tom Osman: so yeah, like it makes sense

[00:33:11] Hani Mourra: of fluidity. Yeah, it makes sense. We can do it and we have enough teams, so people can still continue on track with our plan. And then I can pull somebody off.

[00:33:19] Hey, let's focus on integrating this. So I love that because. Yeah. Things change quickly.

[00:33:25]Tom Osman: Definitely.

[00:33:26] Hani Mourra: It seems like you might be.

[00:33:28] Tom Osman: Yeah. You might be catching a couple of interesting wave. Say a one, obviously podcasting over the last few years is taken off in a big way and then probably. Then if it's good to say, but there has been certain types of businesses that have done well out of everybody having to learn remotely, obviously zoom being the most obvious one, but then that accelerated the trend in remote working.

[00:33:54] This is like recording videos of a zoom. Like this is now becoming probably one of the most. predominant content types in terms of recording sessions. And then again, like using this as your headline piece and then creating things up. So you got a double wave there that you can. Capitalize on it.

[00:34:12] Hani Mourra: Yeah. Yeah. And I was also Facebook live like it was about four years ago or so. And Facebook live became like the hottest thing. it's still, very popular way to go, but that's when we said, Hey, we need to add a Facebook live to YouTube integration because that's what people were doing manually.

[00:34:28] And we're like, Oh, why are you doing it manually? We can automate it for you. yeah. We're whatever, I wanna say, I don't want to say trends because these are like whenever new tools or new. New things come out. We're always on the pulse, right? And we're like, okay, this is good. This is good.

[00:34:42] People are doing this now. Let's see if we can make their life easier by adding an integration.

[00:34:47]Tom Osman: I think one of the common themes with using. The tools like yourselves alongside other automation tools like Zapier to tie in together, the rest of your stack, be it from notifying team members to monitoring like social activity, customer support, like CRM or this sort of stuff.

[00:35:05] You could do much more with less people. Is there an area you think that needs work that maybe you could do with a repurpose type products? Anything does anything come to mind?

[00:35:17]Hani Mourra: yeah, one kind of a unique. Yeah. Use case for repurposes people who are doing videos. they don't think about making podcasts like, Hey, I make a video.

[00:35:29] How do I make a podcast out of it? So we added integration where you can take any video, even live stream, and then rip the audio out, upload an intro and outro automatically, and then push it off to your podcast host for you. So it just opens up another channel for people who are doing video only content to say, Hey, I can hit, I can have an audio podcast.

[00:35:54]the nice thing is that you've just opened up a whole channel for users. I'm going to think. I think that's powerful. And I think people have looked at,

[00:36:01] Tom Osman: yeah, I think, I think just the more people actually just get used to summation. This is one of the things that we. Really tried to showcase it make bud is you mentioned the harmo before, and once you get people to the aha moment, it could be things like creating your first zap in Zapier to take information from an email account and put it into somewhere like air table, which then gets prioritized.

[00:36:25] To a team member. This is like a, be like a simple automation where people's mind is just blown. That what do you mean? They don't have to copy and paste this information? that's probably the, one of the biggest aha moments. Or you can turn like a Google sheet into a mobile app in five minutes.

[00:36:42] It's like minus blown everywhere. That's

[00:36:45] Hani Mourra: wild. Oh yeah.

[00:36:50] Yeah, we love those moments too. Like I, just the fact that nobody had to do it, nobody on my team had to do it. And it went from here to here from, a Google sheet to an app. Wow. It just to me as a maker, to people who are makers, it's I don't have to waste time here. I can think about the big picture.

[00:37:09] What am I trying to solve with my product or what I'm doing, What I'm making to solve a problem. I don't have to worry about how it's done this helps take care of that for you. yeah, I definitely, those are hot. Those automations are like big aha moments for me personally, when I integrate a tool.

