Bluesky.

[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome back everybody to Bootstrap Web. It's been a few weeks. Mr. Brian Castle. How you been? [00:00:23] Speaker B: Yeah, doing good. It has been, I don't know, it's been like three or four weeks now. So we gotta do. We gotta do some catch up here. [00:00:29] Speaker A: Three weeks, I think. Yeah. I went to D.C. for Thanksgiving, but I went the Friday before. So it was like those two weeks. You can hear my voice. I'm just getting over some strep throat that knocked me out while in D.C. that was not fun rough. [00:00:43] Speaker B: Oh, man. [00:00:45] Speaker A: But we're back. [00:00:46] Speaker B: Good time out there. What's that? What'd you do? A bunch of sightseeing? [00:00:52] Speaker A: We did a little sightseeing. So my sister in law and her husband family lived there. So we got, you know, we're hanging out, kids, it's. It's a family vacation, but it's in D.C. first of all, I like DC. [00:01:04] Speaker B: I love D.C. i really do. [00:01:05] Speaker A: Very impressed. Yeah, just overall, food's amazing. [00:01:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:10] Speaker A: People cool. [00:01:11] Speaker B: There's some really cool neighborhoods. [00:01:12] Speaker A: Really cool neighborhoods. It's like this mixture of like what feels like a smaller neighborhood, but everything's at like an urban, big city level. Like the delis, the stores, the shopping, food. [00:01:24] Speaker B: It's just kind of operating part of it. They must have some regulation there that, that caps the height of the buildings. Right. Like it's a. It's a major city, but no building is taller than what, like five? Just a few. [00:01:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:01:39] Speaker B: You know, Right. [00:01:40] Speaker A: Unless you're downtown and there's a big building besides that couple. [00:01:42] Speaker B: But like even that, like it's. It's like a. It's like a flat, like vertically city. [00:01:47] Speaker A: Yeah. It feels like a lot of like overlapping cities. So like from D.C. to Baltimore to Bethesda to all these things. Not me, not Baltimore, but Bethesda, they're all kind of interlinked. [00:01:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:59] Speaker A: But we did do a little bit of sightseeing. I. I'm a sucker for it. I'm an immigrant. You put me in that room with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I was like, damn, this is. Try to teach my kids. They're rolling the rice at me. [00:02:12] Speaker B: I'm a sucker for it too, man. And D.C. is one of those things that like, you know, I've only gone there maybe a few times in my life, but every time I'm there, it still hits me. Like the sheer size of some of these monuments and the whole area and like. What do they call it? Like the, like where the mall. The mall and the White House and the memorials like, you see it on all the pictures everywhere, but then when you're there, it's like, man, this place is huge. And, yeah. [00:02:39] Speaker A: Makes me really love this country, which is why I hate Blue Sky. No, I'm just kidding. Yes. [00:02:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Should we get into it? [00:02:48] Speaker A: Yeah, let's get into it. We were talking on Twitter a little bit about Blue sky and feeding off of Ian. [00:02:58] Speaker B: Ian and Aaron. [00:02:59] Speaker A: And Aaron talking about it now. They did, like, a proper multiple. [00:03:02] Speaker B: This is good. I was listening to them this morning talking about it. [00:03:05] Speaker A: Me too. They did kind of a proper product breakdown, and I think, for me, I'm more on the vibes breakdown. [00:03:14] Speaker B: Okay. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Like, I hear you on the product differences. I'll explain where Blue sky sits in my mind, and I'd like to hear where it sits, like, how you think about it in terms of, like, a position in your attention. [00:03:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. All right, let's hear yours first. [00:03:31] Speaker A: Okay. Mine is that Twitter started off as, like, a place to gather with friends, acquaintances, and a few, like, concentric circles out from there. And it had this very flat feeling where I could just ping someone. Incredible, Right? It felt so close. You were like. You could just add, like, if you had a bad experience with, I don't know, some airline, you could just, like, at the airline, and they'd, like, get back to you. It just felt very flat and amazing communication. Then it got bigger and gnarlier, and then it became a news site, and then it became an instant news site. All these, like, metamorphosis, like, these changes in Twitter. And now where Twitter is, it's like, for me, it is news. And I'm like, aaron, I go to the for you tab. That's my home on Twitter, and I'm learning about politics, news, events, what's going on in Israel, and tech and this other stuff. And when I thought about Blue Sky, I thought of it as an escape and almost like a reset back to where Twitter used to be, where I could go and talk about my favorite peanut butter. Right? Like Justin Jackson again at that level. This happy, friendly, personal. [00:04:52] Speaker B: For me. I'm Team Almond Butter, for the record. Almond Butter. