Probably fine
Hey. It is Bootstrap Web, 10/25/2024. We are what are we? A week or two away from election day here in America?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think we're one Scaramucci away from election day.
Brian Casel:That's a that's a great way to put it. Yep. How you doing, buddy?
Jordan Gal:Good. I am looking forward to the election being over. Yeah. Yes. Everything the whole country gets crazy.
Brian Casel:I know. It's crazy. Twitter gets up.
Jordan Gal:Life or death. It's either we win and it's, you know, and everything's gonna be glorious or we lose and everything's over.
Brian Casel:I know, man.
Jordan Gal:We're gonna be okay. We are gonna be okay. It is healthy.
Brian Casel:It's gonna be fine.
Jordan Gal:I think overall
Brian Casel:It's probably gonna be fine.
Jordan Gal:It'll probably be okay. It's most likely it turns out okay. Yeah. It's healthy seeing how engaged everyone is, but it does feel like it tips over into unhealthy when it's like demonization and everyone like, you're right and the other side doesn't disagree. The other side's crazy or evil or something.
Brian Casel:That that is the worst part of it is this like, it look, I I'm I'm in this I'm describing myself too. Like, I'm I did a tweet the other day, a political tweet, which I rarely do anymore.
Jordan Gal:I saw. I saw.
Brian Casel:Talking about who I'm voting for and why I'm voting. And it's I'm not voting for her. I mean, I am. But I'm not voting for her. I'm voting against him.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:And I and I feel
Jordan Gal:like Common
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's what most people in America If you can define the the political climate, everyone is voting against the party. Very few people are actually voting for their candidate.
Jordan Gal:Yes. I'm not voting for him. I'm against her side. Yep. I I saw a TikTok recently of a woman and she was like, I don't know where I'm supposed to be, but like this is what I believe.
Jordan Gal:And I was like, just sign me up for that political party. It was just like what I assume a very large chunk of people believe. Just like reasonable positions on a huge list of issues. Yep. Nothing extreme.
Jordan Gal:It's just kinda like, hey, I think this is totally fine. Do whatever you want, but not this. Sense, but not that.
Brian Casel:I mean, you're right. I think that that is the vast vast majority. The the the big middle, the big center of of of at least in America. I know it's absolutely for me, like there's a whole list of of policies that I do not agree with, the the Democratic Party, and then and then a whole bunch that I do agree with. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And a lot of stuff from Republicans that I do resonate with and I agree with their stance on things, this and that. I mean, this this election, I just I'm just not Trump. That's that's to me. Oh, completely understandable.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I often think of it as like as like a a rank of priorities, but the weight on each priority is super super skewed to the top few priorities. So if you have like 10 issues and you know, look, I'm I was born in Israel. I'm a Jew.
Jordan Gal:Like, okay, that issue is pretty damn high up for me.
Brian Casel:Of
Jordan Gal:course. And and I put a lot of emphasis. So it has like a multiplier. And if you're a young woman and you're single and reproductive rights are very important, like, goes to the top, but there's a multiplier on it. So going in and like judging based on who someone's voting for is actually it doesn't make sense to judge them on it.
Jordan Gal:It's like this list of priorities, background, parents, where you grew up. It's such a mix that to just assume a bunch of stuff is so unfair.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, because really you're you're not judging the per the other person's opinion on that particular issue. You're judging why do they weight that value so heavily. Yes. That's and that's a judgment on like their own values.
Brian Casel:Right. They can't do that. Like, can't just like because look, like, there's gonna be there's always, you know, 50 different issues on the table and we're never gonna agree a 100% with our chosen candidate. There's plenty of stuff that I don't like about the person I'm voting for. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But you have to wait different things differently and Mhmm. That's what the really the choice is. Right? What what always when it comes to, like, the these, like, political times, I don't agree with anyone who does not vote. I just think if you have the right to vote, use it.
Brian Casel:Just whoever you're voting for, just do it. Like like Yeah. And and I also don't get on board with the idea of, oh, I hate both candidates, so I'm not gonna vote. Or I hate both candidates, so I'm gonna vote or write in or or vote for this Really? Third party that has that has zero chance of winning.
Brian Casel:I I just don't get on board with that And line of thinking I am someone who desperately wants to get out of the two party system. I would be all for a a viable third party. I you know? Yeah. But there aren't any viable third parties.
Brian Casel:So you have to choose one. You know? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I I That's my totally understandable. It does end up being an individual choice. So I mean, last time, last election, I did exactly what you described. I could not bring myself to vote for him. I did not wanna vote for Biden, and I just left the top of the ticket blank.
Jordan Gal:And then I voted on all these other things. And especially locally, you can be
Brian Casel:Probably more of an impact.
Jordan Gal:It does have more of an impact. I mean, I have lived in extremely blue places like Portland, Oregon. But inside of the local politics, it still makes a difference on which which Democrat you choose, basically. But here in the suburbs of Chicago, it's kind of been very interesting. You live in Connecticut, but you live far away from the city.
Jordan Gal:Yep. The local stuff is both a mystery because it's kind of it's more difficult to get information on and be informed on, but it has so much more impact on your life, your family, your kids, the school,
Brian Casel:your Yep. So we were talking a bit offline about this. I'm always fascinated by the local vibe on as as we lead up to an election. And something I always look out for and I and I really paid attention to it starting in 2016 when it was Hillary and Trump. And then is is the yard signs.
Brian Casel:Right? Like, you you look at the yard signs. Okay. And and so I'm driving around my town here in Connecticut. So I'm in Suburban Connecticut, but pretty far away from the city.
Brian Casel:I'm not like, you know, I'm a I'm a good like out over an hour north of New York City. So I'm actually Connecticut is known as a blue state, but I'm in a, I would say, leaning Red county or or town Mhmm. In in my area. Right? So just driving around my town, like, are 100 clearly more Trump signs on lawns than Harris signs.
Brian Casel:And and just like by a lot, like, there's there are some Harris signs, but there are not only Trump signs, you also see the handmade Trump signs, the big ones. The the Okay.
Jordan Gal:Yes. The
Brian Casel:They'll nail them to a tree. They'll they'll do stuff, you know. Which is like, look, that's enthusiasm. And you don't see that on the Democratic side.
Jordan Gal:And then
Brian Casel:And back to 2016, I remember driving around and I saw zero Hillary Clinton signs. Not one. And this was at a time when, like, so at this time, like, weeks out, every single poll, every news outlet was like, Hillary's got it in the Yes. In the bag. There's there's no chance Trump can win.
Brian Casel:And I'm driving around my town thinking, man, there's a whole lot of these Trump signs, and I don't see any Hillary signs. That's weird, isn't it? And and what do you know? Yeah. You know, so that so ever since then, I've been very very tuned in to like what I'm ground and Cool.