[00:37:24] Hey, I just connect my Stripe account to this thing. And then all of a sudden, all my data's here, this is wild. I love it. I didn't have to do anything. And that's how we treat. No. We try to build repurpose like that. That is minimal. Number of effort on your side. so that you can get a result quickly. No, you don't have to be a video editor.

[00:37:40] You don't need to have a video editor in your team. You click a button, you have a video, click, a button, you have a vertical video. It's just gonna, it's done for you. So

[00:37:48] Tom Osman: yeah. And, like me, you're also a dad. So have you found, working at home yet, however long you've done it for, with children? How have you found like that balance?

[00:38:03] Hani Mourra: Yeah, pre COVID shut down. And the kids were in school. Everything was good. My day ended at three o'clock when I go pick them up from the bus. And you just playing around that. you have your limits day ends here. Yup. Sometimes I want to work longer. sometimes I do in the evenings, but typically I try to just say, I, this is my work hours and I'm done unless there's a fire that we've got to deal with.

[00:38:25]and then, it was the shutdowns and stuff. If you months ago, It was hard. It was hard because I'd be working. My kids are older, like eight and 11, but they had their homework and stuff online during that period of time. But I was up to my office working. But there's still that guilt, right?

[00:38:42] You feel like I should be spending time with them.  it was productive work at work, I would, it wouldn't, it wasn't as productive as it is, like it was before and what it is now. Cause it gets her back in school. But yeah, it's always it's always a balance because you get hooked when you create, when you're a creator maker, whatever you want to call yourself.

[00:39:00]you're like you become attached to your thing that you're making and it becomes party. And you just think about it all day long and how it can make it better. And what else you can do, but you gotta just, you gotta draw the line at some point and say, all right, just shut my brain off. Focus on family time, focus on something else, read a book, go for a walk.

[00:39:17] Just, you need to turn your brain off from what you're working on. And that's when I find. Ideas we'll sleep in the next morning I wake up. It's Oh, okay. I had time to process that. So yeah, that space with family to those family time, whether it's going for a walk, whether it's just reading a book, doing something completely unrelated, it's very healthy.

[00:39:36] Tom Osman: And has your view changed since, the pandemic started on work or family life in general?

[00:39:44] Hani Mourra: That's a good question. Yeah. I'm during the pandemic time, like during the shutdown, when the kids were at home, it was like, I feel guilty. It was like, these are precious moments.

[00:39:53] They're not going to be home for this long. So yeah, I definitely, wanted to spend more time with them while they were here. Not in the, now they're back to school and it's man, I missed them here when they were here. I'm like, I can't wait to get back to school. Then I went back to school now.

[00:40:08] I wish they were here. The house was too quiet. but yeah, you start realizing that I started really, maybe it's an age thing as well. as you get older, you just you know what, Your passion, your business is your passion. That's great, but you need to turn it off. There's other things, other aspects to life as well.

[00:40:24] And it's trying to get that balance and sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's too much work and sometimes. I'm like, you know what? I just want to spend more time with my kids or my wife and family and just do something, it goes from one extreme to the other, but neither is healthy. You got to keep it in the middle as much as you can.

[00:40:43] And I think the hardest part I struggle with, I don't, I tell everybody this and they laugh is I don't really have a hobby. Like my work is my hobby and it's not a healthy thing to do. I don't enjoy reading as much. I listened to audio books a lot to go for walks, bike rides.

[00:40:57]but I don't really have something to do outside of my work when I have evenings and sometimes, Hey, what did we do? I don't like what I feel lost. I like my first thought this school read Redis API document to see how I could integrate. That's an exaggerated thing, I think work, I don't think what's my hobby.

[00:41:15] I think that's a dangerous place. to be so something I'm working on is just to find something that will pull you away, get your brain a break and do something different creative exercise, whatever it is, do something different than your work.

[00:41:30] Tom Osman: Would you say you consider repurpose work or would you just call it work?