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Jesus. This is what should be talked about online. That makes no sense, and we should argue about that. Peanut butter is one of the great things in life anyway, so I think that's where I saw Blue Sky. I was like, oh, a reset into, like, this friendlier, more personal. You know, honestly, I want to get away from, like, death and destruction and war and politics. So I saw it as an escape. And my vibes Analysis right now is that I went over there and I feel like, oh, it's the other silo. If Twitter turned more right wing, ish, Blue sky is like a left wing, ish silo. And I was like, I'm gonna be entirely honest. That's even less interesting than the right wing for me, you know? [00:05:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so let me start with that last piece first, the political stuff. I totally agree with you and Aaron. And what's different, I think, with you and me than Aaron, we seem to be more interested, at least in our private lives and like following like politics and news and stuff. Sure. But I. That's what I don't like about Blue sky right now is the left leaning vibe over there. [00:06:09] Speaker A: I wished for, like, no politics. I wanted a space online in my life that didn't become saturated in politics. And sure, people can say whatever they want, but I thought it would be easier to. [00:06:22] Speaker B: And also what I don't like is that because of that, it does turn off a lot of people who are just naturally right leaning. And I want those people in. I don't want to turn off anyone because to me, this is the main point I want to make about Blue sky and why it feels like old Twitter and why I'm spending more time on Blue sky right now than Twitter is. I'm there for the community. I'm there for our community, our people, our tech circle, startup circles. Like, yeah, that's what I'm. That's what I go. That's what I used to go to Twitter for, and that's what I go to Blue sky for. And I think I am getting that now. Now that there's more of a wave of our. Of our community. [00:07:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:08] Speaker B: Joining it. That's. That's what has me kind of psyched about Blue Sky. And so that's the thing because, yeah, you talked about the metamorphosis of Twitter over the years. Like, I had a Twitter account back in 2008 when it was super early. And I think since the very beginning, I still went to Twitter to connect with my community. Mostly a professional community. Like in the very earliest days, I was connecting with other freelance Web designers and WordPress people. And then. And then as my interests changed and I was also connecting to. So you know how, like, people talk about community on Twitter. Like there's tech Twitter and there's Nick's Twitter and there's politics Twitter and there's whatever design Twitter, there's art Twitter that, you know. So I always went. I always sought out my interest Twitter. Right So music production, Twitter, Nick's Twitter, Mets Twitter. Right, sure, sure. And I would. And I would start to follow a lot of those accounts, and I still do, and those are some of my most followed accounts. Like, I paid the most attention to them. So I always go to Twitter not so much as a news feed, but more as, like, a way to tap into the pulse of what my circle of people are up to. [00:08:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Through multiple communities. That is Twitter at its best. That's the ideal. [00:08:43] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. And I do the same on bluesky. Like, you know, bluesky has a bunch of feeds. Right. So my following feed, which is where I spend all my time, which is the default feed that is basically all of our tech friends. Like, that's who I'm following. And I. When I look to a feed from these kinds of platforms, I want the feed of, like, updates and building in public and that kind of stuff in my feed. [00:09:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:16] Speaker B: But then I do have other. Like, I have a Knicks feed and a Mets feed in blue sky. So there's a little bit of that starting to bubble up. There's like a design feed. I do have a news feed, but I don't really look at it much. Yeah. [00:09:30] Speaker A: So it's tricky. I think a perfect example of what you're talking about is the. So we've been doing a lot of, you know, admin work and design work and UI decisions, and that used to be my favorite thing to share and talk about, and it feels a little off when I share that on Twitter. I still kind of do it, but it feels like. [00:09:52] Speaker B: Well, yeah, that's. [00:09:53] Speaker A: It feels like everyone's having a conversation about one thing, and then you're like. But also, here's this other thing that I really like, and it feels like, incongruent with what's going on. Well, I wanted bluesky to do that, and it's not doing it. [00:10:07] Speaker B: I mean, I share more building. I've shared building public stuff on both places. And I do get much more engagement on bluesky than on Twitter. And I think also because the other thing that has turned me off for the last couple of years with Twitter is the algorithm. Now I spend my time reading the following tab. Not the for you tab, because I don't like reading the algorithm, but it has the effect of, like, if I tweet something, the algorithm is most of the time going to bury it. Like, most. I would say more times than not, my tweets are. They're just less and less visible to my followers. [00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah, same. [00:10:48] Speaker B: You know, and a few of your. [00:10:50] Speaker A: Followers, like me, who are on the for you tab instead of on the following tab. [00:10:55] Speaker B: Yes. [00:10:56] Speaker A: Right. [00:10:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Like most of my follow most people, I think probably use for you. [00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah. It's annoying because it's a revealed preference of everyone looking to the for you tab. But then as a user and poster, you want people to be looking at the following tab so you can actually have a conversation with the people that you're there for. [00:11:12] Speaker B: Exactly. Like and like the thing. And a lot of my tweets are, like, not intended to go viral. I just want to start a conversation. I just want to show my work to fellow designers and developers and product people. And I just want to show updates and maybe get some feedback or questions and stuff. But sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And it's like, I never know and the algorithm just pushes stuff down. Whether it's like, it's so stupid about links, you can't put a link in your tweet. [00:11:46] Speaker A: That makes sense. [00:11:47] Speaker