The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Revolutionizing Horse Records with Entrepreneur Andy Ide’s Software

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

Revolutionizing Horse Records with Entrepreneur Andy Ide's Software Horserecords.info About the Guest(s): Andy Ide is a seasoned software engineer based in Southern Australia. With a background in banking and web development, Andy transitioned into entrepreneurship after a successful career in the tech industry. He entered the equestrian world through his marriage into a horse family and became the founder of HorseRecords, a comprehensive digital solution designed to manage and store information for horse owners. His unique blend of tech skills and insider knowledge of the horse industry makes him a distinct innovator in the field of horse management software. Episode Summary: In this captivating episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss interviews Andy Ide, the innovative mind behind Horse Records, a pioneering software for the horse industry. The episode kicks off with a humorous and engaging introduction, drawing listeners into a vibrant discussion about entrepreneurship, innovation, and digital transformation in traditional industries. Chris Voss, renowned for his energetic style, teases out Andy's journey from city life to marriage into a horse family, revealing the serendipitous path that led to the creation of Horse Records. Andy Ide shares his personal story of developing Horse Records, demonstrating a keen eye for blending technology with traditional industries. The conversation dives deep into how the software addresses the age-old challenges of recordkeeping in the horse industry by offering a customizable, modern solution. SEO-driven insights discuss the competitive landscape, the software's unique selling propositions, and Andy’s vision for a globally connected equestrian community. Chris and Andy explore the entrepreneurial spirit, discussing the drive to solve problems, disrupt old systems, and continuously innovate to address market gaps. Key Takeaways: Innovation Meets Tradition: Andy Eid developed Horse Records to solve existing issues in equine recordkeeping, marrying his tech skills with his family’s needs. Entrepreneurial Journey: From tech businesses to Horse Records, Andy’s story emphasizes resilience, adaptability, and the pursuit of solving real-world problems. Competitive Edge: The customizable nature of Horse Records sets it apart from competitors, addressing varying needs across different equestrian disciplines globally. Vision for the Future: Andy shares insights on how his software could unify global horse data, enhancing traceability and biosecurity in the industry. Inspiration for Entrepreneurs: Andy’s narrative illustrates the importance of continual innovation and staying ahead in industries ripe for disruption. Notable Quotes: "Success is a staircase, not an elevator." – Andy Ide "I wanted to organize all the world's horse information." – Andy Ide "There's not too many software engineers who know the horse world." – Andy Ide "Just code it up. Just code it up, get it done." – Andy Ide "Let me in on that action." – Andy Ide

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places at this pace anyway go to goodreads.com for it says chris foss linkedin.com for it says chris foss chris foss one of the tiktok and chris foss facebook.com you can find all of our groups there and the chris foss show and everything we do on facebook we're of like, I think we have five or six properties on that silly site. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss Show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing young man on the show with us today. We're going to be talking about his insights of starting a business, being an entrepreneur, and everything else that went into some of the technology he's building that's pretty darned amazing. And we'll get into it.

Today, we have Andy Eide on the show with us today. He has created software that is called HorseRecords.info. And so we're going to get into it. Welcome to the show. How are you, Andy? G'day, Chris. I'm good. hello to all your listeners hello and welcome it sounds like you're coming to us from australia down there yes yes so if i sound quite far away it's because i am actually on the other side of the world based in the southern part of australia in the middle we love australia australians are

always nice wonderful people and i always i guess they have to be since they live in this dangerous world of animals that everything on the island tries to kill them. That's true. Good for you for surviving. You're a software engineer and you married into a horse family. Yes. That's kind of interesting. That sounds like being Catholic and marrying into the Protestants.

I don't know what that means. Yeah, basically. Yeah, my mother-in-law was the first to start Australian stock horse stud in South Australia, which is my state, in the 60s. So it's the oldest stock horse stud in South Australia. And one of the oldest in Australia, actually. Yeah, I'm a city boy. I was wide-eyed and I fell in love with a horse girl.

