Products For Builders
Hey. It is Bootstrap Web. We're we're back after a week off. Jordan, how are doing, buddy?
Jordan Gal:We are doing well. Had a long week. I'm I'm a tired dad. Yeah. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Been on my
Brian Casel:own for a week with You're on your own this week. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. My wife's sister had a baby, so she's visiting the new baby. And I have been on my own Monday to Friday. It was a big busy week.
Jordan Gal:I got through it. I didn't do takeout more than once. You know, I cooked dinners Oh. The whole thing.
Brian Casel:That's impressive.
Jordan Gal:Yep. There wasn't too much fighting and crying. Things worked out. People got to places on time. I didn't miss any rides.
Jordan Gal:It's a lot of rides.
Brian Casel:Hey, those trains run on time. Good.
Jordan Gal:I had some help, Some remote help from my wife but we made it through.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I I left my wife with the with the the girls last week because I was in Cabo, Mexico. I I was you know, I had to suffer through a week at an all inclusive five star resort in in Cabo. Yeah. You
Jordan Gal:know? So that sounds horrible. I saw some pictures. Whatever's going on at that conference seems like
Brian Casel:You know? All the right things.
Jordan Gal:Like Chris. That conference looks like so much fun.
Brian Casel:Hey, you know, Chris Lema really I talk about it every time I go Yes, this is maybe like my fourth or fifth time going there. I ended up I was sort of like a last minute attendee but I ended up being one of the speakers. I I I sort of stepped in for someone. And yeah, it was it was such a good time and and Chris really does it well. Like, from the curating of the attendees, I think it's about 50 people who go down there.
Brian Casel:He does a He he goes deep on like vetting every application and making sure it's the right group. It's like half returning attendees, half new people. So I knew I I I got to you know, meet some some friends in person that I've that I've known for a while. I've got to hang out with some returning people. Met a bunch of really cool new people.
Brian Casel:The structure of it, know, full full all inclusive, like really one of the best resorts I've ever been to in Cabo. Amazing resort, amazing restaurants. Pools and beach are incredible. What he does is like half the day is like workshops. Quote unquote workshops but we're like waiting in a pool Yes.
Brian Casel:Yes. Talking about business. And then a lunch. And he actually puts you together with lunch groups who like fit your, know, fit whatever you're working on. And I had an incredible lunch group with a couple other SaaS people.
Brian Casel:And then and then the afternoons are totally open but what that means is like everyone's just in the pool with drinks talking more business, you
Jordan Gal:know. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And then dinners. It sounds like fun, man.
Jordan Gal:Workouts in the morning.
Brian Casel:And and we had workouts in the morning Yeah. Great. Three days in a row, 7AM. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I have to ask. I have to ask. This is Cabo Press. This is WordPress adjacent. Oh, yeah.
Jordan Gal:How I mean, it feels like it's turned pretty dark and negative in WordPress land. It's not a little date between a company and automatic. It feels it feels like it's in a really bad place.
Brian Casel:It it is. Yeah. This conference is It's historically very WordPress, so there's still a lot of that. There there's definitely a lot of people who are just not in WordPress like like me. Sure.
Brian Casel:But yeah, there's a lot of people. And so I got to actually talk to a bunch of people who are in like pretty large WordPress ecosystem companies. A few people who are starting things up in WordPress land. There are many agency owners there who who work in the WordPress ecosystem. So
Jordan Gal:How's
Brian Casel:the I definitely got a feel for that plus what everything else that we're seeing on Twitter and all the I mean, every with this thing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. People yes. I I don't really know. I don't know if it's any point in like talking about it, I I assume I assume it was it was pretty it's pretty tough going over there. You see people who still wanna work there staying.
Jordan Gal:They kinda sound like they're hostage. It it you know, you can read through the tweets, not good. Then you got
Brian Casel:I mean who
Jordan Gal:are like are contributors to WordPress core who are leading the project. You got private companies. You got people taking sides.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I definitely I'll just report on like my observations. These these are literally not even opinions. Just what I'm seeing. One, this this isn't even specific to CaboPress.
Brian Casel:Just in general, I I know people who run in like significant companies in the WordPress ecosystem. I won't name them. But yeah, they're they're not not enjoying this and they can't really talk publicly about their opinions. Like Too dangerous. Some of them talking about like how yeah, I drafted this whole blog post about it but I can't publish it.
Brian Casel:Stuff like that. And then yeah, just talking to people at Cabo Press and elsewhere, I'm definitely seeing a trend multiple times across multiple companies. There are some who are like well established companies in the WordPress ecosystem. They are taking active steps to spin off and try to detach themselves from WordPress. That looks like these are well known brands and they are going through a big rebrand to to say like, we are something new now.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Or they're doing something like taking a version of their product or service and spinning up a new version of it off to the side under a different brand
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:That's like not WordPress.
Jordan Gal:So it's like risk management here. Both reputational, what you say publicly, where your Yeah. Company focuses, what I feel like I've seen people start looking at different frameworks and different
Brian Casel:the other thing that I'm I'm I'm seeing is startups. Right? So like people who are in the process or have been planning and working on starting up a new product or service into the WordPress ecosystem
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:They're actually changing their roadmap and changing their their plans. Sometimes changing their name to say like, this pro I'm still doing this product but it's not it's not for WordPress or it's not just for WordPress.