B: Please check. You have to do the stupid, like, tweet it and then reply with your link because the first one can't have the link. [00:11:53] Speaker A: Yeah, links are off. The fact that the Internet's open, I mean, come on, what are we doing here? Yeah, Maybe they're incompatible. Maybe a 4U tab and a following tab are incompatible inside of the same product. And what I was looking for to Bluesky was a following experience. I want to talk to people that I follow and I want people that follow me to see what I post so we can talk about our stuff. [00:12:18] Speaker B: That is the following. [00:12:19] Speaker A: I know, but as soon as you introduce a for you tab in the. [00:12:24] Speaker B: Product, they call it Discover. [00:12:25] Speaker A: Right. As soon as you introduce a Discover tab, it will be optimized because people's actual preference as a passive reader is the Discover tab, not the following tab. And then you end up in the same place. [00:12:39] Speaker B: Yeah. So, like, I actually don't spend much time on the Discover tab in Blue Sky. I. Most of my time is on the following, but I also go over to Popular with Friends. I don't know if that's on for everyone or maybe you have to add it, but I go with Popular with Friends and that's basically stuff that people that I. People that I follow must have liked or replied or something. [00:13:02] Speaker A: That's like an in between. [00:13:04] Speaker B: Yeah, like, so I like that. But then the other thing, I think the other tip, maybe a tip for Aaron because he was talking about how he goes to it to discover feeds of new links and new. And. And like, if you If I totally hear, hear the argument that like, if you just stick to the following, then you're sort of in your own bubble and you're not really exposing yourself to new potential. Like the upside of that was a really good point that Aaron made. And I think the tip on Bluesky that's a little bit different is that you probably should add a bunch of these other feeds, these other algorithm feeds. So like I have again, I have like one called Design Sky. One for Mets, one for Nix. You can add a bunch of stuff. And then I find that Bluesky actually pushes stuff from those into my. I guess they push it into the Discover tab because they have a little thing where it's like this, this post is from Design sky, but we're showing it here because you should check it out. So I think that's the way to start to tailor your own algorithm, like your main algorithm is to subscribe to a bunch of these other ones. But at the end of the day, the thing that I come here for is like, because I think, I happen to think that we are so incredibly lucky to work in this industry as tech startup people. No other industry is so well connected to each other the way we are. I think that's unique to us and maybe some other, a few other industries out there. But like we are super connected and for years that we were connected through Twitter and now the Twitter algorithm has just blown all that up and now it's. [00:14:53] Speaker A: I know, I don't know, I think. [00:14:55] Speaker B: That our circles are going to, are going to be continuing to go to Blue sky as like the watering hole or the, whatever you call it, like the water cooler. [00:15:04] Speaker A: I hope so. I just end up, I end up with some form of negative experience every time I go. And that's partly my fault tolerance level. Yes. I just went to Blue sky right now as you're talking to see if I have the, you know, something by friends, whatever that you mentioned. And I go to my notifications and I see someone following a thread that I started and I click on her profile and it is all politics, Watermelon Palestine. And I'm just like, God damn it. You know, I don't want that. I don't, I don't want that here. [00:15:41] Speaker B: Yeah, when I see stuff, see I don't get much of that in my feeds. I. But I see a lot of like the, you know, just like the left leaning stuff that's just, I just unfollow them. And for some reason, like for me in my experience on both Twitter and bluesky it hasn't been that bad on either place. Everyone, at least in my opinion, makes it seem so much worse than it is. Or at least what I'm seeing for whatever reason, maybe my mix of followers and following doesn't result in all the same noise that everyone else sees. But like, yeah, you know, on Blue sky there is a bit of the left wing stuff that I don't like. So I unfollow it and I end up not seeing a lot of it because of that anyway. Or muting or I mute. But then on the right side or on Twitter, like I don't see a lot of right leaning stuff either. [00:16:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, and I don't see. [00:16:41] Speaker B: A lot of like the people talk about like random like porn shit showing up on Twitter. I never. [00:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I never see that. [00:16:48] Speaker B: You know the thing that really that's super annoying on Twitter is the dms. It's overrun with spam now. [00:16:55] Speaker A: You don't find that your spam filter does a good job of it? [00:16:59] Speaker B: Well, no. So they show up in the. So like a new person who, who's never DM'd me before, they're going to be in the. Whatever they call that. Like. [00:17:09] Speaker A: Yeah, they give you a notification and then it's like a. It's like a spam folder, but you still kind of have to open the spam. [00:17:15] Speaker B: But every. Exactly. You still have to open it because it might be someone real. [00:17:18] Speaker A: Yes, yes. [00:17:19] Speaker B: But 99% of the time it's spam. [00:17:21] Speaker A: Yes. [00:17:22] Speaker B: And that sucks. [00:17:24] Speaker A: Yes. [00:17:24] Speaker B: Like the only time they end up in my main DMs is if we've DM'd before, you know, and on Blue sky the DMs are usable and it's good to see our people are now on Blue Sky. So like, I know that I can go to basically anyone in our industry as long as they've joined bluesky and I can just reach out and that's the