Brian Casel:Here
Jordan Gal:is how would I describe it? Not okay. Was gonna say not a single Trump sign, but I stopped myself because I noticed the one Trump sign because it's the only Trump sign. Okay?
Brian Casel:Okay. So you're in a much more blue
Jordan Gal:are so here's the thing. We are incredibly blue because we're in in near the Chicago or in Illinois which is blue and Chicago which is beyond blue.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And the interesting thing about Chicago is the horrific horrific level of corruption.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:It is devastating, and it's so out in the open and so heartbreaking because it's just the schools that just get demolished Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And
Jordan Gal:all the money stolen from the schools. So it's like this very ugly sore that's kind of out in the open, and the mayor here is a hot mess. But where we are in the suburbs, this is highly educated, high income blue. And what that means is that every sign is for Harris, and every conversation I have not every conversation. Fifth call it 50% of the conversations I have are the same.
Jordan Gal:The wife supports Harris, the husband supports Trump.
Brian Casel:Interesting.
Jordan Gal:But you cannot put a Trump sign up. Mhmm. Because socially, it's unacceptable. Yep. Yes.
Jordan Gal:And that's a kind of interesting dynamic, you know, among this state, this location, and this, like, socioeconomic strata
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Where supporting Trump is seen as, like, beyond the pale. How how could you?
Brian Casel:Yep. People just avoid it and they put it
Jordan Gal:aside and they go into the voting booth in private and they vote for them.
Brian Casel:I totally know what you mean. And I I think that that sort of I think there there still is this, like, stigma, like, against Democrats, like, in in all in a lot of part of the country. Like, here too. You know? And that that was always sort of my assumption, like, why I don't see as many Democrat signs as as Trump.
Brian Casel:I mean, in in 2016, it was like it wasn't just that. Like, there was actually a lot more enthusiasm enthusiasm for for Trump. I think there's still some of that. But, yeah. I don't know, man.
Brian Casel:It's it's it's crazy out there.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Is. Well, another week or so and and we'll be done with it.
Brian Casel:It'll all be over. Well, or or it'll be just beginning for another three months of recounts. Who knows?
Jordan Gal:That's I I think what all of us agree on is just avoid some mess, some January 6 thing, some riding, like, please let us get through a nice, peaceful transfer of power. Maybe even a little respect, maybe even a little grace, God forbid. So
Brian Casel:that Right.
Jordan Gal:That's that's what I really hope.
Brian Casel:I mean, there's anything that should just be like off limits in terms of like controversy, it should be the counting of of votes. Like that that to me is like the area that's just like, come on. There there's so much bullshit flying around. Like, it it's a it's an election. Like, no one's trying to, like whatever.
Brian Casel:I I don't wanna get too
Jordan Gal:deep into the weeds of conspiracy theory, but it's like and this. So it's it's it is it is tough to find some consensus on
Brian Casel:Anyway.
Jordan Gal:Basic things. But one way regardless of how this thing goes, we gotta make a living, Brian.
Brian Casel:That is true, sir. We gotta
Jordan Gal:make and then some, because the other day, I had a conversation with my youngest, Daphne. She loves sushi, but she's in that phase of early sushi adoption where you don't eat fish yet. Okay. Cucumber rolls, avocado rolls, you you California roll. Right.
Jordan Gal:And I'm like, honey, there's a world out here that you gotta make the crossover to some raw fish. And I was like, tuna is the great starting point with salmon. And she goes, dad, tuna's gross. Tuna's cat food. And I said, kid, one day we're gonna go to Japan, and we're gonna eat some tuna, and we're gonna go to the market.
Jordan Gal:In my back of my mind, I was like, get busy, bro. Go make some money so you could take your kid and your family to Japan. Do these things that you wanna do in life and like
Brian Casel:That's right.
Jordan Gal:Really helps that visualization. Like, really helps. Because I think about it. I'm like, you know what that cost? Cost about $25.
Brian Casel:I don't want to Japan?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. A big ass trip with the family, you know, to Japan. I I think it's it's 15 to 25.
Brian Casel:You're right. Like, we're we're big travelers too, I I do gauge my current financial comfort on like, how readily just on a whim. We're like, let's book another trip. When's your next one? Let's let's just book something.
Brian Casel:Right. We're we're, you know, we actually just booked something just now and like it's like so that's that's the the meter in in my mind. It's not The willing it's not like literally like how much is in the bank account. It's like how willing are we to just
Jordan Gal:go somewhere.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. So I just booked tickets last night for DC. We we have a new niece in the family.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah.
Jordan Gal:Sister-in-law had a baby. Everybody's so excited. They're gonna come up here for the holidays for Christmas and Hanukkah. But everyone all my kids were like, we don't wanna wait two months. We wanna see this baby.
Jordan Gal:And we were like, you know what? Let's go for Thanksgiving. We have ten days off. Yep. And so that's one of those things.
Jordan Gal:I go, I look up some miles. I'm like, oh, this trip is like a normal trip. Right? Let's be honest. What's a normal trip?
Jordan Gal:Two to five grand.
Brian Casel:Oh, at least.
Jordan Gal:Right. That's like a normal little look, we're gonna stay with them. We don't rent a car. It's this very contained thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Once there's like flights and hotels involved like and kids, like tickets for kids, like, yeah. You're multiple multiple thousands no matter where you're going.
Jordan Gal:Right. So that's the normal trip and and and you you've read it's almost like the the emotional friction to booking that tells you Yeah. Kind of like how you feel about Yeah.
Brian Casel:Are we talking about road trips? Are we talking about plane trips? That's the Yeah. Well, my
Jordan Gal:wife was like, do you wanna drive to DC? I'm like, honey, it's sixteen hours.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's a far one.
Jordan Gal:There's just no.
Brian Casel:Absolutely. Last random bit on this before we get into business. Okay. I I kick myself for not getting on the the credit card flyer miles train sooner. So I you know, about a year ago, year and a half ago, I switched over all my cards to United.
Brian Casel:You know, United cards. I'm in the United program with Hartford as a United hub. So, I mean, I don't know why like, I was in Chase cards for all those years before that. But like Now you get mad. Like, it's just so much more economical to to book flights using miles and racking up the miles.
Brian Casel:And Yeah. And so now it's like like, you know, it's it's easy to get a first class on most trips throughout the year paid for. Like, it's yeah. That's good. Like, that's just my one tip to listeners.
Brian Casel:Like, it I think anyone in this industry who's going out to conferences and doing vacations with their family, just make sure all your cards, including your business card, are racking up flyer miles, not just, like general credit card points. Mhmm. You know? Yep. Commit to one airline.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the the great hacks that venture funded founders do is you you are running all the company's expenses on credit card and you are accumulating that personally. It is it is a cheat.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like that and that is one of the just literally the difference between any any entrepreneur like, if you're running your own business versus someone who who just has a w two job, like, we can just pull all those points Yeah. All those miles That's that's right. With the business expenses. Anyway.