Jordan Gal:It's Okay.
Brian Casel:It's separate or broader or like I I'm just seeing that with like with multiple like so we're seeing like like because it it if I if I'm bootstrapping a new product Yeah. I'm not doing it in WordPress today. Pretty rational. Like that's not something I'm gonna do.
Jordan Gal:It's it's not like a vindictive thing. It's a it's a rational decision to say I don't think I wanna bet the same way I'm watching other people that bet, you know, years into this ecosystem. Yeah. It it definitely brought up a lot of like Shopify memories. I saw a lot of people kind of trying to define platform risk as a very specific thing.
Jordan Gal:Like, hey, if the platform doesn't do x, then there then it's it can't be considered platform risk. I thought back to my experience and how what's under the surface is actually much much more damaging than what's explicit. Meaning, these thoughts, these these like decision processes that are impacted by fear and by intimidation and by rational calculation, that and those changes overall are bigger than the actual you must remove this from your website. You can't do x. A lot of these things we did with Cardoc and Shopify, they were just they were just warnings.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Just just a gently worded request from the platform and you're put in a position of that sounds like a request but there is no option. There's only one option to that request. You can't say no thank you. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And I think that's that's happening a lot. At some point during the week, I felt like it was so kind of ridiculous. All these crazy screenshots, people getting banned from Slack.
Brian Casel:I'm like The screenshot thing. It's really crazy. Dude, that
Brennan Dunn:would like and by the way, that's like one of
Brian Casel:my most popular tweets ever apparently. It's like over, I don't know, like a thousand likes, 600 likes, something like that. Like
Jordan Gal:What is it? What did you post a screenshot or something?
Brian Casel:I It was just a spur of the moment because it This happened the other day. We want You know the screenshot that's going around of the checkbox? Yes. To log in to the word Yeah. Press.org back.
Brian Casel:So if you're a contributor to wordpress.org, now when you log in to contribute, you have to check a box. Okay. To say, I I think it says
Jordan Gal:like Was was that you spreading the screenshot?
Brian Casel:No. There there there was this screenshot of that check that says like, I am not affiliated with WP Engine. Yes. Or something like that. Right?
Brian Casel:I I don't know the exact word.
Jordan Gal:So crazy.
Brian Casel:And I I saw those screenshots floating around. Was like, oh, that's a funny joke. Like, somebody photoshopped this thing. Yeah. That's silly that Like, imagine if they put a checkbox like
Jordan Gal:That would be
Brian Casel:so crazy. That would be crazy.
Jordan Gal:Uh-huh.
Brian Casel:And then and then I like And then I saw someone else do it and someone else do it. I'm like, wait, is that real? And I looked at it. I'm gonna see if it's still there right now. You yourself?
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I think it is and I I saw someone get banned from Slack for asking questions about it and saying, hey
Brian Casel:Yes.
Jordan Gal:Like, is this gonna be remembered in some way? This is pretty weird for someone's like career.
Brian Casel:For sure.
Jordan Gal:Someone looked at the source code and was like, yes. That's being flagged in the database as this person signed in.
Brian Casel:So as soon unchecked. So as soon as I I realized like, this is actually not a joke. This is actually a real thing. And I'm looking at it right now.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's a check. So you're logging into WordPress. There's a checkbox that says, I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way financially or otherwise. And I and when I when I was like, wait a minute. That's not a joke?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. What What is that? And there's no way. That's not lawyer speak. That's just some dude.
Brian Casel:And you know what you just said about like what Okay. Like we could What I said earlier about like there's startups who are changing their plans and there are big companies who are who are spinning off new brands. That's real. But who I really kinda feel for are the independent professionals. So think about people who work for agencies.
Brian Casel:They're not even like the owner. They But they are people make living. Who have Who make a living. That their their professional career is in this industry and maybe their agency just happens to have clients who are hosted on WP Engine.
Jordan Gal:Right. Maybe they're an affiliate or who know who knows? So they just Or
Brian Casel:or they have a site or two on WP Engine or whatever. Or maybe they've they've contracted for somebody who works with WP Engine. So if Are are those people expected to not check this box Or check this box? Or no longer contribute to wordpress.org? Or like what are they And and it's like they're not asking for this.
Brian Casel:They're not trying to take a side here. Like there there are these screenshots of people getting banned from from I guess there's like a WordPress Slack.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's the Slack group I've talked about that I that
Brian Casel:I'm Yeah. I I saw those screenshots too. And it's like, they're they're asking in the most polite way, like, please advise. Like what am I supposed to do here? Does this impact me legally in any way?
Brian Casel:Like I'm just trying to do my work as a professional. What's the deal with this checkbox? And I mean like, because now these people have to literally think about like, okay, do I need to change companies? Do I need to change careers? Do I need to do something differently than I have been?
Jordan Gal:Like Mhmm.
Brian Casel:It's just a total mess, man.
Jordan Gal:It's it's really it's not it's not good. What I started to feel toward the end of the week was there's gotta be a silver lining. There's gotta be some good that comes out of this with people just diversifying their efforts, looking at other platforms, making other platforms better because of it. Right? Like like, there's gotta be some positive that comes out of this because it it is like a moment of like creative destruction Yeah.