And yeah, at the marriage, at the wedding, everyone was giggling. But I never found out why until after. That's an expensive trade, being in the horse trade. That's, you know, but yeah, you probably end up married to her because you're horsing around. Oh! We're going to do the horse jokes on the show here today. So basically, I guess guess tell us a story one day your wife was dissatisfied with storing records and notebooks and whiteboards and they were degrading

and it was a real problem and you're like hey i've got some skills yeah that's that's exactly what happens my wife kim she's yeah quite bright but people would call her up and ask her about a horse she bred 15 years ago. Wow. And, you know, how was he to break in? And even though my wife's memory is like a steel trap, you know, 15 years, it's a long time. And, of course, you keep everything in a notebook, but the notebooks degrade over time, and, you know, you've got to follow them. Do you remember where a notebook from 20 years ago is?

No. Whiteboards are just a snapshot. People who rely on their memory is great, but our memory isn't as good as it used to be. So she got me to code something that could be used online, and I built that for our stud. So a stud is like a farm, like a group of horses. So I built that for our stud.

It worked really well. And then Kim said, why don't you let other horse people use this so i took the knowledge from the one stud and spread it out and allowed you know everyone to use it all breeds and all disciplines yeah why why keep it yourself there eh you know and so you help basically help give her a software resolution to what she's doing now was the first business you'd ever started before or no it's not no more i originally started in banking and call centers oh really and doing the stats and recording call wait times and stuff like that and then I moved into my own web development business and that went pretty well until the GFC in 2008 and I woke up one day and I had no emails I had no work come in and it had just been a case of everyone just decided they could push budgets

for websites out a few years and I had to go back and work for the man. But then I worked salaried positions and then horse records came along and achieved success. So yeah, that's my main focus these days. And so how long have you been doing this now with the software? Yes, we launched in May 2021. Wow. Yeah, COVID was 2020, so I was able to get a few things done. I wanted to launch in 2020, but that didn't happen. But May 21, so what, three and a half years. So that's, yeah, it's growing quite well. Well, you know, the horse business, I mean, it's probably one of those businesses that needs to get disrupted or interrupted with whatchamacallit. So you can record the stuff and yada, yada, yada, right?

You need that information. If you can provide all the information, you know, from falling, when it was weaned, whether it was gilded, you know, all its health things like, oh, it had an injury on its hock. That's why it's got that scar there, but it hasn't affected it. Here's everything we did with it. Here's its vaccination status and, you know, its worming status and it's been to a dentist and all of that. Oh, and by the way, here's its performance and all the training we did with it it's like when you buy a car getting the full service history is makes it more valuable it's a car fax for our horses it basically yeah it's okay i can i can trust this owner who's selling it because you know i can see the horse has been regularly you know it's tetanus

is up to date and it's been wormed and you know it's always had you know this body temperature and you know so i know that if the temperature goes up or down then something's happening with the animal yeah because like humans some horses for example run hot as have a higher temperature others are a little bit low so how do you know if they're sick or not if you don't have that that mean or the what their normal is so they're the sort of things we we record we also record scanning results so obviously breeding horses is a big thing and what you would do is you would scan the mare and and see when it's due to ovulate and then when it's due to ovulate it's when you either serve the horse or provide ai like artificial not artificial intelligence artificial insemination which is interesting

because i'm into ai artificial intelligence i'm talking about artificial insemination and my initials are ai don't get them mixed up oh i artificial insemination and my initials are AIs. Don't get them mixed up. Artificial insemination is my favorite way to breed. Just for myself, personally. I don't know what that means. Do you have horses, Chris? No, I'm just artificially inseminating with other people. I'm just doing it.

It sounded funny in my head at the time. It's a bit. That's how I pick up all my head at the time. It's a bit. But once you know women. Yeah. That's how I pick up all my girlfriends at the bar. I just, hey, babe, you want to artificially in 78? You want to go home? I don't know. But, you know, this is the thing I love about entrepreneurism,

why we talk about entrepreneurism on the show. We have people like yourself on so that we can inspire people to be entrepreneurs. I mean, this is the great thing about it. And so you had a problem. You saw that you could maybe fix the problem. And you took and said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to fix this problem. We're going to do this, that, and the other.