Jordan Gal:Oh, yes.
Brian Casel:Let's talk about business.
Pippin Williamson:Yo. What do
Jordan Gal:you got going on? What what's up this week?
Brian Casel:So this week, one of my running themes and the stuff that I've been talking about on this podcast for the past year has been my off and on mostly off attempts at trying to get serious about content. I was talking about trying to grow my YouTube channel
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:That started and then sputtered and then started again and then sputtered. And and just in general, I I think that I need to be doing more content, like personal like me putting out content. And I think most of it has to be video based. I think that is the best way for me to grow my reach to distribute products. And and I I can get more into the strategy there.
Brian Casel:But like the frustration that I that I came into this week is like, man, how long have I been saying I wanna do more content, I wanna do more content, and I feel even more and more crunched on my time and my creative energy? Like I have a lot of creative ideas and content ideas that I wanna put out there, but I'm literally not publishing the content that I wanna be pressing publish on. Why is that? Because there's a bottleneck. That bottleneck is clearly me.
Brian Casel:So I need to solve that problem. So I'm gonna hire someone.
Jordan Gal:Please explain because I have this problem. I feel like a lot of people have this problem. How do you
Brian Casel:So, I have not made the hire yet. I'm talking to one one guy about this but I'm I'm still open to talking to people and bay basically, what I want to have is the ability for me to record or write content on a regular basis. Hit record. Like I literally have my good camera sitting right here. I should just be able to hit record, raw footage, put it into a Dropbox or something, hand it off to my content producer, and they do all of the editing, all of the whatever, create a thumbnail, write up the show notes, schedule it, publish it, send the thing send my written thing to the newsletter.
Brian Casel:If it if it's a blog post, then like do do the spell check and publish it. Like I just wanna I I only wanna be on the mic or on the camera or write the raw content in a page and hand that off. And everything else should be done. I don't wanna do post production. Right?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So the t ball analogy that we have described before. Set it up. Let me walk up. Take a swing.
Jordan Gal:Walk away.
Brian Casel:That's right.
Jordan Gal:You're gonna you're gonna attempt to to kind of set
Brian Casel:that up. I I want I just want to remove any excuse for because I I feel like every time I try to just create a video about something, I'll spend an hour at least, you know, like scripting and then and then recording and and delivering it. And then like another two hours editing it and getting it up. And I just can't do that. I have other projects to do.
Brian Casel:You know? Right. So I so that's the thought. So I I I am hiring someone who is mostly a video editor, but someone to to handle all the other legwork, The publishing, the cutting it into short form and distributing to different platforms and repurposing. All this kind of stuff, right?
Brian Casel:That's the role. I did wanna talk about my favorite approach to hiring people. Especially people like this. And and this goes across different types of roles. I I And it's this part time retainer model and a queue based system.
Brian Casel:Let let me talk Let me explain what I'm talking about. My my customer success person is on a flat monthly part time retainer. We don't have a a strict schedule. She just kinda shows up most days a week, not full days. She has other stuff going on.
Brian Casel:But she just takes care of what I need her to take care of in that role. She's hands she's answering customers' questions. She's talking to them on the phone. She's she's filing bug reports, all this different stuff. The video guy that I'm gonna be hiring soon, same sort of idea.
Brian Casel:Like, we're agreeing on a flat monthly retainer fee. I'm not expecting them to work full time. It's gonna be a part time thing. I don't exactly care how many hours or which days a week this person works. What I do care about is just I I'm gonna have a constant queue of new pieces of raw content, and I want him to be working through that queue and getting them published.
Brian Casel:And and it and we're not like a magazine. We're not like a newspaper where we have to be publishing by a deadline every single Monday. Like, not like that. Like, I don't care when exactly when things get published. I just want things coming out on a pretty regular basis.
Brian Casel:You know? And and that's that's basically it. Just like, I'm I'm not tracking hours here. I'm not necessarily paying per deliverable. I'm just saying, like, you're the person to work through my queue, and you can manage your own pace as long as we sort of agree that that we're publishing like a good amount of content on a regular basis.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So you can find some form of equilibrium. We we do this with the designer. We pay a flat amount. I don't track hours.
Jordan Gal:He doesn't track hours.
Brian Casel:There's no point in that.
Jordan Gal:Right. Is the level of work does it make sense? Then yes. You don't need to be one month you'll do more hours than you would have if you had paid hourly. One month you'll do fewer.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I really like the queue based approach. So like literally we have a Kanban board. So like it's it's extremely similar to my developer. How I work with the developer.
Brian Casel:Right? So like, I have a develop she's actually full time, but like, she just has a long list in her queue that I keep adding, adding issues to. We use linear, so I just add an issue to the bottom of her queue, and she's gonna get to it and then work it through the system. And different things take different amounts of time. That's okay.
Brian Casel:Whatever what and then I can I can reorder things? Like, if I want something to come out sooner, then I'll put that near the top of her queue. Or or less priority, then I'll put it near the bottom. But like, it's just a queue. That's all it is.
Brian Casel:And the same thing should happen with content. I expect to have a Kanban board, and I'm gonna continuously drop new pieces of raw content into the board And that and he's gonna take it through the rest of the stages, you know.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I'm very curious about this. I think this is a large and painful problem. Yep. And if the content comes out good, then I I mean, there must already be services that do this for people.
Brian Casel:Yeah. There's services that like do content for you. And of course, there's also like editing services. Sometimes I don't like those because they are too strict on like what you are purchasing and what they will do. They're productized services.
Brian Casel:Right?
Jordan Gal:Like I used
Brian Casel:to run one. So like, so we so we have to have our clients fitting into our mold. This this is why I I much prefer to hire individual freelancers or consultants or someone to just be my person. And and we can be flexible. We can constantly iterate on like, because I'm gonna have different types of content.
Brian Casel:Sometimes it's gonna be YouTube videos, sometimes it's gonna be a Twitter thread, sometimes it's gonna be a blog post, sometimes it's gonna be a mini course. Like, I just wanna put all that stuff into a big pile and have it, you know.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So you are you are not assuming, you're specifically assuming that there's different forms of content. It's not like Yes. I will give you a five minute video, you turn it into a sixty second video with editing post production and then go here. You're saying Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Sometimes it's gonna be written and you It's gonna be a lot a lot of different Yeah. I'm I'm very curious to see how it works. I think it's
Brian Casel:because this is I'm talking about like my personal content. Right? Mhmm. Like, it's not like a it's not like we're developing a quote unquote campaign for a like, here's what the campaign is structured around. We're gonna deploy this campaign to do that thing.
