Bootstrapped Web

It's Bootstrap Web. We're back. What's up, everyone? Jordan, how's it going, buddy?

Hey, Brian. Nice to see you again.

Alright. So, yeah, back at it. Your your your coworkers have have left the building.

They've left. Ben is back in New York. Rock is back in Slovenia. Everyone on the team is anxiously awaiting the release of that last episode to hear what we thought.

Yeah. That was a fun one. That was good.

That cool.

Actually, that that came out this week already.

So Oh,

yeah? Oh, perfect. I think I think that came out yesterday. Yeah. Yeah.

It was good, and I'm I'm actually gonna cross post that one over to my productize podcast as well. I I just thought it was a good interview. Interesting stuff there. So yeah.

Yeah. A lot a lot a lot of stuff you don't usually hear that much about. Mhmm. Yep. Yep.

But like we talked about in a previous episode and I put out on Twitter, we're going to try and do some sort of armchair quarterbacking of other people's businesses. We're going to get to that today. Maybe grab one of these websites from somebody that we know and then maybe talk about another website that everybody knows and we'll see what happens with that.

Yeah. But before we get there, why don't we do some updates and catching up, what we've learned over the past week, what's what's new?

Yep. I'm curious, like, because you guys are a remote slash in house company. Like, some of your people are there and some of your people are remote.

Yeah. I I call it remote hybrid because it's people all over the place, but the majority of the team sits with other people on the team. It's just that there are two, like I don't know what you want to call it, two offices. So there's the Portland office with six of us and Slovenian office with five, and then Ben in New York and Zach in Milwaukee.

So now that Ben and Rock spent a couple of weeks with you in Portland and now they're gone, I'm curious, like, from a productivity standpoint or or just a company standpoint, like, what impact does that have getting those two guys in person with you for a few weeks?

It was huge. It was it was necessary. It was overdue. That's really what we felt when as it was happening. We said, okay.

We clearly need to do this more often. So there are two sides to it. There is the business side and then there's the personal side. And they're inextricably linked. Then most of the team here in Portland hadn't really gotten to know very well.

And so before you get to know someone, if your only interactions with them on Slack, you get to know them as how does this person use Slack, right, or how does this person interact online, which is not really the same thing as who is this person. Coming here, not only did they get to know Ben and so now understand him a lot better and he understands them a lot better, so the communication is just better. It also gives you leeway. When you kind of hang out and have a few beers and go to dinner and you go to lunch and you work together, you just you give each other a lot more leeway in tone, in the vocabulary you're using. It's just it's just a more friendly way to go about it.

The other thing it did is a lot of Ben's work is a bit hidden from the customer teams, the support, success and marketing. And having him present really what he does during the day gave them a much clearer appreciation for his contribution to the company. Before, they didn't really have a good grasp on it because a lot of his work is with the tech team because it's process, it's setting up the tech specs and the documents and then working with the designer. All this stuff happens before the customer team sees it. All they see is, here's a new feature that's coming out of the tech team.

And they don't really understand where Ben sits in that equation. So it really helped them understand how things work in the company to a much bigger degree. Then Rock coming here was was like icing on the cake. So now they finally got to know someone that they had only seen in Europe over over Zoom calls.

Has he been to The US?

No, that was the first. Oh,

wow. Very cool.

It was great. It was great. And Portland is a fun city to kind of come to and hang out. So we had a great time. It was super effective.

We had this great coincidence where we all went out to lunch together while Rock was here, while everyone on the team was here. And during that lunch, we hit an MRR milestone that we've been kind of aiming at for months. And right during that, it was the refresh, and then we all did a shot of tequila at, like, 12:15PM. It was fun. It was awesome.

Yep.

That's great.

So that on the personal side, it did have an interesting, I guess I'd call it, negative impact, but it wasn't really negative. Just kind of threw things off a bit. Ben was here for a month and then Rock was here for a week. And Rock was here for that last week, the Ben was here, so they overlapped. So that last week,

that was a lot of fun.

I mean, we had big meetings on process, on presentations, Rock showing us exactly how they use Jira and why and then showing how so it was really we did a lot of work.

So you did presentations internally to the team?

We did a bunch of different things. So we just started using a new project management tool called ClickUp. I had never heard of them, and so in my head, I'm like, I'm not about to jump into something I've never even heard of. Totally wrong. Great product and we're enjoying it.

So we had a lot to cover in our move into a new project management tool and how things are set up and how we do sprints and when things go into the sprint and why. We And what we really did is we set up templates for different types of projects. Here is what a feature looks like in a sprint when a feature has an early access period and marketing behind it. Here's the template for a feature that doesn't have those, who's responsible for what, how do we coordinate it, and what's the dependency of one task being finished before another task can be opened. It's just a lot of work.

