The EO Visionary Voices Podcast

Brent (00:01.246)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship, sponsored by EO Minnesota. Today I have Michael Shapiro. He is the founder of Gatuba. They've been around since 1996. Michael, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions.

Michael Shapiro (00:17.856)
Okay, great. So Brent, thanks so much for having me. So I founded katupa.com in 1996. We've been online for 29 years. And my role currently is primarily visionary. I've got a team in place that is handling the day-to-day. And we're at the point now where it's not just they're implementing my ideas, they're bringing their ideas. And that's something that...

has been a long-term goal for me and I feel so blessed to have such a great team in place. And I think you asked about my passion. So my current passion is, I have a lifelong passion in languages and alphabets and my current passion is Duolingo. I'm studying Italian, I'm on day 175 and I'm absolutely loving it.

Brent (01:13.002)
There we go. Sorry about that. Yeah. I'm also doing, I'm doing Spanish and I've been on for more than 3000 days, but I think without some of those interactions with real people, it's hard. give really good vocabulary, but spoken I'm always, I get very nervous. Um, Um, yeah. All right. So before we get started though, before we talk about your business and how you got there, um,

Michael Shapiro (01:28.044)
Yes, that's totally understandable. I struggle as well.

Brent (01:39.408)
I have something called the Free Joke Project. I'm going to tell you a joke. You just give me a rating 8 through 13. Here we go. I accidentally drank a bottle of Invisible Ink last night. I'm in the hospital now, waiting to be seen.

Michael Shapiro (01:54.601)
I that. I love dad jokes and word plays and whatnot. I'm gonna give that a 12.

Brent (02:03.208)
All right, well, that's great. Thank you very much. All right, Michael, give us a little bit of your background. Tell us how you got into what you're doing to start with.

Michael Shapiro (02:14.262)
Okay, perfect. long story is when I was a kid, my younger brother, I think he must have been 10 years old, started a business making custom birthday cakes for the kids in our neighborhood. And that was an early inspiration and idea about like, entrepreneurship might be kind of cool. It took a lot later. I did history in poli sci at my undergrad. And I then...

worked in the mortgage space, which I hated. I eventually went to business school, then spent a couple of years at Procter & Gamble in brand management, learned a ton, but found that I really was too much of a creative spirit for that corporate space. So long story short, I left P &G in late 1994, set off for Jerusalem to do some traditional Jewish learning and on the plane over there had...

a few business ideas that I'd like to start when I came back, and one of them turned out to be Ktooba.com over the long haul.

Brent (03:17.098)
That's fascinating. tell us, so then you started your business, you started your website in 1996. It's got to be, I don't know what the oldest website is out there, but that's got to be a good long standing one. You've gone through all the ups and downs. Is there struggles or anything particular that you can look back on that has shaped that journey?

Michael Shapiro (03:39.584)
Definitely. Well, one of my low points, which was definitely a formative experience, was getting fired from that first job at the mortgage company. As I mentioned, I was not well suited to it. It was a family business. It was a small mortgage and loan company, and it was run with an iron fist by the wife. The husband was the lawyer who took care of all the legal.

She was very smart, very capable, and as a 23-year-old or whatever I was, she rubbed me the wrong way. And the other problem was that I basically sat at a cubicle and I was underwriting deals. She had contacts with mortgage brokers. The paperwork would come in. I'd run the numbers, but then at the end of the day, really, she made the decision about whether to make the deal or not. And I never got to meet the clients or see the houses that we were doing mortgages on. So there was some disconnect for me. It wasn't concrete enough.

There was no personal connection. So, needless to say, well, maybe I do need to say it, I'm showing up late for work and then I screw up a deal. And she calls me into her office, look, you're done. I remember the one thing that I was proud of at the time as a young man is she said to me, well, you know what, I have to fire you and you're have to pay for your mistake. And the proud point for me was that I...

stood up for myself. don't know words I basically said, but essentially, okay, firing me is the maximum penalty. It's not reasonable. You're the business owner. You take the risk. I didn't say all this, but I stood for myself and to her credit, I had already applied to go to business school and I still got in. I didn't get into my top choices. So she didn't mess with the referral, the letter of recommendation that she had written.

Brent (05:36.574)
So just from a from an employer standpoint she wanted to charge you for The error that you had made when doing a mortgage which could be hundreds of thousand dollars. Well, it wasn't that much but That takes a little bit of chutzpah

Michael Shapiro (05:46.515)
Yeah.