Brian Casel:Like, this is just me ongoing long period of time committing to like the long term. Like, I just need because like, I feel like my whatever audience and following has stagnated. And it's it's been like hovering around the same level of growth. Same email subscribers, same YouTube subscribers, same Twitter followers. And to me, that's like, I don't think that this should be important for most people.
Brian Casel:But in my case, I think it is important. Agree. Especially given the products that I'm getting into with instrumental.dev. Like one of the one of the challenges that I have right now with my current reach and audience is that like, a lot of people listen to this podcast, which is a pretty wide range of boot of like startup people and some are developers, some are not, some are more business focused.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Some are employees, I guess.
Brian Casel:You know? And so I'm I'm getting into building a developer tool. So I need to start to put out more opinionated content on how I build stuff. So development related content, design, product stuff. A lot of that is gonna be video based and yeah.
Brian Casel:That's okay. It's it's like a it's a priority. It's been a priority for a long time. I have not been executing on it so I need to hire someone and that's why
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm doing very interested to see how you work it out. Hell yeah. Damn it. Okay. You wanna hear about my week?
Jordan Gal:What do you got? I'm Jason Fried this week, baby. Speaking Chicago, I'm 37 signals. I am reducing. We are removing features.
Brian Casel:Adding by subtraction.
Jordan Gal:Yes. It's it's funny how we got here. I'll explain. And then the immediate reaction from everyone on the team. Like enthusiastic, yes.
Jordan Gal:Let's make it less complex. Let's reduce this other thing. That's not necessary. So okay. I've spoken about the last few weeks.
Jordan Gal:We are very focused on onboarding. Right? We fixed our sign up flow. That's new and who wants to go see it? Go to heyrosy.com.
Jordan Gal:What you'll see there is a multi path sign up flow that provides a preview of the AI voice agent before you need to create an account. So that's this is our interpretation of the sign up flow before account creation. And next up is great. You've created an account. Right now we just kind of dump you into an admin and say good luck and here's intercom.
Jordan Gal:Please get in touch with
Nathan Barry:us. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So we did that on purpose because it didn't make sense to try to build an onboarding flow when you don't know what you're talking about and that turned out to be right. We didn't know what we were talking about. We did not understand exactly how people thought about it, what their expectations were and so on. So good. It's ugly and our activation rate is bad and we're watching a lot of sign ups every day, like that's increasing, that's great, but we're it feels wasteful.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Because you're seeing sign ups get put in the admin and you know you're not maximizing. Okay. That helped put pressure on all of us to say, alright, we're ready to do this self serve onboarding that actually guides people through the setup. Now that we know who these people are, what they're looking for, what's important to them.
Jordan Gal:As we are finalizing that, that's now like being you know, it's over at the developers, like all the design decisions have been made, all that. That's now being built. That forced a lot of focus around features because if if you're looking at your onboarding and your guided setup flow, you're asking yourself which features are necessary for us to surface and to force some type of enablement, settings, something so that the feature is useful. Right? If we have a notifications feature, anytime a phone call comes in and Rosie gets the phone, what we were told was that you need notification.
Jordan Gal:Otherwise, you don't know that you're missing calls. Like, didn't didn't realize that. Our bad. You're right. So we built a notifications feature.
Jordan Gal:For notifications, you need to be able to turn it on or maybe have it on by default. And then you need an email address. You can assume it's the account email address, and then you can also put in a phone number to get SMS. Hey, you have a new call from Rosie. Click here to see the recording.
Jordan Gal:Okay. That feature you realize, oh, that actually needs to be in the onboarding. So when we looked at the onboarding and and and we're forced to make these decisions around which features are so important that we need to inject them into the actual guided setup and which features are now that you're ready here's this other stuff that you can do.
Brian Casel:That's a good one for activation too. I this is something directly that I think was helpful in Clarity Flow since the early days is the fact that we are notifying users when a new message is sent and when a message is viewed. Because it's it pulls them back in.
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Brian Casel:Like Right. On a regular basis.
Jordan Gal:Be able to do who else do you wanna notify. Right? The ideal is that we're sending out an email to 4 or five people every time a call comes in. Mhmm. Right?
Jordan Gal:To me, that's adoption. Because at that point in time, to take that away is painful.
Brian Casel:So Yep.
Jordan Gal:Here's right. Here's an email with the transcription and a summary of a phone call. Do you how do you wanna deal with that phone call compared to or you could not pay us and you could just handle that phone call yourself. So like I I love that setup.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So as we started to look at these features and try to understand which are really important and which are being put off to the side. What we con were confronted with was should we actually have these features at all? The ones that we're saying are not necessary for a guided setup. And we're putting over here as like keep fine tuning or you know keep going with your rosy setup. We started to look at those features very skeptically and said do we actually need the ability to transfer a call to a different phone number?
Jordan Gal:Is that actually right now?
Brian Casel:That seems nice to have.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's so if it's nice to have, should we put it in there as a nice to have? Or should we remove it and really nail down our base tier?
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And our base tier right. So it's almost like this synthesis of this information from different places because we've been in the market for a while now. We've got paying customers and they are opinionated. And they're not all super happy. Right?
Jordan Gal:Everyone's like, I want this. I want that. How come this doesn't work? And then you really start to pay attention to where the support issues are coming from. And then if you match up those support issues with a feature that doesn't feel necessary and essential because you just looked at your onboarding in that way, you start to realize, oh, wait a second.
Jordan Gal:Maybe this feature doesn't belong here at all. Maybe this feature should actually be pulled out and reintroduced later when we have a better understanding of the feature, more confidence in its ability to be reliably good, and maybe belongs in a higher pay tier. So all this stuff started swirling around and what really popped out and it it was it was Sam who really like introduced it all the way out into the sunlight because he's the one that speaks to customers all day.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:What he said was, I think we're a little off on our our product market fit search. It's not that people want a receptionist. That's a human replacement. It's that people want a better voice mail and they don't wanna pay for an answering service. So it's like this little shift toward toward being really good at taking messages.
Jordan Gal:Think about a phone call. If you call a local business
Brian Casel:and you get a voice mail instead of calling it like an AI receptionist, it's almost like a smart voicemail or something like that. Like a
Jordan Gal:Right. Right now, it's AI answering service.
Brian Casel:Uh-huh.
Jordan Gal:Right. Which is kind of like like the new headline I'm gonna publish today is like 10 x better than voicemail, 10 x cheaper than an answering service.
Brian Casel:Oh, I like that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's basically that's what that's what it is.
Brian Casel:I like that. Right.
Jordan Gal:So when we started to look at like that positioning, then all of sudden we start to realize, oh, the features for that are basically what we put into the guided setup. They're not these other things. Let's just start ripping them out of the admin and and launch not launch, have the sign up flow, the onboarding flow, the messaging, and the positioning for a smaller, tighter product.