place. [00:17:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it's tricky. I just wanted the world to work according to my preference and have Twitter be an insane news feed, which is what I want and bluesky to be a nice happy startup community and just can't. Can't have that. [00:18:06] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. It's so just in terms of like observing my own behavior with it. It's like at first I sort of just signed up and it was sort of like half and half like Twitter and Blue sky and now I'm just literally finding I happen to be opening Blue sky like twice as much as I'm Opening Twitter and yeah, I just seem to be getting more like my time there is more valuable than on Twitter and also reading Twitter, it's not giving me anything interesting anymore. I don't know. [00:18:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm about to publish videos about our feature. So we just finished our admin redesign. We are officially out of the Ugly MVP admin to a good looking V1. Everything's polished, the account. Like there's other stuff to do that I want to talk about but it all looks good and it's consistent and isn't just like this Ugly mvp. So now I feel like, okay, great, now I can make a bunch of videos basically for support docs, but why not post them on Twitter and blue sky and YouTube, right? Why not? So I'm very curious to see where I get better engagement on the actual topic and fun stuff. Why'd you choose this? Oh, that's interesting. That looks good. How are you going to get people to upgrade, you know, like the actual conversations that we want to have? [00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I like it. [00:19:31] Speaker A: What have you been up to? [00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So last couple of weeks, let's see, since the last time we talked, I mean I've been pretty much focused on Instrumental Products is how I think about the name of like my company and that Instrumental Products is like the service, the service arm of what I'm doing with Clients, which is MVPs as a service. [00:19:57] Speaker A: Okay. [00:19:58] Speaker B: I've been promoting it through the site one month app, you know, that's like. That's like the landing page for it. But it's. Most projects are about three months long and now I have three developers on board working with me. The third one just came on full time this week. So I've been in this transition phase and we have three active projects going on like for three different clients. We're building three different apps at the same time. And so the chaos was building a lot about a month ago and I was trying to get a handle on it and bringing these new developers on board at the same time. So now I'm about a month into having these developers on the team and I think we're like they're starting to learn my style. I'm starting to learn their capabilities and our communication stuff and we're starting to click. And so I'm in that, I'm in that transition phase going from me doing everything on all the projects to now most things have to be done by them and I have to direct them and because that's the only way logistically that we can even work on three Projects at the same time. I can't do that myself. [00:21:21] Speaker A: Yep. [00:21:23] Speaker B: So. So now it's like everything. Like, I'm at that point now in this business where, like, this business can only possibly work if I'm not the one building the apps. Okay. [00:21:36] Speaker A: Does that feel like progress? [00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it does. [00:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:41] Speaker B: And while we're building, I'm actively building Instrumentl.dev which is our components for Rails product. So I'm building that as it's going to be a product that is coming along pretty. I should be shipping it probably around New Year's, maybe early January. [00:21:59] Speaker A: Oh, you're getting close. [00:22:00] Speaker B: Pretty close. Yeah. But the. It's challenging, but it's cool because I'm building it while we're using it for these projects. We are customer number one on this, and we're already actively using it in all of our projects. So every time we need a component that we don't have yet or we need to tweak it, I'm building that or I'm improving it in instrumental dev. So that's my job, is building our component system while my team is working on client stuff. And I'm still. I'm still managing and delivering that work to clients and stuff. But, yeah, it's been a process and I mean, I guess. One more note on the whole team flow here. The thing that really was a good step forward, I think, was, okay, that third developer that just came on, he's the more senior guy. The two juniors are like, junior developers. So before, like, phase one of this transition was like, me writing up linear tickets, like GitHub or linear issues, lots of checklists. Like, I would literally spend a whole week, like five days of a week just drafting out these tickets to scope out a whole project so that I can hand those off to the. To the junior developers and then they can take them and build them. [00:23:33] Speaker A: Now, is that your person also playing the product role? [00:23:37] Speaker B: Now the senior person is playing that planning role. So all. So I only spend one day now giving him, like, the brief of, like, here's the whole project. These are the big features we need to build. Now you figure out how to architect it and write up all the linear issues and get it all set up for the developers. That's been a big transition. Really good. [00:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah. It sounds like they took over a big part of your job there. [00:24:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I'm still collaborating with him and reviewing every ticket and making sure that things are being built the right way. And then I still do the final QA and polish it up and I deliver it to the client. So I'm active every week, but I'm starting to, like, carve down, like the number of days and the