And wham, bam, there you are. You've got it fixed. You've got it going. A really nice niche. Yeah. There's not too many software engineers who know the horse world. And there's not too many people in the horse world who know technology. So you're always kind of standing.

You're always, people are always aware of what you do because you're the only one doing it that, you know, they've ever met. You know, there are other horse software products, not as good, of course, or as comprehensive. But, yeah, you're usually the only one with horse people who knows computers or is a software engineer. So, yeah, that makes interesting conversations. Now, competitor-wise, you don't need to name any competitors because we don't want to give them a free ad. Free, yeah. Are there competitors in the market?

What sets you apart is what I'm really after. Yeah, yeah, there are competitors, but what I've found is most of them are either it's an old system that hasn't been developed for the modern web. So it's, you know, some system that was built in the 80s or 90s on a desktop. And they've put some on it. Yeah, still running DOS. And, you know, yeah.

So there's that sort of competitor. There's the other sort of competitor that just has converted a cow software and just changed the name to horses, which means it's, yeah, cows and horses are different cows. You tend to manage cattle. You manage kind of in groups where horses have names. So every horse is its own little thing. You don't say, okay, this paddock of these hundred horses are

doing this you know it's all one-on-one and the other thing is most other software is really specialized where mine is more general and more customizable so the other software they write this is what we've chosen for you to record where i say what an aussie with an Australian workhorse does might be different to what a cowboy in Texas does or a dressage rider in Europe. So what I've allowed it is to be customized. You can create event types that you want. So for example, if you have a horse go to a chiropractor, you can create the chiropractic event and add that if you some people give horses massages so you would have a massage event now someone else might not do that so they won't have that event um if the different disciplines do different things so

racing you might have water treadmills and treadmill work dressage you're just doing it in the in the arena there endurance which are like the marathon runners of the horse world so they're like you know the movie hidalgo this huge endurance race with horses they have different requirements as well so because you can customize your event types and customize say the type of training that you're recording it means that the system becomes what you want it's not what i'm telling you you should do i i give some standard you know there's standard events everybody has like gelding feeding you know that sort of thing veterinary, but you can add whatever you want. And I think that that's what makes us so much different

than any other software. And plus, if a new competitor comes on and says, oh, but we do this really specific part of the horse world, I can go and just customise it to do that, which is exactly what happened with our our mere scan tool the the breeding side of things someone said there's this software we pay thousands a month for that allows us to record the results of a internally scan and I said I'll put that in so I coded that up so then you know those save thousands a month because they don't have to buy

that software anymore they just use mine which they're already paying for so a new competitor comes on because it's customizable all handled so there's i don't really even bother thinking about competitors too much because what why do i need to i can just someone wants something i just code it up yeah just code it up just code it up get her done get her done tell us about your journey through life how did you what made you first become an entrepreneur what were some of your influences and what were some of the other things that drove you into you know learning to to write code and software yeah many years ago a couple of decades ago i'm older than i look i do have gray hair chris you and me buddy you didn't have gray hair before horses now i do i did a a project for a client and at the time i got paid pretty well you know I got 10 grand for it and you know I'd

spent three months you know almost every day coding this project for this client so this was in the early 2000s and I got 10 grand I thought wow that's great and he immediately in the first month, he unsold that and made $15,000. Wow. And then $15,000 every month after that. Wow. And even though our agreement was that I built the software for $10,000, the fact that because he had these connections and he could unsell the software to his customers,

that he made the cost of the software in the first three weeks wow and then there never was a trail that came back to me and while i don't have any issue with that that client of mine because that was our agreement and we followed the agreement i just thought this sucks i could i could have been making a piece of that action. Yeah, I did all the work. He had the contacts, and he made money off my labor. So that's why I've always sort of gone to that want to work for myself because I don't want to make other people rich. I just like to make myself rich. Oh, I see