Brian Casel:Man, I'm so excited to hear you talk about this. I dude, this to me, what you are learning here and making these adjustments, this is to me the most exciting part about starting new products and positioning and listening to customers and doing that figuring that out, man. It's that's the best thing because it's like we we always start with something that we think that we need to build in terms of like, what is this product? And our customers just think about it differently. Our customers put put the product in a category themselves.
Brian Casel:Whether we like it or not and whether we agree with how they categorize it or not, they are going to do that. And it's our job to figure out like, what bucket are they putting us in and how do we meet them there? You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. And and the likelihood that you have it right at first is low.
Brian Casel:Very low.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Unless you are building it specifically for yourself and there are lot of people like you, the likelihood is that you're a little off. So this the the way we are talking about this internally is this is our first adjustment in search of product market fit since being out in the market with our initial hypothesis. Yeah. We think people want an AI to answer their phone.
Jordan Gal:It was like our first broad
Brian Casel:And you can't get to today without shipping what you've already shipped.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. And all
Brian Casel:cannot figure this out with just customer calls or surveys or observations of a market. You have to actually put something out there and get real customers using your thing, and then seeing where's the friction or where's the drop off, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And and when I look back at the money spent slash wasted around getting people into the product, I realized that is the investment in this insight. That Yeah. To drive a bunch of people in through the system to sign up and then and then say no, wrong, or yes right but Mhmm. This other thing.
Jordan Gal:So it's just we're at like this incredibly exciting moment because what we're doing is when we launch the new onboarding on November 4, we are launching with fewer features. Yeah. So the onboarding goes there and we don't make the recommendations on these other features that you should go set up. It's like two or three things. But we're Yep.
Jordan Gal:We're eliminating four big features that you just won't be able to find in the admin at
Brian Casel:all. Right.
Jordan Gal:Right. So it feels like, oh, we have a chance to have it lined up. That our advertising and messaging all the way at the top of the funnel will be about these messages and voicemail and answering services, not about appointments and receptionists and all this other stuff. You'll get to the site, it'll talk about that. The sign up flow works with it.
Jordan Gal:The onboarding works with it. The feature set works with it. And I'm like, okay. Now now we're about to learn new stuff over the next few weeks.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's so interesting, man. That learning from from customers. I love it. Like, one of the things that I have on my list here is I've got two more things.
Brian Casel:But the thing that's most relevant to what you were just talking about is So I'm actively now building at instrumental.dev.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:So so this is a a new product that's in the works. It's it's not even close to ready to put out yet. It's a it's a Rails UI components library for for the Rails ecosystem. And and so, you know, I'm taking my components that I use to build Rails applications and I'm starting to productize them into into like a system that lets you like generate and insert components and put them into your projects. Right?
Brian Casel:So what I have there now on on instrumental.dev, when you go there, you can you can click and put your email in and then you get to a survey. And on the back, there's there's a survey with, a whole bunch of questions that that try to ask exactly what we were just talking about. Like, what I'm trying to get to is like, how do you, as someone who's at at least somewhat interested in what I'm building here, what I showed on the homepage. If you're so sort of interested in that, you've put your email in. Now I have a lot of questions for you.
Brian Casel:And what I'm asking you are things like, what other components library products have you purchased? What do the best ones get right? What do they get wrong? How do they do documentation well or not well? Do you like it when they're more of an app template or more of a pick your own components style?
Brian Casel:This is like so 10 more questions like that. Right?
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And then I'm getting all these responses back now. And I'm reading every single one. And I'm I'm I'm so aware now of how how different it is, and and in many ways more difficult to build a product for developers compared to, let's say, a SaaS. You know? Can you dig in Can
Jordan Gal:I give you my guess into what that's like? And then and then like you talk about your experience? Please. My guess is that the the battlefield of disagreement is very heightened with developers. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Meaning, there there's a bigger base, a large number of people, but very opinionated differences. You almost need you you need thick skin. You need to be able to say cool story, but no I I'm not doing that that way.
Brian Casel:You are very accurate on that. That's exactly what I'm seeing. It there's definitely little details in the responses that where I'm starting to see some patterns emerge, which I 100% like, I I love to see these particular patterns, like sentences that people are writing. I'm like, yes. I believe the same thing.
Brian Casel:I have the same opinion. Everyone's frustrated with the lack of this in in all these other component library. I love to hear that. That's great.
Jordan Gal:I I saw you talk about that on Twitter.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I posted one of them. Yeah. But the there's still a bunch of other elements where the audience is like fifty fifty. Like, there's 50 in this camp who do things this way, and 50 in this camp who don't like the way that that other camp does it, and we do it this way.
Brian Casel:Right? And so and and there's a bunch of other examples of that. This and I I just think that, like, for a developer product, especially a components product, it's you're just gonna everyone builds things differently. Everyone has different preferences. So, like, I just have to go into this accepting the fact that, like, not everyone is gonna be on board or this is not gonna fit everyone's style.
Brian Casel:But my the way that I combat that is actually the way that I like to build my products, which is I'm sticking to the most Rails core way of doing things. Right? So this product is for people who use the stack that I use, which is Ruby on Rails, Stimulus JS, that the new Rails Hotwire Turbo stuff,
Jordan Gal:and Okay.
Brian Casel:Tailwind CSS. Does it have to be all of those?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:Yeah. If you if you different All of those all of those are the most common stack if you're building in Rails.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Great. So you're not like super opinionated from like a unique rebel point of view, like only
Brian Casel:Right. So what I just gonna do it. Rails, hot wire, stimulus, talent. Like, that those are the core. There are some people who don't like Tailwind, but more and more people do.
Brian Casel:That's like the base most common setup. Then there are other third party tools layered on top of that. So if you're involved in the Rails space, there are things called like Vue Component and Flex, like PH Flex, and other other like sort of third party things, which in my opinion, they sort of like over complicate components. Some people love them. A lot of people don't like them.
Brian Casel:So what I'm doing like, I don't use those things. I I stick to ERB partials. I'm getting into into the technical weeds here, but like, I'm I'm trying to keep things as simple and rales y as possible to keep it as adoptable by as many people as possible. And it and it just so happens that that's the simplest, cleanest way to do this and it's the way that I prefer to build my products. It's it's very much like the the 37 base camp approach to it.
Brian Casel:Like, they're the makers of rails. Like, you know, it's so I'm taking that approach. And, of course, you could still take these components, insert them into your projects, and then enhance them in other ways or or adapt them in different ways. That's the whole point. But so so I'm definitely gonna be making a lot of, like, product decisions and I'm already responding to people's surveys saying like, I know that you're into that view component thing.
Brian Casel:Like, I'm just letting you know like like, I'm not taking that approach with this. So there's gonna be some things like saying no and and following the vision. And I'm also taking in a lot of this information and going down these technical rabbit holes and learning more and more and figuring out like, well, is is my way really the best way? And how opinionated do I wanna be on certain things? And, you know, so it's it's a very much a give and take and and it's a it's a learning approach because it's like building a SaaS, trying to get to product market fit on a SaaS.
