So Meta

Brian and Jordan are having a great time as they ride good days, give great updates, and look forward to some exciting things in the near and far future.  In today’s unscripted and random episode, Brian and Jordan give us some great news in terms of business updates. They also talk about one of the bigger customer issues when it comes to running a SaaS company. Not to mention, a deep dive into the metaverse: what does the future look like with Web3? “What shoe will need to drop in order for Web3 solutions or applications or products or services or platforms to spill over into the wider market?” – Brian Casel Powered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This Here are today’s conversation points: That wonderful feeling when things are starting, building, and rollingHow to keep the momentum goingSaaS issues: the discomfort of having most of your market be anonymous to youForeshadowing of why we should take the metaverse seriouslyWill Web3 be corporate-owned or user-owned?Monetization through advertising and other types of modelsTinyConf, Disney, and other events in the near future If you have any questions, comments, or topic ideas for Bootstrapped Web, leave us a message here “No one is going to get to zero. But you do need to remain underneath the line of ‘too frustrating.’ And that line has not been determined yet.” – Jordan Gal Powered By the Tweet This Plugin
Brian Casel:

Okay. So we better hit record on Bootstrap Web before we we talk about too much good stuff off air. So, Jordan, how's it going buddy?

Jordan Gal:

This is the unscripted, unplanned, unedited version of Bootstrap Web. Every episode is basically the same thing, but right now we feel a little a little looser. We got no plan.

Brian Casel:

Yep. We're running fine today.

Jordan Gal:

Yes. I'm having one of those days. Every once in a while, the whole world just comes to you, you know, and you got to enjoy it when that happens. I just woke up and I read my email. I'm like, Oh, that's good news.

Jordan Gal:

And then a minute later, Oh, that's really good news. And then like a WhatsApp message, Oh, more good news. So I'm just rolling with it and enjoying it.

Brian Casel:

Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I love it. I mean, I'm having sort of the same kind of week. It's been really building over the last month or two, but especially since Product Hunt, I mean, it just feels good to see a steady flow of conversions and new customers every day, you know?

Brian Casel:

It worked. Product Hunt,

Jordan Gal:

it's working.

Brian Casel:

Yeah, Hunt worked and it's also really cool to see a lot of the free users just converting and seeing a pretty good conversion rate there, which I feel good about. And then it's also surprisingly a fast conversion. Like there's a lot of people who sign up for a free account and upgrade within a day or two.

Jordan Gal:

I wonder if that's optimal, you know, that's great. But I wonder if it's optimal. That's kind of interesting.

Brian Casel:

There's a lot I don't know. And then there's also like a lot of, I think a pretty healthy number of people just going straight to the top plan, the premium plan. I'm seeing plenty of annual subscriptions.

Jordan Gal:

I got a zip message in the wild two days ago, LinkedIn DM with someone. And I'm talking to them about helping build a like financial model. And he pinged me a zip message of a video of him going through like, Hey, this is the type of model I can build for you.

Brian Casel:

Oh really?

Jordan Gal:

That's awesome. Cool.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Well, that's I mean, you know, there's, there's still so much I need to figure out too. And obviously the overall, you know, the revenue has been on a pretty good growth trajectory, but it's not really where it needs to be yet to be like a fully profitable and all that. But I think it's on the right track. There's so much to figure out though.

Jordan Gal:

I feel like that's okay. The toiling in like obscurity, that like thing where no one knows and no one cares, right? And this is like why we hit record so hastily because Brian and I got into this like jubilance where both of us are in a similar place where we just did so much work over the past year. And then now it finally feels like, oh, it's happening. The momentum, the sales, the customers are coming in like, oh my God, finally, it's really happening.

Jordan Gal:

And there's such a great feeling. It's like this odd sense of relief and also pride. Then also like, oh shit, I got a lot more to do.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's I mean, what's happening on your end that you could talk about?

Jordan Gal:

It's it's a similar feeling to what you're talking about. Maybe not quite to the same extent, right? That's a I think it's going to take us another few months to get to where you are. We're still slowing everything down in our early access process and people can't just come into the product and sign up for it. So we're, we're still in that phase.

Jordan Gal:

So I think it'll be another call six months until we're at like, Hey, I wake up and we have, you know, three new signups type of thing.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. And I think just in general, it's gonna, it's always very different between your business and mine, but I think these businesses are very, very different.