Jordan Gal:In in some ways where this ecosystem just got just shook up all over the place and what pops out on the other end, hopefully, there's a bunch of good stuff that comes out of it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, you could make the argument that like almost, you know, yeah, platform risk, there's all different degrees of it. There's different flavors of it. But you could make the argument that like, literally all of us have some form of platform risk. Mean Okay.
Brian Casel:And and it's also on my mind because the new product that I'm working on is I'll I'll actually announce it here.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But I But it's not lost on me. Alright, so I'll talk about the product more in a minute here. But it's instrumental. Dev and it's basically components, a components library for the Rails ecosystem. And And it's definitely not lost on me that like, I'm building a product for the Ruby on Rails ecosystem, which is an open source thing with one highly opinionated individual at the head of this thing.
Brian Casel:Yes. Where have we seen that before? You know But did
Jordan Gal:you see did you see DHH?
Brian Casel:Yes, I did.
Jordan Gal:I thought I'm sure you did. That that warmed my heart.
Brian Casel:That sure did. It sure did. Very happy. You know? And I I think it's interesting, at least the ones in my purview are like DHH with Rails, Taylor Atwell with Laravel
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And Matt Mullenweg with WordPress. It's interesting because these are three very very widely used open source software platforms. All three of them have a single individual at who who's leading the ship. And all three of them And you know, course like all three of them are like highly opinionated in their own way.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:They all have three completely different approaches to leading the way here. You know? We see what's happening with Matt just
Pippin Williamson:Right.
Brian Casel:We see that. Ideological like just kind of a a mess over there.
Jordan Gal:Is well known. How would you how would you describe Taylor's leadership
Brian Casel:I mean I'm less familiar than people who are really in Laravel. Mhmm. But like my observation is like he he might be the most effective of the three. I think. He's I think he's probably the most successful and the most effective at what he does in in that.
Brian Casel:By the way, Caleb Porzio Mhmm. Who who created LiveWire for Laravel and he just came out with with Flux UI for Laravel. He had a really good podcast on his solo podcast where he compared the Rails ecosystem to Laravel. That's a really good listen. Cool.
Brian Casel:And he talked about the leaders, Tee, BHH, and Taylor Mhmm. And their different styles and whether it's like whether Laravel is a cult or is Rails a cult and all this stuff. It's it's a really good listen.
Jordan Gal:I don't think it's surprising that they have three individuals at the helm. It's not
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's almost I think the thing that Taylor does really really well and and has done is he really centralized the the Laravel ecosystem. Like brought in, really embraced these businesses. These these like products in the Laravel ecosystem. If you go to laravel.com
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:There is a navigation menu and you're being linked to Larocast. That's a that's an independent product by by Jeffrey You're you're being linked to to Livewire. You're being linked to all these different products that are that people are making livings on. Right? So so that's very different from WordPress.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Right? WordPress like since day one has been really kinda anti like like paid products in the ecosystem in a way. Like they you know, they they discourage and things like shame it like
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Should have been embraced. It was. Exactly. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Like very clear
Brian Casel:and Laravel has and Taylor has taken the opposite approach of like, hey, let's we're all a family here. We you know, we and it's And we went together. And and look what we see. We Laravel has one of the most thriving ecosystems on on the web. Think Rails is interesting.
Brian Casel:DHH obviously has a lot of opinions. People love them or hate them. I think a lot of Rails developers love building with Rails as do I. That's my preferred platform to build things on. It's not as It's weird.
Brian Casel:I guess it's like somewhere in the middle. Like Rails is not as embracing of like products or businesses built around Rails that that aren't 37 signals.
Jordan Gal:Less centralized.
Brian Casel:But they are not But the but the they are not like it's not like WordPress where they sort of push them away or try to deny them Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Access. They're trying to harm their
Brian Casel:businesses in any way.
Jordan Gal:Rails feels looser and more laissez faire, more, hey, like we are ideologically open source and therefore like we just do this and we don't know what happens after that. You can go off and do whatever you want.
Brian Casel:That's worldview. And and I there's a there's a freedom and and openness about that that is refreshing. But at the same time, it does have some Like if you compare the Rails ecosystem to the Laravel ecosystem Mhmm. Laravel ecosystem is just much more integrated and there's like tools for everything that you could possibly want. And with Rails, there there are tools for everything, but some of them are sort of like projects that were abandoned a few years ago or, you know, there It's Rails' problem.
Jordan Gal:Like there's no central like Yeah. Oh, trying to curate and Yes. Identify the best ones. Yeah. It's kinda
Brian Casel:cool approaches. And in my view from where I sit and what I'm doing now with the product, one of the big gaps in the Rails ecosystem
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:Is components. Right? There are a few well known like application templates like boilerplate templates. So like jumpstart is one, bullet train is those are probably like the two popular ones. There's not many what people think of as like components especially like front end components but also just like app So like in in Laravel land, the the new hot one is is Flux UI by by Caleb Porcio, the creator of LiveWire which is looks incredible but it's it's for LiveWire in in Laravel.
Brian Casel:Right? And there's there's Tailwind UI but that's really just like HTML and Tailwind. And there's a lot of other ones but there there are not many in the Rails ecosystem. And and so what I've done as a as a designer and builder in Rails is I create my own components. Like, take I I design and create my own with with like Tailwind and Stimulus and Hotwire and Rails.