Michael Shapiro (05:54.097)
Yes, I think it would have been a lot of chutzpah. And I don't know if she was serious about it, but at that moment I'm shivering in my boots. I'm being fired for my first job. yeah, I... The other thing I should say about that is so it was a formative experience because it really knocked me down. But then the growing came where I at that point had already rented an apartment. I was living with two friends. It wasn't expensive, but I had to pay the rent. And so...

I found a job, I was walking through the downtown area of Toronto, came across a store that was selling high-end silkscreen t-shirts on the theme of Toronto, so city-themed t-shirts. And I walked in, I got a job at their location down near the waterfront, and that was a formative experience because it was an entrepreneurial couple that were running a really creative, unique niche business and doing a great job of it. At their peak, they had four stores including

But where the real learning came was that job didn't pay enough for me to pay my rent. So I got a waitering job on the weekends. I was terrible at it. Well, good and I didn't get fired from it, but it taught me the value of, really the value of a buck, making it on my own as a young man, as a young employee. And there was some real learning. And I think it was a formative experience rather than just if I had it straight and easy all

Brent (07:21.351)
How about the, you're, you've gone into, you have a tradition that you want to uphold. Tell us about Koopa. Ketuba, sorry. I was struggling to get it out there.

Michael Shapiro (07:32.522)
So ketubah, yes, yeah. Yeah, no worries. Yeah, well, so it's not an easy word, right? Because it's not an English word. It's actually a Hebrew word. It means written. The ketubah is the Jewish marriage contract. And so in biblical times, there would have been verbal agreements, most likely between families. Then about 2,000 years ago, the rabbinical sages in Jerusalem came up with, they standardized,

the text. There it evolved a written text and then there was a standardized text. So that's what Ketuba means and I registered the domain name ketuba.com in the spring of 1996. And I remember at the time that the person who building my website, who actually was a childhood friend who was leaving social work to build websites, this is what he told me, I at that point was looking...

into renting a storefront to open a brick and mortar shop that was gonna sell a whole range of Jewish ritual items, not just ketubas, but a whole range of them to the Toronto market. I met him and basically turned the whole concept on my head. At that point, I understood how much rent was gonna cost, inventory, and the fact that I might be sitting in the shop and nobody would come. So I registered the domain name. He helped me with that. And in that early moment of the internet, it actually took, you had to have two different, I think, registrars or something, and it took a few days.

and I remember being nervous and asking him, when is it gonna come through? When is it gonna come through? And he's like, relax, relax. I had an inkling at that point that registering katuba.com might be a good idea, and it turns out that it was one of the best ones so far.

Brent (09:08.681)
From your to tell us about your creative side then you mentioned you're the visionary. How big is your team and how are you able to sort of get some of those visionary things out of your head to your team?

Michael Shapiro (09:22.441)
Sure. the team is, there's nine people on the team, including myself. I've got, so it's myself, I've got a director of operations in, for folks who are familiar with EOS, we don't follow EOS per se, but I'm the visionary and she's the integrator and we work really, really well together. And in terms of the creative aspect, I would say...

people sometimes assume that I'm an artist, I'm a Ketubah artist, and I'm not, I'm not a trained visual artist, but I have a very well-developed creative side. sometimes that manifests as me talking with artists about ideas, their ideas, giving them feedback, or maybe some ideas I would have about visuals. But there's a whole other piece of it too, which is connecting the dots in ways that perhaps other people haven't. So one example is a year and a half ago,

we launched a sister site to katuba.com. It's called HebrewNamer.com. And it solves a pain point, which is most North American Jews have a Hebrew name and many North American Jews don't have facility with the Hebrew language. So at the few times of life from when a baby is born to when a child has a bar about mitzvah to a wedding to a tombstone, literally cradle to grave, when folks need to deal with their Hebrew names and Hebrew letters, it can be a real hassle. So.

HebrewNamer taps into the curated list of thousands of names that Katooba.com has assembled over the last 30 years of dealing with weddings and the Hebrew names related to that. And it plugs it in together with an AI chatbot so that people can interact with it. And whether they're looking for a Hebrew name for a child or a conversion, that's an idea that is an example of something that I thought, you know what, I think we need to build this. And of course, I've got a terrific team and developer that has helped to make it happen.