Yeah. In audience ops, in the last couple of months, we started doing this thing. Well, I should say Kat on my team started doing this thing where she's now hosting these monthly internal workshops for the team. We're fully remote, so she does this over Zoom calls. She puts out a topic and it's optional for anybody to attend.

We do content upgrades, bonus download, opt ins on every article that we do. She did a workshop mostly for the writers on how to come up with awesome content upgrade ideas and how to really make them effective. She did a whole slide presentation and everything and invited anybody who wanted to join. The writers and everyone also chimed in their tips and best practices, and then she recorded it. These monthly recordings are going into a library that anybody on the team can watch anytime.

We can show it to new hires. It's one of those things where, obviously, it benefits everyone just from quality control of of, like, these workshops, but I think it adds a bit more culture, and that's that's been tough for me since we're fully, fully remote.

Yeah. I like that. It's a it's a great idea. It teaches people. It shares the institutional knowledge.

That's great. What I was saying was after all that work, we had a good time. We went out to dinners. We had could make one up, but they went out to karaoke, and these are just kind of making memories.

You conveniently sat home on that one.

I I had a I had a family thing that I couldn't do and, you know, I I I mean, I got sick because I went out four nights that week, and I I can't go off I can't go out four nights. My body was like, you old brother. Yeah. I am. Yeah.

Exactly. So the strange thing that happened, not strange, almost expected, but the focus on work, I came back on Monday after everyone had left and I got on a lava pit in my stomach of rage and ambition. I'm like, oh, here we go. We just hit this MRR milestone. What's the next one?

Let's I'm just rage mode. And I'm looking around, the team is not there with me. 04:30 comes around, they're like, so what are we doing tonight? Should we go get a beer? And there's nothing wrong with that, and I felt I felt old because I was like, but what are the normal working hours here?

So I had this strange thing of they're not in the same place I am in terms of intensity. And me yelling at them to be more intense, that's not going to work. So I had to calm my emotions for two days and then bring it up to them on Wednesday and say, So here's what I'm thinking. Can we talk about this? Then we had this very productive conversation.

Almost felt like with your partner or your spouse, if you have something going on that you leave unsaid, it's like this weird resentment, then you finally talk about it and it's better. So it was one of those situations where I was like, we're not in party mode anymore. They're home and we need to get back to normal now. And I got there right away and they weren't there yet, so I had to like

Are you talking about the employees or the partners?

No. Employees. The partners were suffering on airplanes and and and jet lag.

Right. Right. Right. I think it's probably tough for most founders because nobody's gonna get more excited than those MRR milestones than us. Great teammates will will have that buy in and they're invested in the company, like, kind of professionally and and emotionally.

They may or may not actually own parts of the company, but, like, it's almost like regardless, nobody's gonna really get as fired up and motivated to keep pushing than than the founder.

Right. Especially not right after you reach a high. The natural tendency is, you know, take a deep breath and congratulate yourself. And I remember getting piece of advice from Rob Walling back when we first started getting some real growth. He said, your tendency is going to be to slow down after you hit like, you you hit these milestones or you get to the next level and you need to do the opposite.

You need to push harder because it's so hard to get momentum. When you finally have momentum, you don't wanna let it go. So I've had that in my head for a while and I've kind of internalized that. So now when something good happens, I don't say, alright. Cool.

I'm gonna go have a beer. I do have a a, like, a habit or tradition, whatever I do. I go to this coffee shop, and I buy this little mini Bouchon chocolate delicious thing. That's my congratulations, and then I'm boom on the gas.

It's the little things.

Yeah. When we hit that milestone in my head, I was like, okay, here we go. Now is the time to push. And I think they had that natural tendency of like, we're doing great. This awesome.

Yeah. It a bit of a disconnect to kind of contend with and it just required communication. That's what did it. Yeah. Anyway, so that's what's happening on my side.

How about you, my man? What's new?

So I guess I'll just kind of give an update on a couple of the things that I talked about in the last few weeks. I did launch the Audience Ops podcasting service. So that's, as I talked about last week, I did a pre sale to a couple of pilot customers. We're now actually starting to kick those off. This week and next week I'm sending some emails to kick things off with those clients.