Brian Casel:But I have to like That's a lot of time to to create that stuff and most developers don't really have both the front end and the back end skills. So that's the gap that I'm hoping to fill. And I And and that's what I'm building at at instrumental dot dev. Know? And and because like, it's something that I I wanna build as a product and I think that has It's like leveraging my byproducts.
Brian Casel:But what I actually see as the opportunity is an ecosystem that's still huge. Rails is still huge. But it is there there are gaps and there are it's very it's just fragmented. Right? Like, it's it's not as tied together as things are in in Laravel, you know.
Jordan Gal:Is there an analogy with the Laravel ecosystem? Is it like a tailwind UI?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I would say it's it's more like a flux UI for Rails. That that's sort of the the mental framework. I mean I'm saying it's gonna be as nice or as well done as what Caleb's been able to build. The stuff that he creates is incredible.
Brian Casel:But that's along the lines of what I'm trying to do for the Rails ecosystem. And and that's what I already have in my in my work here is I have a working library of components that I use in all of my projects. So I'm talking about and it ranges from front end to back end. So I have a lot of front end components like buttons and forms and drop downs and app application shells and navigations and modals and stuff like that. And and the associated tailwind and rails partials and stimulus JS and hot wire stuff.
Brian Casel:And then I also have components that are more like back end. Like a couple of the projects that I worked on recently use AI. Like like hit the open AI API. So now I have some like some some classes and and service objects and things that I do in Rails. So that I can easily implement AI features in a SaaS app.
Brian Casel:Same thing with like Stripe. Same thing with a bunch of other functionality that I would put into an app. So the vision for this is to release it probably as a library where you can pick and choose your own components. Maybe offering like a an application template to pull pull them all together in one thing. I I could talk more about how I think it'll be a little bit different from other components libraries and things that I've been frustrated with but
Jordan Gal:but you're underway at in instrumental. Dev.
Brian Casel:Instrumental. Dev. Right now, you can go there. There's an email opt in for early access and then I have a survey on the back end of that. And and if if you do build in in Rails but even if you're not in Rails, if you're if you're a builder, a full stack builder, I I would love to hear your feedback in the survey on that.
Brian Casel:You can even just go to instrumental.dev/survey if you want to.
Jordan Gal:And skip the email.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's fine with me. I'm really just looking for information. And I wanna talk about, I caught myself making a mistake.
Jordan Gal:Okay. A sign of maturity.
Brian Casel:Okay. So I was on the flight going down to to Cabo and I was thinking about this product. I was working on it on the plane. And I think I talked in the previous episodes about I've been looking for like non SaaS business models to to start building, know. And education was one of them.
Brian Casel:I I've been really interested in like these educational platforms, courses, not just a single person selling courses but like bringing in teachers and stuff like that. Community is another type of business that I've been interested in and these components. And my thought a few weeks ago was like, let's combine all three and instrumental.dev will be the place for people to learn how to build stuff and ship stuff. The people it'll be a community to connect with other builders and it'll be components to help you build. Right?
Brian Casel:And maybe it'll be for rails, maybe it'll also be for Laravel, maybe it'll also be for everything else and that's just too much. Right? Like I I caught myself with That's just It's it's not only so much to to build and and ship but it's also like that's three different problems. That's three different solutions. That's not a single solution for a single audience.
Brian Casel:Right? Okay. Education is like people If you're doing an educational company, you're marketing to people who literally want to learn. They wanna go from zero to one or they wanna go from here to there. Community is like, they just wanna connect with people and network and that's a different problem that you're solving.
Brian Casel:Right? And components, people are building projects and they need components to use in their projects. So like, people might come for the components but they might not care about the courses. Right? So and I realized it when I was writing, I always start with a sales page, like before I build anything.
Brian Casel:I I start to, with like, how am I gonna market this? How am I going to sell this? So, my starting point has been like designing and writing the the copy and the design for the for the sales page and I was I was writing it, I was like, it just sucked because it was like I'm writing it's it's too bland, it's too broad, it's not targeted enough, the the headlines don't don't hit. Because you're trying
Jordan Gal:to sell several different things.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, hey, you have this problem, end this problem, end this problem and that just doesn't work on a sales page. So, then I was like, let's step back. What am I actually trying to build here and what am I actually trying to offer? What Where do I offer the most value?
Brian Casel:It's it's the components. So now I'm rewriting the homepage to be like Rails UI components. You know? It's for Rails. It's it's not for Laravel.
Brian Casel:It's it's If you build with the stack that I build in which is Rails, Tailwind, Stimulus, Hotwire, that's what this is.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So the exercise of writing being forced to actually articulate your thoughts Yep. Helped you bump into, oh, well, hold on. I'm going too broad. I I gotta start more focused.
Jordan Gal:And that's what you avoid a classic mistake.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I have a new version of the homepage. It's not live just yet. Hopefully, today or tomorrow. The because now that the whole thing that I'm writing is I'm selling the problems and the benefits of this Rails UI components library.
Brian Casel:I can speak to the things that frustrate me about other components libraries. Right? The main one for me is like, most of these things are are selling, hey, we will make it faster for you to build stuff and ship stuff. And I think that is a benefit, but I don't think that they actually deliver on that because most of them are like, here's everything in a box. Just implement it and you have an up and running app.