Jordan Gal:

Yeah. In terms of the

Brian Casel:

business model and the space and all that, like it's a totally different beast.

Jordan Gal:

It's kind of cool in that way. There's no one right way to do it. Right. So for us, it's GMV. It's how much revenue processed.

Jordan Gal:

And so everything started to kick off and to see the team, like the whole thing, you could feel Slack, just the whole thing come alive because customers are in the system and leads are coming in and the sales marketing channel lights up, you know, and I get the little one next to it, meaning like I was called out there and I'm like, Oh, I wonder what this is. And then, you know, it's a new opportunity. And then the production like production errors, you know, like that channel and Slack and the conversations happening there. And then the product team moving forward on new stuff is now in development. And it's like, Oh my God, it's alive.

Jordan Gal:

Finally, it's alive.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. What are like the first things that are like popping up on your radar now that are like, I don't know, like feedback from customers or like, or questions or things that, that it's like, okay, this just popped up now. What do we need to do about it?

Jordan Gal:

Well, the thing that's really exciting to me is that everything that we're dealing with right now in the pipeline feels like it's just barely the beginning because we literally started ads yesterday. So we have a $300 a month budget on ads. So basically, you know, from 0 to 10 ks a month in ads like immediately, and that hasn't hit yet. And we have a bunch of like sales outreach happening next week and that hasn't started yet either. So all of these are from the work we did in Q4 to keep people warm And then Q1, right?

Jordan Gal:

Things tip over in the new year. And all of a sudden people have much more interest in doing things, changing things, experimenting with things. That's what's happening. We also brought in that new salesperson and they bring their Rolodex and their network with them. And so all of a sudden we have more new people in the pipeline.

Jordan Gal:

So we have we already have like several million in monthly GMV that's like in the pipeline. So I'm looking at that and I'm looking over at what I need to get done over the next few months with Series A. I'm like, if that turns into what I think it can turn into, that other things can be much easier than I expect it to be, which is what I, what I want to see happen.

Brian Casel:

Hell yeah. Yeah. Again, this is like a random episode. Whatever. But one of the, one of the things that I still haven't quite gotten used to with a SaaS business in general is not seeing directly or being directly in touch with customers who are getting value from the product, you know?

Brian Casel:

Like Okay.

Jordan Gal:

Dig into that a little bit. You mean people that you don't know, didn't talk to start using the product and start paying you and you just kind of don't have any relationship?

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Complete strangers on the internet coming to the website, signing up, converting, paying, and never sending a customer support request and then upgrading and then expanding their account and not sending any contact whatsoever to me.

Jordan Gal:

Okay. Let's dig into that for a sec because that's the dream also.

Brian Casel:

Of course it's the dream. Yeah, for sure. It's amazing. Literally last night when I was sleeping, we had four customers sign up and I never felt better about that.

Jordan Gal:

Okay, okay. I want to connect this to remote work, but keep going, keep going, keep going.

Brian Casel:

But it's still a part of me that like, I don't believe it.

Jordan Gal:

Too good to be true.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Like what am I missing? Yes. Because in like audience ops, literally every customer that ever paid us, like I probably, well, for a while there, wasn't doing the sales, but most of the time that I was running it, I had a

Jordan Gal:

sales Or they had a relationship with the company, with the person at your company.

Brian Casel:

Yes. Somebody at my company they spoke to, or in most of the cases for most of the years, I at least had a fifteen minute call with the person who paid money. And then I like, in most cases I didn't talk to them again. They dealt with the team and that was good. But like, but I could still see that the daily interaction with the team and the customers and like activity is happening.

Brian Casel:

They're paying us money. We're doing activity for them. Right? And then even with process kit, you know, which I no longer own anymore today, it did start to veer into like, okay, now there are these customers who sign up and I never talked to them and they're all good. But especially in the early days of process kit, almost every customer needed some handholding from me to get them onboarded and activated, right?

Brian Casel:

I was doing a lot of that so that like even the ones who self converted without contact, like I understood like, okay, some people can just handle it on their own. With Zip Message, it's so much more hands off for me and it's been that way since the beginning. You know, I do talk to customers and I send a lot of Zip messages to customers frankly and that's always good but that's such a small minority of the customers who I actually talk to. It's just weird, you know? And I mean, the other thing is like, you know, and I don't like actively, like obviously like I don't like, I could see metrics in the app in terms of how much people are using it and stuff, but like, I don't really I don't keep tabs on like how many messages is some account sending or you know back and forth and things like that.