I mean you do that by helping people but I was just always You know I was the one who did all the work and created the whole product and just because he knew people he could distribute it better And I just thought Let me know in that action. Let me in on that action. Yeah Take advantage of that. Yeah, yeah, that action yeah take advantage of that yeah yeah i can i can see why that uh you know something you'd want to do it's it's definitely it's definitely more interesting that way um so you design this software what's the future that you see for your horse trading software the future of maybe some things you're working on innovations

does ai are you are you toying with ai yeah i do maybe that i do have a little bit of ai already yeah if you go to horse records.info and then under tools there's a full name generator where you can put in some attributes of a full just you know a pretend one and it uses ai to come up with some names for you oh wow yeah so it can do it does normal name like single name names which are typical for you know quarter horses and stuff like that and then you've got the double names which are more racehorsey type names and the idea is it gives you inspiration on what to name your foal. And that's my most visited page on my website. The highest SEO rate page is a little tool I created one day thinking,

oh, that would be cool just to be able to come up with a name for your foal. And now it's the biggest page on my site. Not my front page, not my testimonials page. No, it's the foal name generator. You never know when these little tools sort of hit a sweet spot. Sounds awesome. And you've got people using it all over the world. It's something people can use in America here and other countries.

I'm an American, so I act like this country is the only country. Yeah, that's the only country. So one of my first clients was Texas. First day of launch, one of the first customers was from Texas. I've certainly got people in Texas and California that I know of. Most of my clients are in Australia, but I am expanding, you know, to Europe and America, trying to get a bit of a foothold into Argentina because I've got a very strong polo there.

But, yeah, it's mainly English-speaking countries, Chris. So that's where we're at at the moment. Yeah. That is awesome, man. That is freaking awesome, dude. And because it's Australian dollars, it's very cheap for Americans. Oh, really? Cheap for Americans.

Yeah, a 60-cell base plan for seven horses is $12 a month, which is about, I don't know, $7 or $8 American. Oh, wow. So, yeah, very, very cost-effective if you've got horses. And you can try, you know, you join and you get a horse for free, so you can log on and have a look and, you know, add your events, see if it works for you, and then you can upgrade your plan and look at your other horses. Oh, so you can log on and have a look and you know add your events see if it works for you and then you can upgrade your plan and look at your other ah so you can test it yeah test it out

test it first to see if it works and and all that good stuff yeah our big wholesome awesome our big wholesome hairy goal is to basically i took it a bit from Google back in the early days, but I want to organize all the world's horse information. I would love all the horse information to be in one place because then there's that, you can then go the real ethical looking after animals route and just, you know, doing your best to bring it all together so when you sell a horse, you know exactly what's happened to it. Yeah, it'd be great to have a directory.

I know dogs have an AKC directory. And so you can see how that works and you can follow them with it and all that stuff. So, yeah. There's a big project in Australia at the moment called the Horse Traceability Project. And the idea is it's more of a biological safety type thing. So if a disease gets like equine influenza, which is like the flu for horses, but it stuffs them, it can kill them. Oh, really? Yeah.

We had a case of that a few years back, like a decade ago. It came into the country, didn't get quarantined properly, racing industry shut down for several months while they tried to contain it. The horse traceability tool is, I would love every horse to be in horse records and people just register the paddock where they're located so if there's ever a breakout of a disease we can get okay all the horses within this

radius we can contact them immediately say to the owners and say hey guys there's a breakout you know you need to do this at the moment we don't we don't have that We just rely on news reports and stuff. But it would be cool to just be able to contact people directly. So that project's still in place, and I think it's still coming. I think America could do something like anywhere there's horses, it's good to know where they are, where they're concentrated so if there's any disease outbreak, we can do something about it a lot more efficiently. Yeah, so that would be cool yeah definitely yeah the reason i chose a sas business model is just from a business point of view it's recurring income every month you don't sort

of hit december january and don't get paid and that keeps you just developing and being able to pay for your developers over time so that's why i picked sass yeah so yeah sass software we have a lot of people that come on and bring build sass software the as or a service as yes software as a service software as a service yeah so you subscribe pay a monthly amount or or you can pay annually and usually get a bit of a discount. And then you know that the company is making money so that they can continually improve and always be upgrading what they're doing over time. Yeah. That's good to have. That's good to have. This has been very insightful.