Brian Casel:It's like, alright. These customers have this exact problem. Let's just build a feature to solve that Right. Problem and deliver it.
Jordan Gal:Only what they say matters.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. And and what's the most efficient way to build the solution to their problem? Let's just build that. Yeah.
Brian Casel:In in this, it's it's more like I'm taking on the responsibility of giving you some like, I'm not trying to solve all of your problems. I'm just trying to make your lives easier as as builders, you know. So how can I help? How can I remain niched while while not turning off the majority of users in this ecosystem? So that that's just been an interesting, like, give and take.
Brian Casel:And I'm learning a ton from those surveys as I build. And it's also, firing me up when I hear hear people describe things like, oh, I've I've picked up this or that UI components library, but it's not made for the Rails ecosystem and adapting it to Rails is a lot of legwork and I couldn't agree more. And so that's a big reason why I'm why I'm building this, you know.
Jordan Gal:Cool. I feel like you're about to go through a a Indiana Jones gauntlet of neck beards and hate and being cold. Why make
Brian Casel:sense. My impostor syndrome here is, like, through the roof.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's tough. Because everyone's a a more senior dev than you are.
Brian Casel:I mean, they literally are. You know? Because, like, I'm I'm just stronger on the front end and and weaker on back end. You know? Can build stuff, but I'm everyone everyone's gonna have a more technical understanding of of things.
Brian Casel:And I and I but I sometime I like I try to use that to my strength. Like, keep it simple. It's supposed to be simple. You know? Yeah.
Brian Casel:We we don't have to overcomplicate.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Yeah. Cool. I wonder if you need like a like a trusted mentor on, you know, a very senior engineer.
Brian Casel:I've been thinking about that. Like, I I like to get into mastermind groups.
Jordan Gal:But I'm I'm not being stupid here.
Brian Casel:Well, exactly. I'm I'm I've actually been chatting with more of my technical friends lately about this kind of stuff and I and I would love to get into more of a mastermind group where I could gut check and sanity check a lot of these technical decisions for sure.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's You know. If you're gonna get used to arguing back and saying, yeah, I hear you. You could do it that way, but I do it this way for these reasons. It would be great to have a sanity check.
Jordan Gal:Someone to be able to read something like that and say, actually, you should actually never do that. Here's why.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Don't be mean don't let me don't let me look too stupid
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:When when I'm out here.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, because, like, when I when I hear that kind of stuff, I that's when I go into the rabbit hole and be like, alright. Let me learn everything I need. Everything I could possibly learn about this particular question. Like, is this right or wrong?
Brian Casel:And and I think that's part of it, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But Cool. It's very interesting. We we talk a lot about front end. And, you know, basically why things take as long as they do when you have someone really skilled and very experienced.
Jordan Gal:Right? We've worked with our front end engineer since Cardhook. She was one of the first engineers there. She's the first engineer that focus on front end exclusively, and it took our app from everything on the front end. It's actually built by back end engineers, and you know what that means.
Jordan Gal:It's not not great. And she has been with us for years and years and years and and she often has to explain to us. Look here's why it needs to take a long time because if I do it quick and dirty here's what's gonna happen in the future. Mhmm. So we need to do it this way.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. 100% dude. Cool. I got one more thing but you you have something else you wanna go to?
Jordan Gal:You know, the only thing I have that comes to mind, we launched a blog.
Brian Casel:Oh. Yeah. Alright. What's this about?
Jordan Gal:So it's our first blog post from Rosie. And at Rally, I thought I looked at the blog as a pointless investment.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Because to try to rank for content in the e commerce world is just it's just very very difficult. And we were going after enterprise that that you don't really read content the same way. So I just didn't
Brian Casel:benefits of using an AI phone answering system.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. There you go. So right start starting basic. But Rosie's different. And so what we're doing right now is we are working with an SEO company that was highly recommended.
Jordan Gal:And the first thing that we're doing with them is is around a content plan. And we found a writer and this is the first blog post. So we went through the process and then we went through the hurdle of, well, if we're gonna have
Brian Casel:a blog, I guess we
Jordan Gal:gotta design it, we gotta make these decisions, and the font, and the colors, and the spacing, and the blog page versus the blog post page. We just finished that and now it feels like we're in good shape to just start publishing regularly.
Brian Casel:Nice.
Jordan Gal:And it's the
Brian Casel:Sorry. Go ahead.
Jordan Gal:I was gonna say it's the first time that I've ever looked at SEO as like this long term strategic thing. Here are the keywords. Here's what our competitors rank for, and now we just kinda put our head down for months.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Was gonna say are you doing the playbook where it's like you have like a long list of sort of long tail keywords. Let's just make sure we have blog posts that cover all of them.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. What we first did is we hired a company to do link building and without a blog. Just a few pages on our site and then just build links. And that has taken us to a pretty good place. I think we're like 25 or 26 and like that like, you know, domain rank thing.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And now the next layer is what this SEO company does in their initial assessment is they basically create a map for you of which pages you need on your website. Like the entire all the pages. Over the next x number of months build out all these pages. These industry pages, these article pages, these feature pages and like this is what your site should look like. Yep.
Jordan Gal:And then the content with the writer and so we're just gonna start to just go about doing what we're supposed to be doing. I am very novice in SEO. I understand most of the concepts but I don't understand how to accomplish any of it these days. Yeah. So the way I look at it is just a decent portion of our marketing budget, 15% of our marketing budget for the next foreseeable future.
Jordan Gal:Just basically don't look for short term ROI from it. Just see this investment. I'm almost looking at it as an annual investment. This is how much I'm gonna invest this year in SEO and ignore the fact that it goes out the window every month.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's hard to. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, I feel like I've I don't know. I've I've gone so many different directions with SEO and I I've landed back on the fact that like, we we do put like SEO is our most important channel, but it it still all comes back to the homepage and a very few number of bottom of funnel pages and optimizations. And and all the content and money that I spent on, like, the long tail blog post kind of stuff was looking back on it. I don't know if it was wasteful. Like, think I think it was wasteful in in in terms of like those pages don't necessarily rank for stuff and don't bring us quality traffic that turned into customers.
Brian Casel:I don't know if it might have helped with, like, the overall domain authority of the site Mhmm. Maybe. But at the end of the day, like, the people who find us on Google, they tend to land on our homepage or another high level, like, top level, like, product page that leads them to to sign up as customers. But we still are doing blog content now, much fewer and far between, but it's Kat. Right?
Brian Casel:She's our customer success person. And any new blog articles that we are writing, we're really not even caring about SEO keyword optimization. She's just writing for our customers. So she talks and helps customers all day. Part of her role, I've I've given her a task of, every month, just, like, based on what you're learning from our customers, come up with an idea for an for an article that would help our customers do what they're trying to do and just write about that.