Brian Casel:

And like I always sort of like forget about the fact that like there are all these customers now that are actually using it to send and receive messages like every day and and I'm, and just not in my immediate purview, you know?

Jordan Gal:

So the reason I said I connect this to remote work is because the title of this episode is going to be like the boomer episode where I think this has a lot to do with our natural discomfort for complete anonymity. I have the same thing around remote work where I kind of can't believe that someone is sitting in Barcelona right now that I just pay every month and they just do amazing work for us and we just don't know each other. It's still, there's still a gap there that I have to overcome where I have to like suspend my disbelief there. Like, yeah, okay. I guess that is actually happening and that is normal now and that this is just going to work out.

Jordan Gal:

There's still something that's,

Brian Casel:

run into this all the time, but I ran into it last week again, where somebody knew that I just started to get get to know actually through some zip message conversations. He's a he's a new user and we went back and forth and and stuff. He's based in Europe and he was giving me a lot of good feedback on my product. I was giving him some feedback on his product. We're going back and forth async.

Brian Casel:

He was like, yeah, I worked with like Bean Ninjas and you know, like Merrill and Bean Ninjas are in Australia. So it's like, this happens all the time now where where it's like we meet someone new in our industry circles, they live somewhere else on the globe and they happen to also be friends with or work with somebody else that we know in in another continent And that just never ceases to amaze me.

Jordan Gal:

It's true. It's true. And so just to kind of add to that, I got a DM this morning from someone I know in Australia, letting me know that one of the engineers that I used that used to work at Cardhog Forest applied to a job. So like this is someone in Slovenia applying for a job in Australia with someone I know. Now that's the foreshadowing or what we can look at as the foreshadowing on why we should take the metaverse stuff seriously.

Brian Casel:

Okay, let's go.

Jordan Gal:

Because it's because it's already happening. Let's put a pin on that. Hold on a second. Let's leave it for a sec. Tell me if this assumption's right around your discomfort.

Jordan Gal:

I'm projecting the potential discomfort around having so much of your customer base be anonymous to you. Is there something that the challenges, your confidence on like, is this real? Does that mean they can leave as quickly as they came here? Am I really accomplishing what we need to, that they're just going to keep paying? Because you don't have that relationship and access to information, does that make you worried?

Jordan Gal:

Am I right to assume that?

Brian Casel:

Right. So, you know, don't get me wrong. I am not complaining. This is the goal. This is the, you know, running SaaS especially this type of SaaS for me is is the dream.

Brian Casel:

I I can't believe it's it's starting to work. It's not where it's not in the promised land yet, but it's starting to work. I think to your question, there's always the the fear of like, what am I missing? When is the shoe gonna drop? When are all these anonymous users gonna churn out because I'm not visibly seeing what's happening.

Brian Casel:

And I feel like I there are some areas where I have really good visibility into what's working and what's not in terms of metrics, terms of the apps performance. And I do get some customer support requests and things. So I could see a little bit of what's happening there, but like, yeah, there's always a question of like, what are my blind spots?

Jordan Gal:

Right. And it's much easier to have blind spots when you just don't talk to them and they don't tell you what the blind spots are. And we got into this at

Brian Casel:

Like, again, like going back to audience ops, like whenever there was a problem, whether it's a customer who's unhappy about something or a lead that did not convert for some reason, it was always pretty clear to me what happened and why. And then I can go diagnose the problem and the team works it out and we figure it out. And we don't have a churn problem right now in Zip Messaging. Churn has been actually pretty good. It's the fear of like what do I not know?

Brian Casel:

What question am I not asking? You know, which metric am I not tracking correctly? Which there have been some metrics that like, like for example, like the viral loop thing. It's like embarrassing to even think about this but like, I think I described on some of the episodes recently that like, okay, we have respondent. You have a, you're a ZipMessage customer or user, you send something to your client or a freelance or someone, they can respond to you.

Brian Casel:

Now they are registered as a respondent user. So then they don't yet own their own ZipMessage account but they they can have their own logins so that they get notified. But we have a flow for them to go ahead and register their own zip message account. So respondent converting to a zip message account owner. I thought that I had good tracking when I would see like a notification of when a free sign up happened, I could see whether it came from a respondent or somebody brand new who came to the website and signed up.