Brent (11:16.941)
Okay, so give me give me an example because now I'm on the website human Hebrew namer so if I wanted to name my child a Hebrew name I could go through and and put in some items and it would come back with with some names like

Michael Shapiro (11:33.276)
Yeah, you could say something like, say you wanted to name your child, say you knew the English name for the child, you might say, well, suggest some Hebrew names that would be appropriate for a boy named X or a girl named Y. And it's something that I'm really excited about and that we're continuing to refine and getting a sense of making sure that the results really sink.

not literally sing a song, but similar to what I strive to do with Katuba.com is have users be so delighted they can't wait to tell their friends and family.

Brent (12:11.721)
All right, so my first one is Barack is the name that it first came back with probably because my name is Brent. Courageous military leader who worked with the prophetess Deborah. And Deborah has a very interesting, I once read that whole story to a Bible study group of kids and there was a dad there and said, wow, Deborah sounds like a bad.

Michael Shapiro (12:18.126)
Okay, yeah, yep.

Michael Shapiro (12:40.145)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brent (12:40.263)
You know, a, sounds like a, yeah anyways, won't say what, he said I can't believe you got through that whole story. All right, so we're, in EOS terms, we're on a side thing here, right? So, okay, so tell us how you interact, you're using AI, which is super interesting, how are you using it in Ketubah as well?

Michael Shapiro (13:05.297)
Sure, so that's one example. Another way is that if you go to katuba.com, under this, on the main nav, there's an area around selecting your katuba text. we have an, this is actually real, this is a lot of fun. It's an AI-powered katuba text writing assistant, which allows you to essentially generate a text in a number of styles from traditional to Shakespearean.

I don't think we have a Klingon option on there, but it's really, it's meant to be ranging for people who are really serious about helping to write a text for themselves to folks who would like to have little bit of fun. And there's a space you'll see there where you can put in what you love about each other, what sorts of things, the values you have in common. So that's another instance of AI. And another one that comes to mind is there are a number of applications behind the scenes where

We are, you for our back behind the scenes order processing and the way that we assemble the texts with the names and then with the artwork, that's something that we've been leaning in pretty heavily on the AI front.

Brent (14:14.557)
What are you most looking forward to now going into the holidays? I guess, there a holiday season? There's not really a holiday season for what you do, or is there a time where a lot of people get married?

Michael Shapiro (14:28.614)
Sure, well it's a good question. So we don't have the Christmas rush because even though Hanukkah does happen during the holiday season, it's not a particular wedding season. The seasonality for katuba.com really follows the wedding season, the general wedding season. So the largest number of katubas that we produce are for weddings on the Memorial Day weekend. That's our biggest one. Things tend to get quiet or...

as they get towards the end of the year, but then typically last week of December, first week of January, we see pop-up orders based on people getting engaged over the holidays. So it's, you know, the big holidays of Jewish tradition are in the fall, the Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, which is the Day of Atonement, and Hanukkah, then Passover, but the Ketubah business doesn't really follow that holiday season.

Brent (15:21.255)
Yeah. So you mentioned EOS earlier. there something in, is there a way you got introduced to EOS? And did you self-implement when you started?

Michael Shapiro (15:31.878)
Yeah, so I should be clear, which is that I have not implemented EOS. I am aware of it. I was introduced to it, I was first introduced to it when I was in strategic coach. So I was in strategic coach, may be familiar with the terrific company out of Toronto, also in Chicago, also in London, founded by Dan Sullivan, and learned a ton, made some terrific connections with other entrepreneurs.

errors and I'm no longer in the course, although I am part of a Zoom mastermind that a bunch of us who are or were in the course created during COVID. So that was what it was. It was through my experiences at Strategic Coach that I first heard about EOS and then also went to Strategic Coach sponsored a session where an EOS implementer came and got exposure. So like a lot of the ideas, but it's not something that I'm formally implementing.

Brent (16:27.281)
And how about, so in the green room, you mentioned that you wrote a book. Are you writing a book? Tell us a little bit about the book.

Michael Shapiro (16:34.179)
Yes, very much so. So the book is called Ketubah Renaissance. Don't know if this will show up properly on your screen, but it is a sumptuous coffee table book. The subtitle is The Artful Modern Revival of the Jewish Marriage Contract. So as I mentioned before, the Ketubah is an ancient document. There's a thousand year tradition of having it beautifully written and decorated. But over time that tradition died out and

starting in the late 60s and early 1970s, some Judaica artists in the US and also in Canada started to bring this tradition back to life. So this is the first book and it's a gorgeous coffee table book that tells this very visual story of how this ancient tradition was brought back to life over the last 60 years or so. Writing the book was a labor of love and sometimes a labor of hate, just because it was.