You start your own company. You solve your own problems. This is why we like talking about entrepreneurism is because people usually start out trying to solve a problem they have personally and then they realize that hey we could share this and help other people and then you know usually sometimes that transcends to worldwide distribution or other things but i mean it's such the great beauty of entrepreneurism and hopefully it gives people in the audience a lot of ideas, building their own companies, maybe their own venues. Maybe there's something, how to stir your coffee better.

There's a million different ways that things need to be innovated. And this sounds like something, too, that's, you know, this is something Silicon Valley is always going on about with their words like disrupt. We need to disrupt, you know, this thing. And there's a lot of still old world technologies that are being used. Like your wife was using a whiteboard to record all this stuff. Yeah, that's right. I can't imagine. Any stable you walk into has a whiteboard, yeah.

And if anybody accidentally wipes it off or, you know, a horse comes up and wipes it off with his tail, you're kind of screwed. You're gone. One piece of advice I can give to people who are wanting to perhaps code something, if they see that there's something else that does the same thing, say what? Just code your own. In almost any area, there's always competition. But sometimes just you doing it is enough. You don't need the whole pie.

You can just have a nice portion of it. You know, there's enough to go around so don't don't hold yourself back and there's a lot of ways to intervene too yeah yes i mean that's that's the great thing of the other reason we have a lot of entrepreneurs like yourself on the show is they can is you can see things from a different paradigm shift so yeah there may be you know like i remember when you know paperclips were you know you had paperclips I remember thinking okay what that seems like that's pretty good innovation I don't think you can do much more of paperclips but they came out paperclips that were painted the paper was that stripes on them people

paperclips that started having these indent cuts in them that would hold the paper better like little these little grind sizes that would grip it better. Little stuff with messages on the paper clips. Yeah, and so there seems to be no end to how something can be improved. And another note to entrepreneurs is, whatever you make, you've always got to keep improving, because if you're not, there's going to be somebody out there

who takes what you do and figures it out. So you've got to either eat your own lunch and innovate, or somebody else will beat you to it. Yeah, and say you're an entrepreneur who wants to, say, code a mobile game. You go, oh, this game's exactly like this other game. But what they don't think is that the customer, the player, sees the new game and goes, yeah, this is like another game I've played, but hey, this one's a new one.

So the customer isn't quite concerned about competition that he might be. Yeah, so another piece of advice I have for entrepreneurs is success is a staircase, not an elevator. The big wins that you hear about in the news often have a huge amount of work behind them. You know, like everyone wants their company to win the lottery, the company lottery, and suddenly have 100,000 users all paying 1,000 a month and, you know, you can retire to the Caribbean.

But the truth of the matter is that success is just a step along the way that slowly takes you up the staircase. And then one day someone sees you and says, how did you get up there? Was it by elevator? And you go, no, no, no, it was this big, long staircase behind me. So I've got a blog where I talk about, you know, that concept a couple of times.

I like that. I'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, it's hard because you're sort of conditioned and you grow up always seeing big successes and big wins. And the news is only ever about big wins. It's never about the 10 years of hard work and all the emotions you go through thinking is this gonna work yeah only look at the you know the last win where you've won some award or something so yeah just entrepreneurs keep that keep keep going keep grinding guys keep punching keep punching away boys as we go out give people final pitch out to check out your offer yeah and dot coms all that good stuff yeah so

the website's horse records dot info it's for recording all your horse information it's all breeds so whether it's australian stock horses quarter horses arabs whatever all breeds and all disciplines from polo to eventing to racing to dressage to cross-country. You can do it all. It's all fully customisable, so you can run the system how you want and record what you want. It's very cost-effective. You buy annually and it's cheaper.

I also have gift cards, so you can give the horse person you know who has everything, you give them a gift card for horse records, and it's all electronic and all emailed to you, so that's all good. So, yeah, that's horserecords.info. And if you want to see some of my more nerdy things, you can have a look at my blog, which is jangoandy.com, D-J-A-N-G-O-A-N-D-Y.com. And I'll send those links to you, Chris,

so you can put them in the show notes. There you go. I certainly appreciate that. They'll be in the show notes, folks, so you can take and get them. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Andy. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. I'll chat to you later. Thank you. And thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas,

linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, chrismas1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us.