Brian Casel:

And I found out last week that the flow for respondents registering their own account was broken, but not a 100% of the time. Which is like the worst kind of error. It was also mixed in with some broken tracking. So I believe that there were many respondents signing up that I was not able to see that they were in fact respondents signing up, right?

Jordan Gal:

You need to know that that might be one of your very, very key metrics.

Brian Casel:

Yeah, some were being tracked, but then somebody like a new customer who tried to sign up from a respondent to regular, he was the one who reported that like, Hey, I can't finish creating my account because I'm seeing this error. And that's when I identified it. Thank you.

Jordan Gal:

So shout out to that person.

Brian Casel:

Thankfully, you know, he mentioned it to me but like, then I diagnosed the problem and not to get totally into the weeds, like our test coverage should have caught this but like there was a certain part of our logic that wasn't in our test suite, whatever. And so I fixed it about four days ago now. And in the last four days, I'm seeing like probably double or triple the number of respondents converting to free accounts and converting to paying customers. Like clearly it's been working, but it was invisible to me for the last like two months, you know, but there was also some portion that I think couldn't even sign up. But at the same time, our overall metrics have been pretty good.

Brian Casel:

Like we've had our two best growth months in December and January. So like, again, it's like, I don't know. It's again, like, don't know what I don't know, you know?

Jordan Gal:

Yeah, I don't know. But you're definitely starting to get more information and it is not necessary to know why you are succeeding in order to succeed. It's not a requirement that you actually understand what's happening. I always think back to that because in my solar light e commerce business, like ten years ago, we had no idea why people were buying, but they were buying a lot. And then once we learned why they were buying and we had that reflected onto the site and the copy and the ads and so on, that's when things took off.

Jordan Gal:

It was the- The

Brian Casel:

flagpole light, right?

Jordan Gal:

That's right. That's right. Why? Why do people keep buying this friggin solar light for, you know, dollars 100? It's because it reaches it says because one bullet point says reaches up to 20 feet and that's how tall American flagpoles are.

Jordan Gal:

And then once we learn that we put on the site that everything clicked even more.

Brian Casel:

I think the oldest Bootstrap web listeners will remember that.

Jordan Gal:

Oh, out to Solo Light Store. Hell yeah.

Brian Casel:

On the other end of the spectrum is like the fear of technical issues. You know, I do get support requests or where they say like, oh, the video got messed up or I couldn't record. That's like one of my biggest fears with this business is that like those have greatly reduced and we've done a ton of work on making it more reliable but you know the weird thing that happens now is is sometimes people will will report an issue that I've just never seen happen with anyone else and I can't reproduce it.

Jordan Gal:

Right and you just don't know if it's happening everywhere or what.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. I mean, it's usually that person's weird webcam or something like that, but like, yeah, it's like stuff like that, that happens on the client side is so hard to diagnose, you know.

Jordan Gal:

Well, you're not going to get to zero, right? None of us in software are going to get to zero bugs and zero issues, but you do need to remain underneath the line of too frustrating. And that line has not been determined yet. You don't know how sensitive or insensitive people are. We learned at Cart Hook that people were extremely sensitive to anything that gotten in the way of a sale.

Jordan Gal:

If the checkout didn't work and people couldn't buy, that was absolutely unacceptable. But on the admin side of things, oh my God, people didn't care about anything. They just wanted the functionality and we will have mistakes and mess ups and all that sort of thing. So the line that you'll eventually find, as long as you stay below that line and that line is affected, not just by tech and value, but also by goodwill and brand and love and all that stuff.

Brian Casel:

Can we dive into the metaverse or web three at all or no?

Jordan Gal:

Yeah. Come on. Let's do it. Okay. So I saw a tweet today by Kaylee Moore.

Jordan Gal:

She's a writer in the e commerce space. She's great at Twitter. She's cool. She's she's great. She wrote a tweet this morning, something about like basically everyone I've met over the past five years and all my friends I've met online more than the people that I've met offline.

Jordan Gal:

And she was like, I guess that's kind of an argument for this metaverse thing being real. And I think all of us are kind of experiencing in some way around remote work. I have friends here in Portland, but I talk to them on Slack. I see them once a month or two and everyone else in my peer group and that I care about, including my family, I interact with online, whether it's phone or online or WhatsApp or FaceTime or some combination of all of them. I think where this whole metaverse thing is going, the hard part is the second you say the word metaverse, people think about Facebook and they think about the annoying people on Twitter and think about all these things attached to it.