number of hours that actually require me in it. [00:24:30] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:24:42] Speaker B: Yo. Okay. All right. So this recording is just starting again, so I don't know where we cut off. Are you on the same recording? [00:24:56] Speaker A: It still shows that it's. It showed that it's been recording the entire time for me. [00:25:01] Speaker B: Okay. Because I think mine was sort of. [00:25:04] Speaker A: Like, I just saw your camera freeze and that's it. [00:25:08] Speaker B: Okay. What was the last thing you heard me say? [00:25:10] Speaker A: I heard you the whole time. [00:25:13] Speaker B: Yeah, just like it totally kicked me out. Like, I had to refresh Riverside. [00:25:17] Speaker A: Oh, okay. I thought it was just the camera froze. Yeah. If it recorded. I heard the whole part of the whole conversation on, you know, hiring the new senior dev and them doing more of that role. [00:25:30] Speaker B: Okay. [00:25:31] Speaker A: And now you're still, you know, guiding them and consulting with them, but you don't have to write up all the tickets. [00:25:38] Speaker B: Okay, sweet. Yeah, that's. That's where I was. [00:25:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Hell yeah. [00:25:42] Speaker B: We'll see at the end of this. Maybe. Maybe some of my thing kind of dropped out, but yeah. [00:25:47] Speaker A: Okay, cool. [00:25:51] Speaker B: What do you got? [00:25:52] Speaker A: All right, what do we got going on? I guess the defining of, you know, piece of place to focus for us is we're trying to figure out if we're on the right track when it comes to our funnel and conversion path. So when we first started, we had a seven day trial with a credit card required upfront. And so what that meant was someone comes in, if they're in the app, that means we have their credit card on file. That's not true at all. Let me backtrack a little bit. If they're in the app and they have a phone number, we asked you needed to put your credit card in to get your phone number, your Rosie phone number. So if they were actively using Rosie, that means we have their credit card on file and seven days they're converting one way or another. We wanted to do a few things. We wanted to get more people in the app. We wanted to not require a credit card upfront. We wanted more people using it, giving us feedback. And that meant giving the phone number away before the credit card. So right now it's really self serve. It's a great onboarding experience. I've made a video of it actually over the last few weeks on the homepage is like a full four minute demo. So we switched from a seven day trial. Right. Time based Automatic conversion. At the end of the trial, we switched it to 50 minutes. You got your first 50 minutes for free. So the downside of that is the uncertainty around timing. I don't know if that takes 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 90 days. We just don't really know yet. But on the upside, it let more people in, got us more feedback, more people using the product we're up to. It's almost a thousand minutes a day now. So it's starting to, you know, starting to grow. And the part that I really liked is everyone that converts has adopted. If you're 50 minutes in, you're beyond testing, you're sending people to this phone system that really call your business. And I wanted it to be. [00:28:09] Speaker B: And these are businesses that are getting a lot of phone calls. [00:28:11] Speaker A: They're getting phone calls. They're sending it to us. And then they're getting notifications in their inbox and in their texts saying, rosie picked up this call. Here's the transcript, here's the recording, here's the summary. Now you have shifted your behavior in how you handle your phone calls. And if I'm right, that this is a severe painkiller. This is not a vitamin product. This takes away the Saturday morning. You're with your family out at Pancakes, and you get a call on your phone, and you don't know if you should pick up the phone because it might be a $2,000 job for your business. That pain is actually pretty severe for our customers. So solving that, I wanted to solve that before they had to make the decision to convert or not, because I wanted it to be like, do I want to reintroduce this pain in my life, or do I just want to pay this company 50 bucks a month to take it away from me forever? [00:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:10] Speaker A: All right, so now we're in this place where we don't. We knew that there would be a slowdown in conversions. Right. You make this switch that you had this cohort that automatically converted at the end of seven days. You know, our revenue grew kind of quickly from that. [00:29:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:28] Speaker A: Now you make this big switch, and then everyone that walks in the door has not put their credit card on file. You're. You're. You're kind of confident about adoption and people using it, but you don't really know in the same way. And so now we're a month in, and we're starting to look at data. And so that's where we are right now, is we're trying to look at the data and say, what's the Right decision. How patient should we be? Should we make any changes? Is there anything obvious? Are we learning anything? So now we're like, building up these internal systems to reveal that data. [00:30:05] Speaker B: Right. [00:30:06] Speaker A: So now we have a list of people, and you see how many minutes. And we have slack messages that come in. And so we have thresholds. When you hit 10 minutes, when you hit 25 minutes. When you hit 45 minutes, when you hit 50 minutes. [00:30:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:18] Speaker A: Okay, so 10 minutes tells us you've gone beyond testing. You might be sending real phone calls. We want to know that. [00:30:25] Speaker B: And then you can see it's like a one minute. It'll be just. That's just testing. That's just 10 minutes. Like that's somebody real. [00:30:31] Speaker A: Yes, but even