I did publicly actually launch a page, so now that's at audiencops.com/podcasting. I sent that to my list and started getting that out there. I got a bunch more good feedback and a couple of new leads and actually one more sale coming through that, that's looking pretty good. I've got the basic marketing asset now done, launched, like the sales page for this service. I don't have a lot of marketing content or funnels or anything like that set up yet, but at least now I have the ability for people to come to the site, get a consultation, and even purchase the service when they're ready.

So it's official.

It's live.

So it's yeah. Although, like, there is still a waiting list for it, but the but all the infrastructure for that is there. It's ready. You're pretty fast, buddy. It it was a lot of just duplication of things that we already had with Audience Ops, but that still took, like, a week of work to get up.

The challenge has been, getting the behind the scenes stuff all put together. So, I did hire two podcasters so far. So these will be like our producerson air hosts. It's always a challenge onboarding new people, maybe even more of a challenge as a remote team. For you, it's great because you can bring in an employee in the office in Portland and really sit with them for a day or two and get them all situated in all the different tools and whatnot, or somebody on the team would do that.

But I have to do the same thing but from far away. On day one, their welcome is me just bombing their email inbox with an invite to Slack, an invite to Trello, an invite to Google Docs, an invite to this and that. And it's just one thing after another. Do

you have a set, this is how we handle when someone joins? This is what their first week looks like or their first day or a few days?

Well, normally we do for the writing stuff. That's been in place for three years. We've got a whole training program for writers and for project managers on the writing side, but the podcasting service is brand new, so we don't have any of that. The tools, getting people set up in the tools and our processes for the HR kind of stuff of getting people on board, that's pretty nailed down and I just do that. The the thing that that's been tricky this week has been kind of training these new people and building the processes at the same time for like how we're gonna onboard new podcasting clients and how we're gonna start setting up their new podcast and getting the creative assets together for that.

Like, there are big pieces that are that are gonna be different from our writing service, and I have to, like, figure these things out. I have to figure out what our standard process is gonna be, and I have to get these people onboard with with what it's like to work at Audience Ops. Like, it's not it's very, very different from, like, a typical agency or or just a solo consultancy where you can just kinda handle each client. You can finesse it. You can do things a little bit differently for each person.

But with us, we are extremely process oriented because even though we only have a handful of five or six clients today, like we have to be doing things so that this works when we have 20 clients and 50 clients, you know? So I'm getting that together. I think it's starting to turn a corner, but it's still kind of a challenge. And like in addition to the, to those podcasters, I also need to get like an assistant and a and a, audio editor on board and a designer to do podcast artwork. So there's just a lot of moving parts that I need to fit together.

So that's that's kind of what's taking up most of my time right now. I've done this before. I built it with Audience Ops. I did it with Restaurant Engine too where it's like, I know that all it takes is putting these processes together, putting people together, working the process, being close to it for a few weeks. Then I know that in another month or two it'll turn a corner where I can kind of let the team loose to run the process and work with clients.

I'll still be in the loop, I can start to step back and I'll free up. Who do

they look to for answers as their direct report, their manager? Is it you or is it Kat?

Well, on the writing side, it's mostly Kat. When we onboard new people on the writing team, it's all Kat.

She's the boss.

Like literally right now, this week we're also hiring writers because we're growing that team and she's the one interviewing them and onboarding them and everything. And and so that's all systemed out. Like but podcasting, it's this is my project right now. Know?

Kat's kind of a gangster. It's

very valuable. It's awesome. Yeah. We've a couple of other really great managers who've been around for like on the team for for, several months who've really been awesome. Writers too.

Like really, I'm just so happy with the team. So anyway, that's, that's the podcasting service. The other thing that I talked about a few weeks ago is the product ties, the product ties side of my business, right? Where I sell the course, it's like a course and community. And I talked about how this year for the first time I went to a closed cart system.

You've seen this before where it's basically closed all year long and then it just opens up, for like a four or five day period periodically throughout the year. That's how I started off 2018. I did a couple of live launches in like February and March and those went pretty well. By the March I built out a system so that now those live launches happen automatically. So it's like an evergreen automatic

Describe what that looks like for the visitor, the person who experiences it?

Yeah. So basically now going forward, ProductHyze kind of opens up every Thursday of every week and it closes every Sunday night, but not for everybody, only for a small

segment So of what's the experience though? They see an ad in Facebook, is that the start of it?

Well the start of it, like they come into my list from a variety of ways. They hear about me from a podcast. I do have some ads running, like pointing to content. They come in through a content upgrade on one of my articles. My main lead magnet now is, is the productized crash course, which is like a video course, like four four lessons video course.

I'm I'm running retargeting ads to that.

So that doesn't make an offer. That just gets them on the list?

Yeah. That's offering a free course on how to productize your service.