Brian Casel:And and we've And she's published a few of those. She's a great writer as it is. So we've published a few of those. And it's also a good piece of content that we can send to our newsletter, which reactivates some people who've been looking at. And and she's talking about real use cases for Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:So these are very Clarity Flow focused articles. Like, how to do this in Clarity Flow, you know?
Jordan Gal:Right. You can categorize them as lower in the funnel.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Bottom of funnel Yep. Or or like, even more just like, did you know you can you can run a course funnel using Clarity flow? Like, here's how you would set that up and and, you know, so stuff like that.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Cool.
Brian Casel:Yeah, man.
Jordan Gal:What what were you gonna
Brian Casel:I got one more thing. This is about my consulting work lately, which has been picking up in terms of volume and busyness. So right now, I'm in the mode. Now that it's starting to pick up, so I have like two two developers coming on board next week to start to work with me on these consulting projects. Basically transforming from just me being a solo consultant to being a small development shop where we're running multiple MVP projects.
Brian Casel:One of the big bottlenecks is proposals. So the typical flow is somebody sends me an email and it says I'm interested in I have an idea for a new MVP. I know that you offer the one month MVP service. Let's talk Great. About Here's my link to book a call.
Brian Casel:We do a live call, twenty minutes. I learn everything I can about their thing. And then I go back and I write up a proposal. And sometimes spend like half a day writing a very detailed proposal on on here's what a four week or a six week or an eight week version of your idea would look like. And and, you know, here here's, like, item by item, the things that we will build in in this number of weeks.
Brian Casel:Right? So it takes me a long time to like be very clear about what we're building and what we're not gonna include in the scope. So one one step that I did this week was I started to bring in AI into the process, ChatGPT, to help me go take my rough notes from the call and just format them into the proposal. That definitely saved a lot of time in in producing that v one proposal to the client. Right?
Brian Casel:So I can that that has taken me down from like four hours down to like twenty minutes.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:That's nice. Which is fantastic. Yeah. But there's still another thing that I haven't quite figured out yet, but I'm starting to mull it over. So I'll just do it out loud here on the podcast.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And that is, this is sort of a classic problem that many agencies and consultants have, is like how much time do you invest upfront to hammer out the scope and the proposal and negotiate the terms and what's included in the project and not before you agree to move forward and get paid and have a deposit and and all that. Right? Because it could very easily, and I've seen this happen a number of times. Like, I've had a couple projects where I just send them one proposal, and two weeks later, I have a payment coming in and we're starting a project, and that's great.
Brian Casel:I've had other things where I send them a proposal, they come back with questions. Oh, I didn't realize what you wanted is actually more complex. Let me give you another proposal. Let me give you a third proposal. Oh, there's still more questions.
Brian Casel:What about this and that? Okay. Let's let's tweak it. Now we're on a fourth proposal. Now I've now I've literally invested like ten, twenty hours of my time.
Brian Casel:And and I'm and I still don't even know if this is gonna be a project or not.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Not
Brian Casel:good. So that's not good. And And so people end
Jordan Gal:up doing the the paid proposal.
Brian Casel:The paid discovery. So that's what I'm thinking about. You know, but that's also challenging because it's like, you don't wanna just say like, look, pay me x dollars, and and then we'll find out what's what. Yeah. And I I wanna offer some sort of value.
Brian Casel:And and also like, pay me x dollars, but like, before you do that, you're gonna have no idea what this is gonna cost in in the end. Like, I don't like that either. Like Mhmm. What if I'm if I'm hiring someone, I wanna have an expectation of, like, alright. Well, are we gonna end up with a $100,000 proposal or a $20,000?
Brian Casel:Because the question of like, help me understand what ballpark we're playing in here. So okay. So so my thought right now is I'm gonna keep things mostly the same, have that initial call, and give them a quick first proposal, which I can use AI and I can do that within a half half an hour off of the first call. Or or maybe on that in that thing, I'll I'll sort of position it like, if if we're good to go, if this is simple enough, let's just move forward. Here's the quote.
Brian Casel:Let's let's do the project. Great. Or you can hire me for a one week engagement for this very palatable dollar amount. And in that one week engagement, I'm gonna do more of a deep dive. Okay.
Brian Casel:And I'm gonna create some visual wireframes of the screens that go into this is another problem related to this, which is like, I currently give a proposal just using Notion, which is a text page, a bulleted list of the things that I'm going to build. And then I give you a video of me talking through that list and trying to explain to you verbally, here, try to picture this and here's what we're gonna build. And look, no matter how detailed I explain it, I think that most clients have a hard time visualizing what is it really are we gonna build here? I think what most clients want is they wanna look at screens. They wanna see like screen one is gonna do this, screen two, screen three, and users are gonna be able to click this button and it's gonna do this.
Brian Casel:Right?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Help visualize.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. And that's easy enough to do, but I'm not gonna do that for free. I can't spend the time to create wireframes and user flow and these visual explainers. Like, there has to be a a price point on that to do that time.
Brian Casel:So I'm thinking like some sort of like a one week engagement to to take your idea into a much more tangible thing that we can look at, that we can understand together. And the thought would be like, whatever I price that at, that'll be credited against the project if you end up hiring my team to actually build it. If not, you came away with something super valuable with a with a clear roadmap. You can think about it some more. You can shop it around to other providers if you want.
Brian Casel:But if you come back to us, then then you get that credited toward your project.
Jordan Gal:A
Brian Casel:lot. That's that's the thing that I think I'm gonna start to introduce pretty soon. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I'll it matches very closely to my good experience with the Sessio company.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Recommendation from a friend, little trust building, get on a call, talk for thirty minutes, and then the offer is an analysis. The analysis comes with all the pages you need to build on your website, and a content plan, and a bunch of keyword stuff. That I pay for. Right? Yep.
Jordan Gal:And now I'm waiting for that to be generated. So that is the first service is cost money, not a commitment. And once I have that, I can go do it myself. We can do it internally. We can say we want you to do all of it.
Jordan Gal:We can say we want you to help us with this part, but not this part. Yep. And then what I found myself wanting to know before I made the decision on whether or not to go forward with the first limited project was let's just say we wanna work with you after. What's the range of price? They gave me a range.
Jordan Gal:It was in my price range and expectations, and then I feel good moving forward with the initial scoped limited project that I know is gonna be valuable no matter what.
Brian Casel:That's a 100% exactly what I'm what I'm thinking here. And the in in my case, I'm delivering MVP software application products as a service. Right? And so, you know, I'm doing a I'm I'm finding I'm I'm having to do a lot of explain not that they don't understand this concept, but, like, I still have to explain it in in terms of scope, which, you know, we all know the the infographic that floats around, like, for MVP products.