Jordan Gal:

But really it's just an improvement on what's already happening.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. I think that like folks like us who are obviously in the tech industry and we are definitely more active on social media and Slack and communicating remotely than, than even a lot of our friends that are our age, but not in the tech industry.

Jordan Gal:

Right. But look ten years younger and we're, and we're boy scouts. We wouldn't even know what we're talking about. We're still boomerang around, you know, around remote work and not seeing people that work for us type of

Brian Casel:

a thing. Yeah. It's easier for folks like us to see the path from here to mass worldwide adoption the things that we take for granted today, right? Like, I mean, we've started to see it in the pandemic where like my parents will use Zoom now.

Jordan Gal:

Because they wanna see their kids.

Brian Casel:

Where they didn't even know what Zoom was two There's years ago, that kind of stuff but like, I still, all right, the big question on my mind, whether you're talking about the metaverse or Web three point is what will it take? Because I'm optimistic on this stuff too, right? Right now it's obviously still super niche, right? Which which could make it a really great time to start investing in this kind of stuff, right? Especially if you believe it and and and if you could sort of see the pathway to how this grows and how this gets big.

Brian Casel:

That's my question though, like what is what shoes are gonna need to drop in order for for the for like whatever like web three solutions or applications or products or services or platforms to to spill over into the wider market. Because right now when I think about like, alright, if if anybody is building like a a new product, a startup product on web using web three technology And correct me if I'm wrong because I'm an idiot with this I I don't know any

Jordan Gal:

No one's a 100% right on any of this.

Brian Casel:

But my assumption is, okay, you're building a product, you're you're experimenting, that's cool, but your customers are the hardcore believers of of Web3 and crypto and metaverse stuff. Right.

Jordan Gal:

And it's like accomplishing something that could only be accomplished using

Brian Casel:

Yeah, like when you talk about like validating a market for a new product, your market is limited by only those people who happen to have an ETH wallet, you know, like

Jordan Gal:

Right, right. A hardware wallet off of an exchange.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Like most of the world does not have that and most of the world does not know what that is, right? So it's like, so what is going to need to change to get to the point where my brother who is not in the tech industry has a wallet, you know, for crypto? I

Jordan Gal:

think it's just, it's a matter of time. It's a matter of time. And it's just this inevitable drift toward things being more interconnected. And I think that's kind of what starts to add more value to end customers and end businesses. And then they start to care and they don't care how it's built.

Jordan Gal:

Right? No one cares if you're using Ruby or PHP. No one cares about that. The only thing that matters is the value that they're getting. And I think as it gets closer to that and focusing on the value that's being provided and not on the tech that the more mainstream it gets.

Brian Casel:

But that's my question. Like what is the value? What's the thing that's going to push it over the edge where?

Jordan Gal:

So I think what is already happening and what pushes it over the edge even more over time is the focus online. The focus of your possessions and your identity online over what's offline continues. And the more that continues, the more you start to care about ownership and what you can do with it and what it means. So right now people buy like a Range Rover and drive it around. And it's important to them in what it symbolizes, how they feel about it, how other people look at it, how other people feel about them because they drive a Range Rover.

Jordan Gal:

It's like we're human. This is the stuff that a lot of the stuff matters to us. When you start to look online and care about what you own there, and that becomes increasingly important, you start to care about ownership. When you start to care about ownership, you start to care about things like proving ownership and you start to care about interconnectivity. So when you think about someone who's into, let's just take gaming because that's always like ahead of things.

Jordan Gal:

Right now, the way it's been is if I use, I don't know, here's my ignorance line. I'm going to cross over it and ignore feeling stupid. If you're, if you're in, if you're into Fortnite and you are spending money there buying stuff, that becomes part of your Fortnite identity. And that is valuable, but only inside of Fortnite. When you can connect Fortnite to other games and the things that you're buying at Fortnite are also useful in the other games.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. I mean, that is where we're seeing a blow up is gaming, right? Correct.

Jordan Gal:

Because that's just like ahead of things.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Then again, it's like the question of like, okay, like like I'm not a huge gamer. Right? But like, but my kid, my seven year old daughter is actually like is super into playing games and and making games and stuff like that. And like, I could totally see how, obviously people in our generation are gamers too but like the next generation is even more, right?