[00:41:36] Because that's how other people are classifying it as really? You find that fun.

[00:41:40] Hani Mourra: That's the problem. It's that I it's not work. it's my, it's fine. This fun project I've been working on for four years. I, I have a million other ideas that we can keep doing. it's just, I call it work, but yeah, you're right.

[00:41:53]it's not work. It doesn't feel like work some days. It does. I'm not going to lie some days. I'm like, ah, I don't want to do this thing. That's administrator. I didn't want to figure this out. overall you're like, this is This is awesome. I'm building something I wanted to build and building something that I would use myself and I use myself.

[00:42:11] So yeah, it's not work, but that's where the danger is as well. Is that if you're in there, you're having too much fun and it's But you need to take a break from it and do something else. so yeah, it's a balance. And I like the fact that the kids go home with three, the bus comes around three 15 and it's I have an alarm at three o'clock it says pick up your beautiful children and your day's over

[00:42:35] Tom Osman: and that's it.

[00:42:35] Yeah. That's the famous thing he says. yeah. You want to find the thing that feels like work for everybody else. And it feels like play for you. and again, that falls in line with doing the thing that scratches your own itch. I was. Was similar although it's not like my own company, so to speak.

[00:42:53] When I first joined you make pad, it wasn't a job before it became my job. So I didn't ever think it was something that would turn into a job, but it was always like hacking on things like automating things, tying systems together, even just like trying to find that the lazy way, how to do things.

[00:43:08] I want to do this thing over and over again. Like I'd rather just automate it. So I had a bunch of things I did. Previously that had saved in like Integra and some like wild automation stuff. And then positioning, make part came up, shouldn't abandon, then it suddenly became like a job.

[00:43:25] And. That's one of the things it's almost feels like a default unfair advantage if you're just being paid for the things that you're interested in anyway.

[00:43:34]Hani Mourra: yeah. Absolutely. You guys, since I can just feel, yeah, you feel guilty. It's like guilty, but it's like, This is like too good to be true, but of course there's always, some days are harder than others and you're dealing with stuff, but overall, yeah, it's a good place to be and, grateful for that.

[00:43:50] But I liked what you said about being lazy, finding the lazy way to do it. That's always been my motto for everything. Like even before I created any softwares, I was like, how do I, what's the shortest way of doing things? Because even if I have to do it once or twice a month is too much, like it's repetitive.

[00:44:05] I need to find a better way, a shorter way. So we think alike in that terms, I always joke around people say, why did you create your purpose? Because I was lazy. They'd laugh. But yeah, a lot of the stuff we do is. I'm just lazy. And to me, it's annoying when you have to repeat something.

[00:44:22] Tom Osman: Yeah. So I think we are going to be, I have a hunch anyway, that we're going to be implementing repurpose quite heavily here.

[00:44:29] Now that I've been racking my brains and thinking that there's a lot of our processes and we consider ourselves quite a automation first. Company, because you'll be having 135 zaps running the business at this point where like a small team, but we have a lot going on in terms of like content and the site in this quite a big product and community at this point.

[00:44:53] But yeah, this content side, we still need to figure out. So yeah, it could be leaning quite heavily on you guys.

[00:44:59] Hani Mourra: Damn. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love hearing that.

[00:45:02] Tom Osman: Yeah. I think one question I did want to ask before we wrap up was that'd be people, a lot of people listening to this podcast because they are starting down the road of creating their own thing and creating their own project, punchy, following a passion, which they hope they could work on in their spare time, which eventually gets turned into a product and you could sustain that lifestyle.

[00:45:25] And then they can transition out of maybe like a full-time job or they can implement it, like at work. Or if it's their own business, start automating some more processes and start building their own software, et cetera. How did you navigate the early days of being a founder, and balancing everything that goes on in life.

[00:45:46] I know that you maybe have the way you ponder that question. I know you probably have more of a balance now, but what is the message you tell yourself now, to your previous self.