And you're you're not pushing at the end of that an upgrade into a a paid course or a paid product. You just get a list.

I have automation in place so that when they finish that course, which takes about a week or so, like ten days, it's, I forgot exactly, but it's like the following week after that they're gonna, they're gonna find out about, Hey, productize is opening this week.

Okay. So it's, it's like a good two weeks or so when someone

It's probably like three weeks or so, before some like from the time somebody joins the list to the first time they see Productize open for them.

And how long? How long has it been running?

So so this system has now been running for about four weeks or so. Last week was the first time that some people actually went through the Productizes Open Now and it was like a very small batch of people because I caught like, I don't know, maybe about 50 people at like the tail end or whatever. 50 people went through it last week, nobody bought and I was getting a little bit nervous. Was like, Man, I spent a lot of time on this thing and not that many people bought in this first group. Week, right now, today's Friday, so it technically opened yesterday.

It'll be closing on this Sunday for this batch is like 300 people or like two, two fifty something like that.

So every Sunday night are you just like on the couch watching TV just like getting ready? Yeah.

So we're only two days in now. So it opened yesterday and there's already been several sales now. So actually what I'm, what I'm really happy about is like the revenue now from just yesterday and today basically matched what I was doing on a monthly basis last year.

Okay. Seems to be working.

If I could repeat this next week and the week after, it's definitely an increase in revenue. And it's already shown to like, could start pumping more traffic into this funnel, I think. So I'm feeling pretty good about that.

Very nice. Yeah. Mean, we spoke about it, what, a month ago or so, and then we said, okay, we'll see how that starts to look once it gets automated. Yeah. So far so far so good.

Yeah. I feel like the automated versus like truly live, like there's really not a lot of difference and like it's all the same content. It's all the same emails. The webinar is all the same. It's it's like I'm not literally there live.

I am there live. I answer a lot of questions via email. People reply to the emails in the funnel and I just reply right back. One of the other interesting things is the pricing. Since it's closed, I don't show what the pricing is.

If you just go to the site now, you don't know what the pricing is.

Oh, that's interesting. You can test pricing more easily.

Could test pricing more easily, but I think it's also like a price anchoring technique. And I didn't really plan for this, but I'm starting to realize it because most people are conditioned these days to like, okay, the people who sell courses this way with the closed model and then they open it, like somebody literally emailed this to me yesterday. They were like, You know, I'm just going to guess that your course costs $2,000 because that's what most of these things cost. Right? Yeah.

And he started like and then he was like, And look, I don't know if I could afford $2,000. Like, do you offer any sort of coupons? Like, just assumed Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's You know?

And and, obviously, I was happy to reply to him and be like, alright. Well, first of all, even the highest tier is well below $2,000.

So it's almost like they're getting a good surprise.

Yeah. I had a bunch of sales right when it opened yesterday, Thursday, so I think that generally people get that impression that like, Oh, I thought this was going be a lot more expensive than it is. But still the interesting thing is that the price point this year, 2018, is higher than what it's ever been. Like I did increase the prices this year. It's more revenue per customer.

It's good. Like it's, it's in a good place.

Nice man. Well, congrats on it so far and keep going.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and really most of the, most of the work on it is, is done. Like I, I did the course, I did the automation. I could do more to drive more traffic and marketing, but, yeah, it's a good help.

Somewhere out there, there's a developer to cheer you on. Know that money's just going to go flow right through your account to them for the software side.

Yeah. Well, actually, and then that's just the other quick update here. I know I talked about how I'm I'm I'm I do really want to learn to code and and really invest time into that. For a couple for like a week there, I I did get heavily into it. This was kind of right before I started the podcasting service.

I went through a course on onemonth.com. I did the one month Ruby course. I wanted to get the basics of Ruby down first and then, my plan is to learn Rails and really dive into a bunch of other stuff. I did manage to get through that course and I understand everything. I got all the projects right and everything and, it was a good crash course, got me the basics, but then I got so busy with the service stuff, the audience ops stuff that I kind of lost all momentum.

I mean, things good right now at audience ops and I know I have a lot of work to do, so that's fine, but I am itching to just, maybe in a month or two after micro comp to just like go into a hole and just I want to really focus on the coding stuff, but I haven't been able to really make it a priority in the last couple of weeks. I'm reading a couple of books about Ruby right now, which are interesting. I would love to just really dedicate some serious time to going through more courses, practice projects, and really get a handle on learning how to code in Rails so that I can get to building out very simple apps in Rails. I know this will be a long term investment before I can really do anything with it, but I'm excited to do it. I still really want to do it.