Jordan Gal:

So Right and and their lives are more online.

Brian Casel:

Then the question is like, okay, like we've seen like the sort of like experimental stuff of like remote like work places and these like virtual spaces and all that kind of stuff. But like, how does that become mainstream?

Jordan Gal:

Yeah, think it just keeps going. If you think about something like Instagram, what is the fuel behind Instagram? It's showing off and getting a reaction. Whether it's our age, like here are my three kids when we went skiing and people like it and that feels great. And it's the same thing if I'm, you know, I don't know, some muscle bodybuilder or some girl in a bikini.

Jordan Gal:

It's kind of all driven by these human emotions. So if you just keep going with that, just extend that and take the Range Rover analogy and get that into the profile picture and then your possessions. And then it starts to work across other environments. And so they're not separate right now. Everything is separate.

Jordan Gal:

You literally go to a website and it doesn't know who you are. So it says, I don't know who you are. I don't know what your preferences are. I don't know what your payment info is. I don't know anything about you.

Jordan Gal:

So log in and then I'll know who you are because we'll take your information from our database and we'll use it to tailor the experience to your Facebook account or your purchasing account on Amazon, take that identity and just expand it so that you anywhere you walk around the internet knows where you are. It's not one database. It's a shared database and it gives you a control on like, you know what? I'm kind of sick of Facebook. I'm taking my stuff away.

Jordan Gal:

You can't know who I am anymore.

Brian Casel:

That's exactly my next question on this, right? So obviously identity is so tied into this whole thing, right? And people talk about Web3 and in the metaverse and everything as like the beginning of whatever it's web three point zero, what comes after web two, right? Web two was Facebook, Google, Twitter.

Jordan Gal:

Right. Web one read, web two read write, web three read write own.

Brian Casel:

How significant are the current huge companies? The Amazons, Facebooks, well Amazon is kind of a different beast, but like Facebook, Google, especially those two and Microsoft. Like how significant are they gonna be in the Web three metaverse

Pippin Williamson:

world?

Brian Casel:

Right,

Jordan Gal:

it's hard to imagine they just throw up their hands and say, well, guess we missed it and I guess we'll go away and die. Like that's just not gonna happen. They're going to acquire. They're going to partner. They're going to do their own initiatives.

Jordan Gal:

They're gonna they're gonna be involved. They're they're they're not going away. Right? Zuckerberg is no fool. You can say whatever you want about him, but he ain't no fool.

Jordan Gal:

And watching him turn the entire company literally into Meta as a new name, as a new identity, as a new brand points toward what he thinks is going to happen and what he is uninterested in missing. What he wants to do is he wants to host the party. He wants all these different environments, running inside of his world. And he can do that in a more interoperable way because he knows if he keeps it completely closed the way Facebook is now, then he really might miss it. But if he opens up and you can use your Facebook identity, the largest bank of identities in the world ever, and you use that as your core identity and everything goes into it between your possessions and your payment info and your shipping info and your privacy and all the, all these personal things that you want to hold onto.

Jordan Gal:

If you can take that as your Facebook identity, as the central layer, and then start walking around the internet into these different places, but using that as your core, then he wins. So that's, that's, he doesn't want to miss out on that. And you have all these other much more ideologically driven technology people right now saying this is the war is will web three be corporate owned or will it be user owned?

Brian Casel:

That's the battle. See that's where like, it is hard for me to see how it's not, how it doesn't end up still being. Like I think that Facebook and Meta the company will be, I know I'm no fan of Facebook and Zuckerberg in general, but like I don't see really any other like easier path than for that entity, the meta company to be the bridge to get my parents.

Jordan Gal:

That's right, the onboard.

Brian Casel:

That's right. Friends and family who are not tech, right? Like that's the bridge. I mean, you know, talking about like identity then it's like, you know, Google is so tied into our, we all have Gmail accounts and Google accounts now and it's like, you know, where does that fit in? And Microsoft seems to kind of dominate on the gaming side.

Jordan Gal:

Yeah. And Microsoft is phenomenal what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. So here's the interesting thing about the Instagrams, Facebooks, Google's. That model monetizes through advertising because it doesn't know how else to monetize.

Jordan Gal:

It says we build a thing that attracts people. And when you attract a lot of people, advertisers want access to them. You combine that with the data and then you have a money machine. So the potential in keeping those entities out of Web three point is that the business model is so upside down. It's so flipped that it doesn't rely on advertising and it can rely on other types of models that that's where the opportunity is.