[00:46:00] Hani Mourra: I started early start. I wish I started, I, to start, I was video blogging and doing all this, learning what the blogging is all about and, 2009. And, but, and then I was building a following and teaching video, but I was like, I never, it was never, it was exciting, but it wasn't my thing.

[00:46:17] I never felt it was my thing I was doing. I was enjoying teaching video and making videos about how to make videos and marketing, but then one day it just Oh, you got to create a software because you're a software engineer and you can solve people's problems. And then that moment was exciting for me.

[00:46:31] I was like, I got to build it. And then it was still a few more years before I took action, because I was like, how am I going to build it? Or what if somebody wanted? but then. the moment I did it, I was like, man, I should have done this three years ago. Like just taking the leap, not leap of faith.

[00:46:46] I going to say drop what you're doing, but just take the first step and build something and show it to people because I showed it to somebody who helped me launch my first software. And he was like, wow, this is awesome. I have the perfect audience. Let's partner up. Let's promote to my audience. Perfect.

[00:47:00] And then I started hearing feedback, Oh, this just saved me so much time. man, like, why was I afraid of it? If nobody liked it would just tell you they don't like it. And then you build something else. But so I guess the long story short is I should've, I look back and I wish I started earlier.

[00:47:14] Cause you have a lot of energy when you're younger. Yeah. I started by mid thirties before I started doing the stuff we already had. we were to have started having kids and stuff. life was already hectic and I starting this crazy thing that was just like, They're risky and a lot of late nights.

[00:47:31] And as you get older, you can't stay up late anymore. you could, but as you're paid a price the next morning. Yeah. So if you have an idea run with it, and don't be afraid to put it in front of people. That's what I would say. You don't have, they don't have to pay, necessarily if you can get them to pay great, but just put it in front of as many people, I started getting feedback and then tweak as you go.

[00:47:51] That's what I was doing. It's just. Don't like this, I could just go in this direction and then eventually, it refined itself into the WordPress plugins and now it evolved into the repurpose platform. So it does take time. So start early.

[00:48:05] Tom Osman: Yeah, I think it's, just to add to the, and I think that's a phenomenal point and one that can lend itself to the no-code space because you're building with a really low barrier to entry, almost zero cost to create something which means you can build knits right.

[00:48:19] Fast. So yeah, like completely back up that point completely. So it was almost zero cost to failure, which is nice. And it's something which didn't exist in previous. Now almost a bit of a luxury.

[00:48:32] Hani Mourra: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You can show things off very quickly now, right? Put things together and show them off to people and get feedback quickly, faster than ever before.

[00:48:42] That's

[00:48:43] Tom Osman: awesome. I think that's a great place to wrap what's working at really find you honey, if they want to either connect with you personally or learn about a repurpose and how they can get started there.

[00:48:57] Hani Mourra: Yeah, I feel I have a kind of simple website called panty maura.com. It's like H a N I M O U R a.com.

[00:49:04] It's got links to just a bit about me. My social platforms want to connect with me all the tools we've built over the past seven years. Or if you want to try repurpose repurpose.io, we've got a free trial. You can check it out and learn more about it. There.

[00:49:19] Tom Osman: Gotcha, honey. Thank you very much. His own really appreciate connecting with you.

[00:49:23] And I know now that I'm going to have to rethink my content strategy after this school. Yeah. We appreciate you and hope everyone reaches out and it can actually do to make sure we put all these links in the show notes below this episode. Once it goes live, and yeah, if you speak to you again soon,

[00:49:42] Hani Mourra: Awesome.

[00:49:43] Thanks for having me here.

[00:49:44] Tom Osman: Thanks a lot. Bye bye. Thanks so much for listening. You can find us online@makerpad.co or on Twitter at

[00:49:53] Hani Mourra: make that we'd love to hear if you enjoyed this episode

[00:49:56] Tom Osman: and what would you do next?

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