It's it's like maybe two or three in my queue of things to

It get sounds like one of these things, and this is what I'll talk about next on on my side. Some things can't at least for me, I can't do them during the day. They they require multiple hours of focus. And during the day, during the week, that is almost impossible. I did it this week for, like, four hours.

The only way I was able to do it is leaving the office and I went to the Starbucks down the block, got a coffee, put my headphones on too. Only way. There's just too much going on. And then I definitely overload myself with calls and meetings, but that's my favorite thing. And that's where I make the progress and I learn things and people learn about us.

That's my I mean, today, after this podcast, it's basically just one phone call after another. And then one on ones, which is the other thing I'll talk about. So I have been stressed lately because MicroConf, I don't know about you, but I leave on Sunday and I get back home on Wednesday. So I have that for MicroConf and then the next week for Shopify Unite conference and then the next week for a blockchain conference in New York. So three weeks in a row of Sunday to Wednesday, Sunday to Wednesday, Sunday to Wednesday.

They're dead. They're useless. So I have three big gnarly projects that take multiple hours that need to get done before I leave. So I'm looking at my calendar in a different way. I'm saying, how do I block off chunks?

And then I'm looking at the weekend saying, okay, how do I find time on the weekend?

I always look ahead to trips, especially business conferences, like, oh, I'm gonna get so much work done on the plane. Oh, I've And then and then that never happens.

I I I stopped pretending a long time ago. I'm just terrible overall at getting worked on when when I'm away. I'm just not there mentally. Ben is like a wizard. He works on the plane.

He works like normal when when when we're traveling. I I don't understand it at all. I'm just like, no, man. I'll answer the emails that I need to answer, but I

I can't get into projects.

Yep. So so the MicroConf slides themselves for the talk. That's a big project. And then and then I'm in the middle of writing a a Stripe guide, which is like this amazing opportunity, and I wanna do I wanna do well with it. So that's

Oh, for for Stripe?

Like Yeah. You know those Atlas guides?

Oh, okay. Cool.

Yeah. I'm writing one on ecommerce. So that's like this great opportunity to get exposure and all this other stuff. So I I wanna make it good and writing writing is is hard. I don't write enough.

Whenever you do it, you end up staring at two paragraphs for now, which is not a good way to get done with a 30 page document.

I know that calls and sales and networking and stuff is your thing And I do all the sales too for my business right now. I do have a bunch of calls, but lately I've been trying to limit that as much as possible. And meetings are like team meetings I try to really keep to a minimum. Literally an audience ops aside from the podcasting stuff, which is active right now, the writing side, my managers and I just have one standing meeting every two weeks, and even that meeting lasts only like ten minutes. Max.

Good for you. Are exhausted. It's

like because beyond because, like, you guys are building product. We're we're just running processes every week, so it's like, you know, a lot of what we do just happens over Slack and and it's not meeting worthy, You know?

Yeah. Yeah. We we at least right now, we feel the need for the meetings to get onto the same page and avoid these slight miscommunications. These we are almost on the same page, but we're talking about slightly different things, and then you're gonna go off and work on your thing. I'm gonna go off mine.

We're gonna meet together and say, oh, we don't have this right. So we that kept happening.

I I updated my Calendly, so, like, I gave myself an extra hour in the morning so that, like, I will never have calls between like nine and 10:30AM. And that's actually to not to work, but to like get a workout in. Like, that's my time to go exercise. I've been finally trying to get on a, get some exercise in every day and it's been working.

Nice. I have turned into one of those annoying CrossFit people, but not for CrossFit, for Orangetheory, which is even geekier and not nearly as hardcore and cool, but it has really helped. I do a 5AM workout now, twice a week. But I I get home at 06:15 and I do my 06:30 call with the guys in Slovenia and I'm like I'm like a a warrior. But before 7AM, I've gotten all this amazing stuff done.

It feels so good. Only issue is I I just eat everything in sight. Yeah. Me too. Yeah.

That sounds so good.

Yeah. Like, that's the thing. Yeah. When I work out in the morning, it's like I'm I'm just chomping all day.

Yeah. And that's it. Today, I have a bunch of one on ones and I'm trying to do better with my one on ones with teammates. So what I have found really helpful is my buddy Spencer Fry. You know him?

Yeah. I don't know him personally. I know his stuff.

Yeah. So he runs a company called Podia. I think they used to be called Coach and they changed their name to Podia. So he, at some point, posted a link to see how like, here are all of our one on one calls excuse me, one on one questions. And they're really, really good things because I would go into the one on ones not unprepared but unstructured.