Jordan Gal:

Because the web being monetized by ads was like the original sin. That's like, that's what, you know, marketers ruin everything, ruin the internet too. So these new models are interesting. I mean, look, this is, this is what I'm doing all day.

Brian Casel:

Yeah,

Jordan Gal:

I'm looking at, but for us, it's commerce, but people are doing this all over the place, right? We look at it and we say, Hey, Shopify monetizes your payments and then keeps you locked into a platform and then keeps all the money for themselves and their shareholders. And we say, Okay, well, what if we flip that and let the merchants own a share of the network instead of instead of us keeping it all. Right. So we're trying to flip a model in a similar way that others are around things like mirror, right?

Jordan Gal:

Which is like a decentralized like medium and things like Audius, which are a decentralized Spotify. So there's a lot of these things happening that are just trying to invert business models and say, what, I wonder what happens if we share a portion of everything ownership with the users.

Brian Casel:

If you participate in the platform, if you use the platform, you gain- You gain coin in that.

Jordan Gal:

Whether it's play to earn in the gaming world or it's removing the middle layer like a Spotify and just giving all the money directly to artists.

Brian Casel:

I guess as a fanboy of Apple, obviously it's like, I would still like to see I know Apple has been going down the road of like services, services, services like let's, you know, they they keep trying to up up that revenue stream but like if I would still love to see them remain like the premier hardware company in the world, you know, making the best computers, the best phones, the best goggles, the best cars. Like, if they continue to dominate on hardware and let Facebook do whatever the hell they're gonna do with Meta and like.

Jordan Gal:

Yeah, no, I hear you because that's the portal, right? I'm on an iMac right now as we talk and I have my phone next to me and my access to any of this stuff comes from the hardware. And I agree it is, life is better with Apple devices. It just is. So hopefully they can maintain that and not let that drift.

Brian Casel:

Yep. Yep. All right. Well, was the one.

Jordan Gal:

We did it. We did it. We got through an episode that we had no idea what we were talking about. I have a call in nine minutes. I'm gonna continue on my good day and ride it down to the sunset and have a beer at the end of the day.

Brian Casel:

Hell yeah, dude. I'm off to big snow tiny comp in Vermont on Monday. So I'm super psyched to get back to doing that.

Jordan Gal:

Nice. And Don't tell my kids, but we're going to Disney next week that they don't know about. First time with the fam. We're gonna we're gonna just blow their mind by coming home from coming home from school. And there's just gonna be a bunch of luggage and we're gonna be like, kids, we gotta

Brian Casel:

be Oh, that's awesome.

Jordan Gal:

I know. I'm so excited. Definitely gonna, I told that to my parents now, asshole. Sorry. You you better film that.

Jordan Gal:

You're gonna set up a phone and you're gonna record that because we need to see that.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so no bootstrap web.

Jordan Gal:

I will be running around trying to get myself onto the Star Wars ride in Disneyland, which I hear is good.

Brian Casel:

We went a couple months ago and my daughter and I waited about one hour for for the two minute ride on Splash Mountain. And it was it was amazing.

Jordan Gal:

We were doing some reading last night about, like, these new systems and, like, I don't even Genie and Genie Plus and Genie like LinkedLine experience. And then we started finding websites with like these like graphics around wait times. Like, damn.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Oh dude, the tech on Disney is unbelievable. I mean, only went for half a day. Like that's all we need. Like we're, we've had enough, you know, but like.

Jordan Gal:

Yeah, that's what I was rooting for. Instead I got three days.

Brian Casel:

Yeah, but it is really incredible. I mean, and I've read articles about what they do behind, like they have a whole underground network of tunnels and headquarters underground where they like, you know, the wait times are too heavy over here, let's fire off a parade over there and Like attract

Jordan Gal:

it's crazy. That that's intense. We're going to the one in California, which I'm happy about. Disney World is like a city.

Brian Casel:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Were down. Weather.

Brian Casel:

Nice, dude.

Jordan Gal:

Well, great to talk. Thanks for listening, everybody.

Brian Casel:

Alright. Later, folks. Yeah.

Creators and Guests

Brian Casel
Host
Brian Casel
Building Builder Methods. Co-host of The Panel
So Meta
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