Brian Casel:But the reality is people are not taking these app these boilerplate app templates and just turning it on and letting it run. No. What they are doing is they're taking them and they need to customize them. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:That's They need
Brian Casel:to take them and they need to adapt them and then they need to build on top of them and build features and tweak them and take out the things that they don't want and that's that's the play. That's the playbook when you're using these things. And the the components libraries and the app templates that give you too much all in one big box end up slowing you down. It Like we started one With one at the beginning of Zip Message and it slowed us down because it gave us too much and we had to undo and rip out too much. We're talking about weeks and weeks of extra developer time to adapt it.
Brian Casel:So so my vision for this thing is to give you components that are simple and clean and give you a lot of the structure that's time consuming. But but I also wanna show you, maybe in like video tutorials with each component. Like, here's how it was put together. And if you wanna take it apart, it's easy. You could do this this and this or you can configure it in this way.
Brian Casel:But I I I'm going into it with the understanding like, you are a developer. You work in code. So I'm giving you nice clean code that you can work with.
Jordan Gal:Like You're selling less the end state and more Yeah. Along with your process.
Brian Casel:We If people wanted an end state, they would just use a hosted SaaS product. Yes. You know, selling to developers who are who need to use their hands to build with stuff, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We just had this conversation yesterday internally. We were talking about our front end development and our UI because we're doing a big of of a lot of work on the onboarding. So these are screens that we just don't have right now. Right now we just dump you into the admin and then we give you a little intercom message that just say set up a fifteen minute call to get set up because Yep.
Jordan Gal:We didn't wanna build onboarding before we knew what we were talking about. And in that conversation, I made a comment. I said, I want this thing to come out the way it looks in Figma. Right? This is just an an annoying non technical CEO basically saying, it's so pretty in Figma.
Jordan Gal:Please make sure it comes out that way in the admin because sometimes it doesn't. And then you know you you could then you're spending time dealing with it. And then where the conversation ended up going was around what components are we using? Or what what are we doing to give ourselves a leg up and not have to do everything custom? And then the conversation starts to get into, well, if we grab stuff off the shelf, then it becomes heavy.
Jordan Gal:We need to customize it anyway. If you want to look like Figma, like you're basically asking opposite things. You're saying you wanna go fast as to use a UI library, but you also want it to look like Figma. Those are not compatible with one another. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So everyone deals with this internally and you have to make a lot of trade offs and you end up building custom stuff, then you end up like customizing things off the shelf. It's it's there is no straightforward answer. So what you're it to people who you know how they work.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a lot of like legwork and groundwork that I can provide that can actually save you time. Like it saves me time when I'm when I'm working in my projects.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But there's also like, it's it's it's This is the hard thing about designing and building a product like this because I There is a line in the sand where like, I know I could keep going. I could keep designing and keep adding more more design elements into this or I can keep adding more magic that's happening in the back end under the hood to make it quote unquote easy to just plug in. Yeah. But the more of that that I'm adding in, the These are these are more assumptions that where I'm assuming that you are gonna want this stuff. So I need to draw a line in the sand to say like, I'm gonna I'm gonna save you a lot of time but only up to this point.
Brian Casel:And and I and I'm leaving space for you to take it and run with it. Mhmm. You know? So like not over designing your positioning. Like like just having a very clean and almost like not stylized but just structured design.
Brian Casel:And and then like the back end logic. A lot of these component libraries, they try to make them work like magic. Developers don't want the magic. They wanna they wanna adapt it. They're gonna have to adapt it, you know.
Brian Casel:So that's that's the And and like Cool. That that's hard. I'm I'm still at the beginning of productizing it. Like, works for me. But I I'm still figuring out the technical aspects of like how do I make this something that I can release to other developers.
Brian Casel:And this is literally where I wanna get the feedback from other builders to see like which which components have you used? Where have you run into frustrations? How can I make this the easiest collection to actually use? You know?
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Yeah. A bit of a customer discovery, but not for the software product, more so to just understand how far you should go
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:In doing things for them compared to where where do you stop? Where where does your product stop and allow the developer take it from there?
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's an it's an interesting like product problem because it's like it's not like a SaaS. Like with Clarity Flow, it's a constant discovery of like, okay, you're a coach, what are you trying to do in your business? Let's go build a feature to solve your problem. This is more like giving you tools and like raw material and like to to help you go actively build stuff.
Jordan Gal:You know? So Cool. Well, it's great to see you up and running. Looking forward to hearing more.
Brian Casel:Hell yeah. What's up on your end?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So I wanna talk about a difficult topic that we normally don't talk about and that is letting people go. But I think it's worth talking about. We we let we let a few team members go this week. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And it was it was it's always difficult process, but it it made sense to us and I think it's just worth talking about.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Why why don't we start with like what can you share in terms of like Mhmm. What were the roles and yeah.
Jordan Gal:So, you know, you have to kind of explain this to yourself and explain it to your team members and explain to the larger team. And I I mean like the leadership like, right, this is not a small thing. You're you're eliminating jobs. So you can't just be like, well, we wanna save a few bucks or we don't think x. It's not, you know, it has to be more than that.
Jordan Gal:And the way I wound up kind of explaining it to myself and to the leadership and then to the team, and this I was helped in this thinking with a few peers. So I I started to get this feeling that we didn't have the right team structure and I started to go to a few peers that I trust and saying, what do you think about this? You know, I'm I'm real close to the problem literally and I just wanna get an outside perspective. Am I crazy? Am I not crazy?