that, like, all of this stuff, all this data gathering, it feels like it is impacting our analysis of our customer base. And once we have a better understanding of that data and how it plays into conversion, then we can start to use those events to start to automate and provide people the experience and the content that we think they need in order to convert. So here's an example. If someone comes in and uses. Creates an account and uses two minutes. So we get a slack notification. It used to just say, this user 2 minutes. Then we added the phone number that they called from. So if we wanted to, we can just call them and say, hey, I just saw you did a test call. How can we help? Then we added in when they signed up. So is it the same day they're doing their first test call, like, you know, five minutes after? And then we added notification on whether or not they include their credit card, if their credit card's on file. So now all of a sudden, we can see if you create your account, if you use two minutes of time and then you put your credit card in. We know that the test call got you to a point where you pulled out your credit card in the next step in onboarding, and you put your credit card in. It's not required. It is optional. We position it as. Make sure not to have your service interrupted. Put your credit card on file. [00:31:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:31:55] Speaker A: If you did a test call and then you put your credit card in, like, in some way or another, you're generally happy. [00:32:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you think that they're. [00:32:04] Speaker A: If you don't. [00:32:05] Speaker B: Do you think any of these. Any of these businesses have, like, a second phone number that they treat as, like, their testing phone number? [00:32:13] Speaker A: So people have very different behavior around. Around a lot of this stuff. We see a lot of people come in and they run the initial query in the signup flow and then a day later they come back and they run it again and then they create an account. Right. So what does that really tell you? They saw the ad on their phone, they clicked on it, they did the initial scraping, they listened to a clip about. From Rosie about their business, and then they said, oh, I like this, but I'm not about to create an account right now on my phone. And they come back the next day and yeah, yeah. So all these like, like little behaviors you start to kind of identify like, oh, here's what you're doing. So phone calls, where you're calling from, how many, all this stuff we're starting to learn and we're trying to anticipate what's happening on the user side. So, for example, we really want to understand who has adopted versus who is testing. So at first it's rudimentary. It's like if you're over five minutes, maybe you're done testing. I don't know. If you're 20, then you definitely. But some people are like super testers. Some people test for 30 minutes. So now we're starting to build in. Okay, let's allow the user to identify phone numbers that they're going to call from that are their phone numbers. That should not count against their minutes. So we have a more accurate view of these are testing minutes. These are real minutes. [00:33:32] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. [00:33:33] Speaker A: Because. [00:33:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:33:34] Speaker A: The most important thing for us is to understand who, who has actually adopted, who is sending real business calls. And what we're learning from it is like there's all these individual touchpoints and events that we need to be aware of. For example, if you hit 45 minutes, we send a Slack message in along with that. Now we see the date that they signed up. So it's like if they signed up three days ago and they just hit 45 minutes, that's a blinking light for us. This is a potential great customer that's gonna be on a higher plan. But now, right along with that Slack message, we see, have they put their credit card on file or not? So if you hit 45 minutes, you're four or five days into the product. You don't have a credit card on file. We need to trigger something. [00:34:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yes. Like, how do you even get that far without putting your credit card? Well, I know you can, but like, but like, why would they, why would they not? You know, if they're putting, if they're sending real phone calls to their business through this thing. [00:34:33] Speaker A: Right. Because you know what happens if you hit 50 minutes and you don't have your credit card on file? [00:34:37] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:34:38] Speaker A: Then all of a sudden your phone stops working. Yeah. So we're learning about the activation and the conversion path and all these individual events that we need to be aware of. At what point should we inject ourselves? At what point should that be automated versus manual? [00:34:58] Speaker B: So we're just. [00:34:59] Speaker A: It's fun, man. [00:35:00] Speaker B: I know you've been going for this like self serve flow. Sounds like it's kind of coming together. Um, like, do, do these, do these business owners like just want to talk or do, or do they want to be more hands off? [00:35:13] Speaker A: You know what they want? [00:35:13] Speaker B: Does your team try to reach out? Do they respond? [00:35:16] Speaker A: Like, yeah, yeah, it's, you know, you know what they do? They text. That's what they want. Yep, yep. [00:35:22] Speaker B: So that's like ideal. [00:35:23] Speaker A: It is. The whole thing is super interesting because it really feels like, look, overall feels like we're onto something because there's real demand, like, yeah, you know, from, from all over the place, just a huge range of businesses. And it also feels like we need to, we need to have a little, you know, we have a slide in our all hands. And the last two months the slide had a little graphic with a little like evil looking raccoon holding his fingers