I've never written a book before. I first, in 2013, I sent an email to the artist whose work is on the cover of the book. His name is David Moss, and he really is the father of this renaissance, really the spark that then lit the whole thing up. And I said to him, you know, I think there should be an exhibition, because it's been about 50 years since you started doing your work. And he was supportive, great idea, whatnot. over a period of...

well, guess that's 12 years now, I got more and more serious about researching it, putting it together, selecting the images, lining up a publisher. And then it really got hard, because my editor was very demanding, exceptionally good at her job. And that was the part, those were some of the parts that were really the darkest, because I'm like, my God, I don't know how to address the comments that she's suggesting. But the book is so much better and so much more fleshed out than it would have been otherwise.

So it's very exciting. It's coming out on August 1st and published by the Jewish Publication Society and I am excited to, after having received so much in this space and had such a privilege to work with all the artists to be able to now tell the story and share it hopefully with as broad an audience as possible within the Jewish community and beyond.

Brent (19:06.001)
My auto-mute keeps coming on. Sorry about that, Michael. Tell us just briefly the platform migrations that you've gone through over the last almost 30 years in e-commerce. I can imagine that you started with something custom way back in 1996.

Michael Shapiro (19:09.251)
Okay.

Michael Shapiro (19:26.275)
So, yes, so we started off with something very simple. In fact, if you go to the waybackmachine.com, in December of 1996, you can first see katuba.com showing up. And it's very sweet. It's a very simple site. And it says, says Katuba, Katuba, because that's actually, that was the name of the company at the beginning was Katuba, Katuba. And then the URL was katuba.com. And as a slight aside, an excellent member of my team.

number of years ago said hey why don't we just call ourselves Katooba.com so that was that was I guess the you know the origin of that now I've lost the train of thought about the question that was answered yes yes okay yeah okay so the version the first version of the first instance you can see on wayback machine.com

Brent (20:06.985)
No, yeah, I was just I was asking about your platform migration and how many times you how many different ecommerce platforms you've chosen and

Michael Shapiro (20:20.659)
In December of 96, that was a very simple HTML site. It was not an e-commerce site. The next iteration after that was a site built in cold fusion. And that served us well for a number of years. That was the first one that had e-commerce capability, where we went beyond the earlier stages where people would have to send us an email, print a form, write their credit card information, fax it to us. We would then have to put it through manually.

The ColdFusion was the first one that was a proper e-commerce site. next after that, the next big platform change would have been to what we have now, what we've kind of built on now, which is it's a WordPress site with WooCommerce. And that's something that's really well. I remember when I was...

when the Cold Fusion site was really coming to the end of its life, I wanted to have something that was based on a standardized readily available platform that many developers would be familiar with. And my developer at the time said that there's no way you're not going to be able to get the customization that you want. And what we have achieved, which is not uncommon now, but was uncommon at the time, is a site that is a custom site built on a platform that is a standardized platform.

And that's what we have today.

Brent (21:49.917)
That's awesome. So Michael, we have a few minutes left. As we close out, I give everybody chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Michael Shapiro (21:57.898)
Okay, perfect. Well, if you or anyone you know is getting married, you don't have to be Jewish. We actually do get customers who are not Jewish. Usually they've been to a Jewish wedding, but you don't even have to be. My company from the get-go is really here to serve anybody who wants to touch and connect with this beautiful Jewish tradition, to have a beautiful marriage document that can be read out at the wedding, that then could be displayed and framed in the home as a memento.

For many years afterwards, after everything is done, it's something to look back on. So if you or anyone you know is getting married, if you're a Jewish interfaith couple, LGBTQ plus couple, we are here to serve and have texts that are appropriate and welcoming to you. So I would say that's the main plug. And the second one is you can pre-order this on Amazon. It's called Ketubah Renaissance. And it's

gorgeous and it's coming out officially August 1st. So pre-order available now and it will ship I think sometime in early

Brent (23:03.005)
Great, how would they, how can people get in touch with you?

Michael Shapiro (23:06.462)
So you can get in touch with me directly through my website is best. can info at katuba.com is usually the best way to go and then my team will make sure that it gets to my attention. You can also find me on Instagram, the handle is katuba.com spelled out and of course on LinkedIn.

Brent (23:26.813)
That's awesome. Michael Shapiro, the founder of Katooba.com. It's been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here.

Michael Shapiro (23:33.323)
Brent, thank you so, much.