Jordan Gal:What do you think? And I got some really really good feedback and and and the way it looked once I had more perspective about it was that we made a big evolution. The company changed. It morphed when we went from the rally checkout in 20 plus people down to nine people. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And pivoting and building rosy. So that is an evolution, a big change from one type of company to another. And a lot of things go with that. People go, but also layers go and management who people report to and what the process looks like. It changes.
Brian Casel:And actually, let me just pause there. So the the nine people who continued on Rosie, like what's the makeup of what what are the roles? It's it's mostly engineering focused or No.
Jordan Gal:Was pretty evenly split between several engineers
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:And then some product and then some go to market. And so what what ended up kind of forcing itself onto my desk, like, you know, you you can't avoid things that are like obvious because they have a way of intruding. They have a way of just coming back up. Sure. So now when we when we made that initial change and we started building Rosie, we didn't really know what type of product Rosie was, what it's like to manage this thing, what it's like to build it, operate it, and sell it.
Jordan Gal:You know, you just don't know that much until you're there. Mhmm. Now we're in the market. We have customers. We have revenue.
Jordan Gal:We have sign ups. We're looking at numbers on the conversion rate. We're trying to figure out, okay, what what do we need to do here? And when I look back over at the team structure it felt like we had not finished evolving. The company now that we know what the product is like, we know more of what we need, the product wasn't there.
Jordan Gal:It's not a surprise that we didn't get it perfectly right. We went from one type of product to another but it was lingering. The team evolution was lingering behind the product evolution.
Brian Casel:Okay. So what was the the need that wasn't
Jordan Gal:So so these are all three people that we let go were good at their job. Right? That that's so it's like the tricky difficult thing but we we That's
Brian Casel:always the hardest thing. Right? Like it's you know And you had like nine great people on the They they were there for a reason.
Jordan Gal:Yes, that's right.
Brian Casel:This isn't the kind of thing where it's like, oh, we it it was a thirty or sixty day trial and it's just not gonna work out. This is more
Jordan Gal:like We had, you know, we had two in the same position and now we have one because we only need one and this is the one that's right. So it's kinda different. So let me explain it because I think people will understand more in detail. Number one, we had a fantastic DevOps engineer. And if anyone needs a DevOps DevOps engineer, please let me know.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. At Rally, we had payments. We had vaulting. We had multiple integrations. We had, you know, a decent sized engineering team.
Jordan Gal:We needed DevOps was, like, critical. And then all of a sudden, now a few months into ROSA, we look over and we're like, man, this thing is not nearly as complicated. We're leaning on a bunch of APIs. We're gonna lean on even more a p like, everything's gonna turn into an API when it when it comes to LLMs. Like, every service is gonna just be an API.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And so that's one of these things where, I can try to justify keeping them on because maybe six or twelve months into the future, we might need more DevOps. But right now, that's not what the team wants. Then we had a a senior QA engineer, and they were amazing and necessary for Rally because you can't make mistakes, you can't have downtime, you can't have a deployment screw things up for two hours. It has to be perfect when it comes to payments and checkout. And all of a sudden now we look at Rosie and we're like, you know what?
Jordan Gal:I think the developer should be doing more QA.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And we just don't need the same thing. We'll probably need some manual testing and that sort of thing but you know, not a bunch of automation engineering.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And then and then and then a product manager, we we don't need two product managers for this. In in many ways, the product management was the hardest thing because
Brian Casel:You're starting you're starting to to describe the shape of my team with Clarity Flow. You you have a few more people of course, but like but
Jordan Gal:It's a tonic.
Brian Casel:Right? Well, yeah. And I think you're starting to describe the shape of my team and probably the majority of like bootstrapped SaaS product
Jordan Gal:teams. Yes. I think that's a good way to
Brian Casel:put it. You know, because like, yeah, there there's there's always a somebody in charge of product and some Sometimes it's it's a founder, sometimes it's like a lead or a head of product or something like that. Mhmm. There's a lead engineer. Right?
Brian Casel:Or a CTO. And then maybe one or two people. Three people working working with them. These are like full stack peep And a full stack engineers can do a lot of stuff. They they know how to like configure a server like the base At least the basics.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know you know That's right.
Jordan Gal:They know how to get things on the internet and keep them
Brian Casel:up there. And when we're talking about a bootstrapped SaaS startup, we're not talking about the scaling phase. We're not talking about Right. Solving problems to serve thousands and thousands and thousands of requests. We're Yeah.
Brian Casel:We're not at that level. So we don't need those people.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So it's it's like we evolved back into the atomic unit of a Bootstrap SaaS. Maybe a little more luxurious than that because, you know, because we can and we wanna do things a certain way, but we've shrunken down and now it feels like, okay. Now the company structure caught up with where we actually should be right now based on this product in this time.
Brian Casel:And so like like on the DevOps thing. I was saying I was saying just before like in the history of Zip Message and and Clarity Flow, we only brought on a DevOps specialist in as I remember only one case and it was like a one or two month project when we were migrating from Heroku
Jordan Gal:To like getting set up.