I would basically be like, how are you doing? And let's get into that. His set of questions, it's things like, how is your workload? What could I do to make your work easier? How do you feel your work life balance is?

What are the things that you feel like waste your time during the day? All these things that are about them but also very helpful to uncover, what else can we do to make you better at your job while making you happier. He tweeted that out, and I'm pretty sure I retweeted also. Today will be my first day that I go into one on ones with that level of detail on the question. I'm curious to see what the response is from the employees, if that's like, this is feels weird like an interview or this is great.

I actually am covering the right things. Yeah. I should do I should

do more one on ones. I feel I like, I've done them in the past, and I just felt like they weren't very productive, and everyone was like, yeah. Cool. Whatever. Like

I felt the guilt and the need to do it, but I was like you. I was like, how much are we really getting out of it other than an opportunity for you to tell me directly if you have an issue? Thing that I have found over the past month is and this is something that's always going to be challenging for the founder and for the entrepreneur, we just think in a certain way and maybe we don't really remember what it's like to be an employee. And at least what I found is I think the lines of communication are very open. But over the past few weeks, I have found like one thing specifically, I don't wanna mention exactly what it is, but I was shocked that the employee didn't come to me directly, that I found about it like in a roundabout way.

Was like, I would never want that to exist. I'm doing something wrong if you're not coming to me with that.

Yeah. I think about that too. I know that there's stuff that people, as the sole owner, like I know that there's stuff that like people don't want to come directly to me about. The other thing that I, I think we talked about this, but like people are very, very hesitant to throw each other under the bus. And not that we want people to throw on each other under the bus, but like if there's an issue on the team and somebody's not delivering and it's causing problems, like we do need to know about it, know?

Yeah. So

Alright, man.

Should we should we start tearing apart other people's businesses or what?

First, let's make sure we don't position it as tearing apart. We are. Alright. We're tearing up. How about that?

Yes. Yes. It's an intellectual exercise in, you know, how would you approach this? So you want to get started with the company that's more from our community. So we know him personally and we know the project.

So what we're talking about is a new project, new business from Andrew Culver, who is a buddy of ours who lives in LA. I saw him pretty recently, I guess it was a few months ago now, and I look forward to seeing him again at MicroConf. So he came out with a product called Bullet Train.

That's at bullettrain.co..co.

And the main headline says, Bullet Train is a Ruby on Rails SaaS in a box. A very interesting concept. Why don't I let you explain it, Brian, because you you are dealing with with a lot of the stuff right now.

When I first heard about what he was building with Bullet Train, the very first thing, the association that came to my mind was Laravel Spark. If you're familiar with that, with PHP, Laravel, this thing called Spark gives you out of the box everything that you would need if you're building a SaaS with Laravel, billing and subscriptions and user invites and authentication and all this different stuff. Bullettrain.co is, my understanding, it's more or less the same thing, but for Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a framework and it's very popular for SaaS, but I think BulletTrain takes you a step further. Let me actually just read off the website a little bit here.

It gives you pricing pages and subscriptions, user account management, teams, social logins, security and permissions. These are all things that you would need to build out, invest some time in building these pretty routine infrastructure functionality into your app. We're not talking super custom functions, but things that almost every SaaS is using in one form or another. Right.

This is the stand on our shoulders to get you started a lot

faster. Yeah. It gets you started a lot faster, gets you much closer to actually building your real custom features that makes your app unique. You can dive into those without having to spend so much hours, either yourself or spending on paying developers to build your user login system or your teammate invite system. Like that stuff is just there.

Now there's probably a lot more in this that I didn't talk about and that I don't know. So I haven't actually used this. I don't think you've used it either. All we really know is what we're seeing on the, on the page and what we've heard, you know, Andrew talk about the whole site looks, looks pretty awesome. Real slick.

I really liked the way that it's set up, way that it's branded. It just looks really great. What are your first thoughts on this?

As a non developer, I'm thinking back to when I wanted to get into a software product. Did bother me that it felt like everything was gonna be custom built from the ground up when so much of it is standard. Every app has these issues of just like creating an account and having an email confirm that account and being able to change your billing info. All this stuff that does not add value to the world or the market, it's just basic. It should just be there.

And so the attractive part of a product like this is that, okay, you can get your idea out there faster. If you're going to go and raise $2,000,000 and have a whole team, you may use this to get things started, but at least in my head, the attractive part is I'm going to put a project out in the market a lot faster using this, and then I can get some feedback on whether or not people really want it, how much they'll pay for it and so on. So the attractive part to me is at the beginning of the product life cycle. So with that in mind, I look at this and I say to myself, okay, how much would that be worth to me to save that time or to even as a non developer, I almost want to send this to a developer that I hire. So it's like, okay, I go and I talk to someone and they say, okay, cool.