Pippin Williamson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:You start with a skateboard, and then you build up to a bicycle, and then you build up to a car. Like, everyone comes in with an idea and a concept for what their car should look like. And I have to tell them that, like, okay. Well, the four week version of this looks more like a skateboard or maybe almost a bicycle. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:You know? And here's and here's it was like so I have to give them a proposal for, like, 60 or 70% of what they actually want. And I have to explain to them Why? And then and then here's the actual proposal for a 100%. Right?
Brian Casel:So Mhmm. But also, there's, logistical things. Like, we we can't build the 90% feature because functionally, we need to build the foundation first. Mhmm. Right?
Brian Casel:And so, like, just logistically, things have to be built in a certain order. And it's just so hard to, like, really explain that kind of stuff without looking at it in wireframes. You know? Cool.
Jordan Gal:I I I like it. If if you want me to send over like my conversations and the proposal, I feel like it's I would love to is very similar to to what you're describing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That would be that would be great. And anyone listening to this, because I know that there are a lot of, you know, development agencies out there who who've and this is a very common model, like you said. Like, it's a it's a very common, like a like a paid discovery sort of thing. I like to productize things.
Brian Casel:I productized the one month app thing. Unfortunately, somebody already owns a one week app. I'm thinking about putting a price point on it and making it like a valuable thing. Even if you just have like an idea that you wanna flesh out and don't even intend to hire me to build it, like, I I still want it to be like a valuable mini service, you know.
Jordan Gal:Cool. I like it. Well, that's it. You know what this weekend is? It's prime apple picking, pumpkins, cider donuts.
Brian Casel:I was just last night I was watching the daily show and they did a funny bit on apple picking. They're like, who? What are we gonna we we eat like one apple a month. What are we gonna do with a bucket of apples, you know?
Jordan Gal:Okay. That might be your family. My family goes through $50 of apples every week. I don't know. We're Okay.
Jordan Gal:We're apple crazy.
Brian Casel:Yeah. My kids eat a
Jordan Gal:lot of plus apples a week.
Brian Casel:Yep. I don't know. Just Nice man. Just pushing through it. Yeah.
Brian Casel:We we do the pumpkin picking just like get a pumpkin and then just throw it out. Like, you know. You don't
Jordan Gal:you don't carve? Mine's my kids sit.
Brian Casel:We carve sometimes. They they paint them. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yes. There's usually crying. There's some screaming involved. There's dad, you're doing everything wrong. This.
Jordan Gal:There's a lot of that. But you know, I I carve When
Brian Casel:I was a kid, we like kids would go like walk around my town and smash like, the the band name Smashing Pumpkins, that was a real thing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Look, you and I from Long Island, you know, it's a different thing.
Brian Casel:It's a different scene.
Jordan Gal:The level of violence and danger and, like, fear involved in Halloween is not normal the way
Brian Casel:I'm realizing, like, now, I don't know if it's this generation or just where I live now, but like it was not what Rockville Center in Long Island was. What like, it it was like Halloween in that town was the one day a year where like everyone, parents and police sort of like tolerated a light level of like Loss. Mischief
Jordan Gal:and Yes.
Brian Casel:And and like mayhem. People would have like shaving cream fights and eggs and smashing pumpkins and
Jordan Gal:all Do you remember the shaving cream?
Brian Casel:Toilet paper?
Jordan Gal:You stick the needle in the shaving cream and they use the lighter to melt the plastic around it. So the hole was very skinny so it would shoot out
Brian Casel:Spray. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Between feet? Yes. Oh, yeah. I don't want any part of that. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Any part of that.
Brian Casel:Somebody last year this you rarely see this in Connecticut, but somebody like threw toilet paper up on on like a tree near my house.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:Some kids some kids were like running around like
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know. And I'm like, man, that's that's annoying. I gotta I gotta rip it down. A part of me is like, alright, respect. I did that when I was a kid.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:The kids around here, I don't know if it's like the Ferris Bueller's Day Off like North Shore Of Chicago vibe, they're they're a little mischievous. My house has been toilet papered multiple times.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah.
Jordan Gal:I have I have three daughters. There's always some idiot out there ranging between ages eight and like 12 doing something stupid.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yep. And teepee is annoying because as soon as
Brian Casel:it gets sticks up there. Yes.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Anyway, I'm an I'm an old dad. Now, Brian, we just gotta end this off in the right way. We're podcasters. This is a podcast.
Jordan Gal:There is a podcast mega event happening today with the orange man going on Joe Rogan.
Brian Casel:Oh, is that really? I didn't know about that.
Jordan Gal:That will be an interesting podcast event overall.
Brian Casel:Oh, that's crazy. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That's It's cool that podcasts have well broken into the mainstream, including politics and now everyone does podcast.
Brian Casel:For sure. I heard yeah. Like I heard Tim Walls on Smartlist the other day. Not exactly a podcaster but like, you know, Kamala Harris went on Howard Stern. You know, I I do wanna call out that.
Brian Casel:Call her daddy?
Jordan Gal:It's a big podcast?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Apparently, that's a big one. I I Look, most of these things I don't tune into because it's just such politician bullshit. They they have their canned answers and it's just nonsense. I must say, I had, like Howard Stern, I'm such a long time lifelong fan of his.
Brian Casel:I truly think he's like best ever the GOAT when it comes to interviewing And the interview that he did with Harris, like, two weeks ago, it was one of the few where he can actually get her to speak real. And and he does this with multiple politicians and and and other people. Like he he just has this thing about about how he maybe it's like catching them off guard or making them comfortable. But like, you they start to take down their guard and actually be a real person. And they're they're that was a really good one, I thought.
Jordan Gal:Cool. I I have searched for her like real self to come out. It's it's kinda rare.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's like an hour long. You gotta get through it. It's like she takes like ten, twenty minutes to get into that comfort zone. But then then it's like, oh, these are some like real stories coming from her now.
Brian Casel:So it's like, yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I would like to listen because the the caricature is not good and the clips of people on Twitter basically like, here's the worst possible thirty seconds of her. You know, like if you if that's what you take in all the time, you're like, well, who is this person?
Brian Casel:Or if you watch like not like like whatever like CNN stuff, like it's always gonna be like Right. Trump's and and and like Yeah. Do you
Jordan Gal:see Trump on on Andrew Schultz? I'm not a big fan of Andrew Schultz, But Yeah. That was it was just kind of like when you are there long enough, you do start to get your guard down and then you're like, oh, there's a person in there somewhere Mhmm. That I can kind of see.
Brian Casel:Right. You know. Right.
Jordan Gal:Whole thing's so crazy.
Brian Casel:It's all over soon. It's all over soon.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Yep. Apple cider donuts. Family. Yep.
Brian Casel:More important.
Jordan Gal:Alright, brother. Later. Thanks.