Brian Casel:Over to AWS to to get our our It was a it was a big migration. It was pretty technical. We had to set up a lot of stuff, lot of lot of different services and infrastructure. But it was a project and they finished up and now my engineers, my back end team can still operate our systems, you
Jordan Gal:know? Yes. Yes.
Brian Casel:And we have people and they have people that we can go to when we need more complexity.
Jordan Gal:That's right. That that's always out there. So it was a tough week on that front, but I feel comfortable in the decisions that went into it because they weren't taken lightly and and they make sense. And now we kind of can sit back and grow only when it hurts, where it hurts. And it's like we're being very efficient.
Jordan Gal:We're giving ourselves as much runway as possible. We are not hurting the company because of it. And very interestingly, right, and this is probably stuff we'll talk about next week, we are finding that we are able to buy customers. Advertising
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:In this realm works. And what that tells me is we can optimize that over time to understand. Here's how much we can spend. Here's what we need to convert from that spend in terms of trials, in terms of activation, in terms of conversion, and it's more of a it's more of a machine than a mystery. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:When we spend $400 a day
Brian Casel:Oh, that's exciting. Many sign ups.
Jordan Gal:We spend $800 a day, we get this many sign ups. Mhmm.
Pippin Williamson:Yep.
Brian Casel:What else on the team there? So like
Jordan Gal:So right now, I'll I'll describe it. Six people.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right? Myself, mostly marketing strategy product, that kind of thing. Sam on the go to market. So you know Talk
Brennan Dunn:customer success.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Customer sales everything. Mhmm. Then we have Rock CTO along with the front end engineer and the back end engineer. So we we don't we don't go full stack.
Jordan Gal:We we have two two specialties.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But that that sounds like a solid crew right there.
Jordan Gal:Right. Where it's like right. And and Rock does a lot of like what I would call like strategic engineering or like we need amplitude. We need to get this analytics set up to understand where people are dropping off like that's engineering work that Rock would do. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And he also does exploratory engineering. Like let
Brian Casel:me
Jordan Gal:go figure out what an integration looks like before engineers go in and start building innovations.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I I do the same thing as well. I so I have one full time back end Rails developer who And and she just knocks out the road map that I give her. Right? Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And it's just So I I I do all the scoping and design and architecture and just give her take Like we're we're building a big forms feature now. She's hacking away on that for the next few Cool. But we're also doing research. So I have another more senior engineer and I only bring this person in occasionally as needed when we need to do this like technical research for future planning of a very complex thing. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Rock and I love that aspect of his job because it'll almost it'll often start with my thinking and ideas, and it'll translate over. An example would be, Rock, we need to get our costs of the AI services. We need to get it down by 50% in the next three months. Like Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Just have that in mind. Yeah. Look around. That's what needs to be on your desk in some form.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and we literally had that project on on that senior person's plate about eight eight months ago. Like Mhmm. She spent two months like, how can we shave a couple $100 off of our AWS bill? You know?
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Like look into it. You you do
Brian Casel:different configurations, different services, different optimizations, and yeah.
Jordan Gal:And then and then number six on the team is Jessica. And this I think is one of the most interesting aspects of this change in company structure because Jessica's VP of product. Mhmm. But my directive, like my here's like my marching orders for lack of a better term is less product, more growth. And I mean growth as like an area of discipline.
Jordan Gal:So let's make the product management process as light as possible. Let's just get on meetings. Let's have a conversation. Let's write some requirements and like no big crazy process. We didn't like this scenario where developers almost ended up in a position where they were asking permission from product.
Jordan Gal:I I want the developers to feel more free. Okay. So it's like, Jess, we need less product process and a lot more emphasis on growth. Viral loops, sharing loops, what what's the conversion rate of each individual screen in the sign up flow, what do we need to do to improve that, how do we get activation faster, like all these things that are focused on the usage of the product, the sharing of the product, the adoption of the product, much.
Brian Casel:Got it. I I like that. So so it's like shifting the focus of that product manager role less from like Like it shouldn't really be like project management. It shouldn't be like That's right. What are you What are we delivering by Friday?
Brian Casel:And then what are we planning for next week. It's more about like what's working and what's not. Like the in the activation flows, the funnels.
Jordan Gal:Which experiment is next.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And right where it's almost like we we should demand that we get the benefit of being six people. Don't just shrink down to six people and say, oh now we're missing all these people. Get the benefit Exactly. Which is of being smaller tighter like one of the first thing that came to mind was like, we should get together. Like, we should get together.
Jordan Gal:We should have some fun and and get the cohesion and the value, the benefit from being a small team.
Brian Casel:I like it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So it's it's kinda fun. It's a it's another new phase inside of all these changes over the last year.
Brian Casel:Yeah, man. Exciting, dude. I I I like this whole transition. I I I've liked it since since you went to Rosie and then, yeah. It's it's multiple iterations and it and you're dealing with a new reality and you gotta keep rolling with it, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it.
Brian Casel:It's like that age age old thing. It's like what what got us here won't get us there and and that can work in different directions. That that's not just about scaling up. That's about transforming what's changing.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. And and You know, the the challenge of it, I assume just like myself, other people have the same thing. There are emotional barriers to get through. There are habits to change.