That'll be $30,000 to build an MVP. And I wanna say, cool. What if we skipped those first four weeks of development and just use this instead? Can we take that from $30,000 to 15 or $10,000 for an MVP? So I see that and that's why I was just looking at Laravel Spark as you were talking and I looked at the pricing there real quick and I see $99 per site or $299 for unlimited sites.

I look at Bullet Train and I see their pricing and it starts off at $950 for the site. So now I'm like, alright, he's moving closer to the actual value of this thing. The truth is it's worth a lot more than $950 but you have to kind of find a price that that will that

will be attractive at the same time.

I might, offer the the the contrarian on on this one. Please please do. And maybe I'm not in the target market for this thing and and that that could definitely be true. That's my one kind of hesitation or complaint, if you will, about Bullet Train is is is the price point or or the model really because I'm I'm seeing $9.50 to get this up and running. I'm just trying to step into the shoes of developer who might consider buying this or using it.

The thing with Laravel Spark because I bought Laravel Spark for a project that I never even continued using, but it was a no brainer, just buy Spark just in case I might use it on some side project. That's the thing about the pricing on Laravel Spark is it's so low, and I'm not necessarily advocating for a super low price like Spark, $99 or $2.99 for unlimited sites, but that was low enough for me to say, Just don't even think about it. Absolutely go with Spark and don't build this stuff custom. It doesn't pay to even consider building a custom. Whereas Bullet Train nine fifty, if I'm a solo bootstrapped developer on Ruby on Rails, which someday I hope to be once I learn how to do Ruby on Rails, like I'm gonna actually consider like, you know what?

This does look pretty valuable. It would certainly save me a lot of time, but if I'm a do it myself bootstrapper, like I could build an even simpler version of Bullet Train myself for myself to use on this project and my other projects without paying $9.50 and renewing it for $500 a year. I understand the renewal is optional, we should make that clear if you want the updates. Like $950 and then $500 for a second site, it's not that it's not worth it, but it does make me hesitate and it makes me actually consider like, well, I could spend a few hours or a few days or a few developer hours or whatever, like, building this this stuff that like, we could build it in house. Right?

Right. And so it's it's effectively, like, $80 a month, but it doesn't I don't know if it makes sense to sell as a as a a monthly recurring service because you're really getting the value upfront. You're not getting an ongoing Yeah.

And and I guess that's putting it at such a high price point. I guess the thinking is like, This is definitely not a recurring revenue business. It is a one time value, so let's try to get the lifetime value of a customer upfront with the price point. And I totally get that, but I would probably if your goal is to launch a recurring revenue service out of this, I would probably go with a lower price point for Bullet Train, maybe not as low as Spark, but something in between, and use that as the lead gen for selling some other recurring retainer service, whether it's a service or a SaaS or something to that same audience. So if you if you know that it's developers who are buying your Bullet Train framework, sell those developers on some other product as a step two in the ladder.

That's probably how I would think about this sort of like, this this to me seems more like a lower level on the on a multiproduct ladder kind of kind of product.

Okay. I see what mean so that they could it could fit in with other offerings.

Yeah. Like, you could offer, like, Rails maintenance services or you could offer, like, you know, developer tools or something like that. But but, like

I would look at it as a challenge on finding the type of person and situation that would find it the most valuable. So if you are calmly approaching a project and thinking, how do I wanna go about this project and nine fifty makes you think, then you may not be the type of person in the type of situation that would get the most value out of it. So I'm almost thinking if you think about like an incubator, you come in here and you have three months to get a product up and running as fast as possible, people who are really, really focused on speed or lean startup networking things and hackathons and

I'm just trying to think about where this fits in. So if you're a bootstrapper on a very limited budget, you're going to have the objection of, okay. This is a little bit pricey. Maybe I should just save my cash and build it myself. If you're a company that has a lot of cash to burn, if you have investors or angel investors or something, then that probably means you have the cash to burn on paying developers to just build your own systems.

A third party tool, not that this is hosted by a third party, but maybe that causes you a little bit more of a hassle than if you just pay for your development team to build your own that you can customize and modify. So so, like, I'm just trying to see that alignment there. And where a higher price point might make sense is a completely, like, out of the box, like, here's some sort of a done for you SaaS solution. So if you're, like, a nontechnical founder and, like, this somehow magically gives you, like, a, like, a working SaaS, like, I know this is whatever, but it's, like what I'm saying is that the audience for this is definitely developers.