together saying, all according to plan. And I was feeling pretty good about myself and I was like, everything's going exactly according to plan. This is great. And this, this month I put a giant, like sticker over it that said humble pie. And I was like, relax, relax. Maybe it's going according to plan, but we have a lot to learn about everything that you mentioned. How they communicate, how they prefer to communicate. What's really fun is having a very small team and just being able to huddle and be like, you know, we should try, let's inject the phone number into Slack and then let's just call them. And then what you learn is people don't pick up the phone and then they text you back like, oh, we learned something. We failed and we learned something. And now what we're trying next week is as soon as you sign up and start your testing, I'm not going to call your number, I'm going to call your Rosie number. Because if I call your Rosie number directly, you're not going to hear a phone call, but you are going to get a text message saying, rosie's got a new call for you and it's going to be the founder of Rosie saying, this is Jordan. I saw you did a test call. Your business looks awesome. Welcome. What can we do to get you from your test call to actually flipping it live? Because the biggest mystery of all is how people feel after the test call. [00:37:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:37:13] Speaker A: We don't know. [00:37:15] Speaker B: I mean, we do that with Clarity Flow. Kat, our customer success, she sends a Clarity Flow message to all the new customers and, like, cool a lot because they, too, have to go through a testing phase before they're comfortable enough to start inviting their clients into it. And it is the kind of thing that just communicating asynchronously through Clarity Flow, you have to start to experience it, to start to be like, oh, this can be. This can work really well if I embrace the async concept. And the conversation with Kat is often their first real experience with sending a thing and getting it back and getting real support over the course of two or three days asynchronously. [00:38:00] Speaker A: You are creating a light bulb moment. [00:38:03] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yes. [00:38:05] Speaker A: Our challenge. And I wonder how you handle this at Clarity Flow. Our challenge is understanding when they've adopted, when they've gone live, because we don't have control over when they forward the phone number. So I think the most obvious thing for us to do is ask them to identify which phone numbers they're going to test with. That benefits them because it doesn't work against their minutes. And it benefits us by identifying when there's a phone call that's outside of those numbers, because that might be our best indicator of. That's a real business call. That. That's adoption. [00:38:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:43] Speaker A: Activation, Whatever you want to call it. [00:38:45] Speaker B: It used to be. I mean, I think a big one is have they mapped their own domain name? You don't have to do that, but a lot of our customers do. And if you've set your DNS to point to Clarity Flow, like you're. You're adopting. [00:38:57] Speaker A: Okay. [00:38:58] Speaker B: You know, a lot of our customers do that, but now we. We charge on day one, so we don't even have a trial. They're they're converting when they come in. [00:39:05] Speaker A: So it's a different form of adoption activation you're looking for. [00:39:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:09] Speaker A: You kind of jump right into retention, huh? [00:39:12] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Like that's. That's actually now what I'm most. When I think about Clarity Flow, I'm thinking about retention now. And it's. We're only about three months into this experiment with no trial and charging up front, but it's been working well enough that I want to stick with it, at least for Now I'm still not totally convinced that it'll be this for the long haul, but we have to keep going on this path. I feel like it would be premature to cut the trial at this point or cut our test of this approach. [00:39:50] Speaker A: I'm with you there. My conclusion is that our data is inconclusive and we should just stick with exactly what we have right now. [00:39:56] Speaker B: I think the hardest thing about what you're talking about, and I think about this too, is these changes that we make in the, in the onboarding flow or even like the pre sales flow. Like in my case, I'm. I'm not seeing how these changes impact conversion. I mean, okay, so like for example, we shipped, I think since our last recording, we shipped two big things. One is we shipped our forms feature in Clarity Flow. [00:40:26] Speaker A: So that's a big. [00:40:27] Speaker B: We have a whole forms builder now built into Clarity Flow. But the other one is I re recorded our demo video which is shown on the marketing site. You just click like get a demo. And you can watch that. It's like, I don't know, six or eight minutes long or something like that. [00:40:43] Speaker A: And that's used a lot. Like people who convert really use. I mean they're making a buying decision before even so you really show. [00:40:52] Speaker B: I think almost every customer is going to watch that before they sign up. And we even made it our primary call to action button, not the sign up button. Like the big button is watch a demo. [00:41:03] Speaker A: Right. You're not going to sign up until you learn more. [00:41:05] Speaker B: Yeah, you can. There's a smaller button that you can go sign up. But we want you to come to the demo first, watch it, really see what it's all about. So the update on the demo thing is I rerecorded the whole demo and that's. And by whole demo, the main thing is like eight, six or eight minutes overview. And it includes like an overview of all the newest features, like our forms feature, our appointments booking feature, our stripe connect, all this