Jordan Gal:It's like you and what's going on inside of you as a leader
Nathan Barry:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Is like that's the limiting factor in all this stuff. How willing are you to admit mistakes and cause other people pain. Like, all all these things are like psychological and emotional but that that makes the difference between either never doing it, taking too long to do it, doing it on time, doing it too early, doing it too late, and and so on. So hopefully, I I got most of
Brian Casel:it right. It does remind me of something that I'm I'm going through right now also. I I feel like I am passing through some sort of transformation in my work, in my team. My consulting work, The Which is 1month.app. That's that's still how I position it.
Brian Casel:I'm building MVP products for clients. And that's been going well. And it started to really pick up in the last couple of weeks. And so today, I'm just finishing up one of those for a client. I have another one that is starting on Monday.
Brian Casel:And then I have probably two or three more that are very close to being booked for October, November, and December. Right? So these projects are starting to pile on a little bit. And when I was in Cabo, I was I was thinking through because that was like a week off to step back and say like how are things going here, right?
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And I was sort of on the fence between Alright, so the the problem or the pain point that I'm starting to feel very In a very real way every week is I wanna be building product. So I'm I'm always gonna be spending roughly 20% of my time on Clarity Flow with my team there. But then I I It's a high priority for me to be spending some portion of my time working on a new asset. A new product. I talked about instrumental.dev.
Brian Casel:That's what that is.
Jordan Gal:Right.
Brian Casel:But I struggle now to find the time to put into that. Like currently, what between the consulting projects and my Clarity Flow obligations, I really can only give it about like one good full day if if if you can even call it a full day of active effort of moving the ball forward on this new product. And one day a week is not enough. Can't really do much.
Jordan Gal:20% of your time, caller.
Brian Casel:It's even less than that probably. I like I I can't really push the ball forward with this new product with that with only one day a week. So I need to figure out how how can I make the consulting, How can I reduce that down from like three three to four ish days a week down to like maybe one day a week? Or or you know, yeah. Like make that another 20% and make the rest working on the new product.
Brian Casel:Because I was I was also debating like maybe I just wind down the consulting altogether.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And I could swing that. You know, like I have some runway that I that could last me a a bunch of months. So I could cut it out and try to go hard on this new product. But I don't like that option. I've done that before.
Brian Casel:I've gone all in on products before they're profitable and I don't like it.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:And and I don't like the idea of just like cutting off the the pipeline right at the moment where the pipeline is starting to heat up.
Jordan Gal:That's right. So what what do you
Brian Casel:because I'm I'm also starting to feel the the natural wave of demand and and word-of-mouth spread and clients are coming back to book more projects now. So like there's between the past clients coming back and new clients coming in through word-of-mouth or or new network effects like it's steady and I don't wanna cut that off. So the other option of course is to hire a developer. I have my team that I that I work with and I've already talked to them about bringing on another maybe two additional developers to work with me just on my consulting projects. And so that's that's what I'm gonna be doing is I'm I'm continuing to build out.
Brian Casel:I'm gonna continue to to take in new consulting projects and and book them out. But I'm This is the transition that's gonna be hard is figuring out how can I run these projects and still own them and direct them and put my design and architecture and direction and project management on them? Like I do that really well in general. Like like we have a really solid solid flow with Clarity Flow. But then multiplying that by like a second, a third, maybe even like a fourth project happening simultaneously.
Brian Casel:Like that's still taking a lot of my time to manage it all. So this is gonna be like a painful transition period where it goes from like me 100% solo, which is what it is now, to me plus one or two developers working directly under my direction. But I think soon after that, the next level is like bring in another manager or someone like me who can totally own projects without me.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. In many ways, it's an asset waiting to be turned into an asset.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's like, you know, it's it's like sort of like the agent the evolution of a of an early agency. I'm not but I'm really not trying to make it a a large agency. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That's fine.
Brian Casel:I'm trying to keep it small, but small doesn't have to be just me. You know? That's right. That's right. But I'm also trying to not have a situation where like we are unable to take in new projects.
Brian Casel:I'm not saying no to projects.
Jordan Gal:That's Right.
Brian Casel:You you to to be able to take take in the demand, execute it at a high level like we always do without sacrificing quality. But but have that consistent cash flow business happening, you know.
Jordan Gal:It's a hell of a challenge. It it is the Yeah. Classic challenge.
Brian Casel:Hell. And I I mean, I've done it before. That's right. It's it's hard. But this is also the type of business that I would still like to be run.
Brian Casel:Like, this You're right. Like, it is another asset. I'm happy to be building software. Like, that's what I do. You know?
Brian Casel:And and we're leveraging byproduct. We're taking these byproducts, turning them into components for the for the library. There's case studies, you know. I still have my own SaaS ideas that that I could So like during periods where we slow down, if I have an extra developer or or my extra time can go into other products where we're showing off the components library. Like, know, yeah.
Brian Casel:It's a mix of different things. All building software related but I I need to figure out how to make it like a smooth smooth on on the financial front and smooth on the stress level front without without overheating on any of those meters, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's a trip. Yeah. Juggling a lot.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Always.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Alright, my brother. That's a good episode. It's Friday. It's Shabbat.
Jordan Gal:Tomorrow is Yom Kippur.
Brian Casel:Yes. And league championship series. I'm about that.
Jordan Gal:I saw saw your tweet about about the Mets. I mean, things happen.
Brian Casel:Hell, yeah. Oh. Alright, brother. Have a great one. Later, folks.