What about agencies or developers that are building things on behalf of other people? Right? The other side of the equation for me. Someone comes to you and says, can you build me an MVP? And you're you're the developer who's gonna build that MVP.

So it's not me saying, hey. Let me be clever about showing this to the developer so I can cut down costs. It's the developer or the team of developers that says, yeah. We build MVPs, and we build them fast. And for them, nine

fifty a good point. Right. I like that. I think that's actually the play. Maybe that's the play.

I know if he has an affiliate program. If he doesn't, I would do that. Offer an affiliate program so that the agency can give a quote. They're an MVP shop, right? They give a quote to a client, they say, Hey, here's the quote with us building everything 100% custom, dollars 30,000.

Here's the quote for the same product, but we're going to use Bullet Train. You buy Bullet Train, Mr. Client, missus client, and use our affiliate link and this project is $20,000 instead.

Or or they just buy it themselves and don't need to even tell the client that they're building using this because they're gonna take it and modify it anyway, and they still charge a $30,000, but they save themselves a ton of time. Maybe they can come down to 25,000 and be more competitive or whatever it is, but that'd be interesting because then you could you buy it once for $9.50 and then you could use it again for other projects. What we're missing and what the site is missing, because we're just looking at it from the outside, is is is a niching down, a focus, a value proposition that speaks very narrowly. And I think it's just because Andrew just launched this and he's busy as hell. I think the site has changed that much over the past two, three months that I've seen it.

And I imagine as he learns more on where to focus in, then the site will start to change to talk to those people. Because right now, it talks about what the product can do more so than it talks

I gotta say his copywriting is really good.

It is really good. Was reading some

the headline here right above the pricing is like save four to six weeks of full time development. So it's, you know, he's really speaking to the, this is the cost saving or time and cost savings that you're looking at.

Yeah. He's talking the right language. Users can sign up, sign in, and reset their past using a hand tuned installation of the devised Ruby gem. Like, I don't know what the devised Ruby gem is, but the person reading it does. Right?

The person interested in buying it does.

But again, you know, you gotta think about, like, if if the person reading it knows about these Ruby gems, they're a developer, they've probably worked with these gems before, they probably have some code from previous projects that they could cut and paste and avoid this expense. That's where I think if you're the product owner buying this for your product, I don't quite see the alignment. I know that there is some alignment for some companies, but yeah, like the Bootstrapper or the invested, I don't see the alignment, but the agency is the route that that really kind of makes a lot of sense to me.

Because they're they're making money off it. The pricing doesn't matter as much as the value that they're getting from it. I mean, I remember I spoke to Andrew about this last time I was in LA a few months ago and he was just getting started on it. I was super excited about it. And when I spoke to him about it, it was very easy to kind of believe and feel how hugely valuable this is for people who build apps like all the time.

Being able to convey that on the site, I think, go a long way to making the price look a lot smaller than it really is.

If he's talking about a person who builds so many apps in a year that they feel the pain of having to do this again and again, he should be speaking directly to the consultant, the consultancy, the agency and not necessarily the product owner. Because if you're if you're a product owner, you only need to kind of deal with this headache or this cost once if if you're only going to work on your one product all year long.

Yep. Yep. So it's like I mean, right now, right, the the sub headline is bullet train saves you weeks of development by starting you off with all the features that are the same in every SaaS so you can focus on what makes your app unique. Whereas a different page, an agency page or an agency point of view would speak about that differently. It's not so you can focus on what makes your app unique.

It's so you can build apps faster for your clients with higher performance and better quality and speed and just a different point of view.

Ship apps for your clients faster, fit more client projects in a month, make each project more profitable.

Yeah. Make your customers happier, the the whole thing. Yeah. If this is at the beginning of the product life cycle and and you're experienced in in this world, you you kinda know what's coming next also, and that gives you opportunities to cross sell, be an affiliate for hosting, all all these other pieces that that happen right after you build the basics.

That's what I'm saying, right, is is if you make Bullet Train that step one product like, he he could offer, a Heroku type service, you know, as like the upsell. That as like, you know, something like that.

Right. Look, you could get it for $9.50 or you can actually get it for 500 if you sign up for a year of hosting with our partner. It's cool. I like it. I don't if we have time to keep going my man.

I have thirty minutes to eat and then I have call call one on one call. Yeah.

Why don't we why don't we do do another one maybe maybe next time around and we'll go from there.

Cool, man. Good to talk with you. Have a great weekend. Thanks, everybody.

See you.