stuff. But then below that we now have links to like individual feature videos. This is all on our demo page before you even sign up. So you get the overview from me at the top. And then whatever feature you're most interested in, like our commerce feature or our appointments or our forms, you can just scroll down and click to watch another five minute video just on that feature. [00:42:01] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Okay, I'm going to go deeper on this. [00:42:05] Speaker B: Yeah, because it's good because every new feature we do, we have a video for it where we do a deep dive on that on that one feature, I can't do a deep dive on everything in one demo. You'd be sitting there for an hour and we'd have ton of like drop off if I did that. [00:42:19] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. [00:42:21] Speaker B: So you put on the page. [00:42:23] Speaker A: Not. Not on the homepage. My thinking is to put it right on the homepage. [00:42:26] Speaker B: It's not on the homepage, but all of our big call to action buttons point to slash demo. And on the demo page we've got my big one at the top and then the feature videos below it. And I also added some new social proof on there. So that's like our. That's like our second sales page. After. After they're sold on the homepage, they go to our demo page to sort of like close the deal. [00:42:46] Speaker A: Key part of your funnel. If I was going to give you any bit of feedback at all right now, it would be to get some thumbnails. [00:42:53] Speaker B: Thumbnails on the videos. [00:42:54] Speaker A: On the demo videos. [00:42:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Right now they're just sort of like a logo and a text. Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. [00:43:02] Speaker A: So you make these individual, like deeper dives. So you really give. [00:43:06] Speaker B: And these are videos, like the feature ones I've done months ago for each individual feature. But the new one is the one at the top. And the other thing that I did on that, on that video, on the new one is I purchase, like I walk through the whole purchase process on the video. So I'm going to show you how to get started with clarity, flow. I'm going to click to the plans page. I'm going to pick my plan and then I'm going to put my credit card in. I do that. And after I do that, here's exactly what I see on the next page. And now I'm in. And like I show them like, this is what's going to happen when you pay us right now. [00:43:43] Speaker A: This is like an E commerce mindset. [00:43:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:45] Speaker A: Like, no. Take away all the unknowns. [00:43:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:49] Speaker A: Let them know exactly what's next, which page, what they need to do. [00:43:53] Speaker B: And then on the next page, you're going to see a message from Kat. She's our customer success person and you can get started from there. [00:43:59] Speaker A: Very interesting. I think that would work really well for our audience. So they just want things explained straightforwardly. [00:44:07] Speaker B: So the interesting thing is. All right, so I launched that, I think a week or two before Thanksgiving, I launched that and at first it was a little quiet. Like, I think it was like a day or two of no Conversions. I was like, oh, shit, what did I do? So then finally a purchase or two came in, and then I think it was weird because we are not running a Black Friday sale. But starting from Black Friday forward, we've been having, like, a string of new signups. [00:44:35] Speaker A: Yo, me, Me too. [00:44:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:44:38] Speaker A: The last week went crazy, and we're like, did we change something? What is going on? [00:44:43] Speaker B: I think some people. My hunch on it is because we had a bunch of people write in and ask us, like, are you going to run a Black Friday? Okay, we just tell. We just tell them no. And then when they realize that we're really not doing a Black Friday, they were sort of, like, waiting around to see if we would, and we're not. So they'll just go ahead and buy it for us. [00:45:04] Speaker A: From November 26 to December 3 was a combination of the best signup numbers with the best quality of signups. [00:45:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:45:18] Speaker A: And I would love to say, oh, we changed the model and the voices. But, like, no, I think people just had a chance to think. [00:45:23] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm also seeing a slight uptick in annual purchases. So some people are just coming in and paying for a year upfront. And that must be like a December thing. Like, get the. [00:45:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the taxes thing. I have extra money. Why would I pay to the government? [00:45:38] Speaker B: And the. But so the hard thing about all of this, circling back to what you were talking about and all these different changes in the. In the funnel, is I am focused on retention. So I won't know the impact of this until a few months from now. Like, I'm looking at. I'm looking at retention of people who. So August 1st, going back to August 1st, that was the beginning of our switch, of our no longer having a trial. So I'm very focused on the people who've purchased since August 1st, and what is the retention on those cohorts? [00:46:14] Speaker A: Okay. [00:46:15] Speaker B: And it's interesting from month to month, right? So, like, in, there's August and then there's September. I think we shipped appointments during September, and then there's October, and now in November, these are people who saw the new demo. [00:46:30] Speaker A: So on their way in. [00:46:32] Speaker B: On their way in. And I think that is going to create. Hopefully the hypothesis is like a better demo, a clearer demo giving you better expectations is going to create more. Is going to create customers who, okay, might expect expectations are met. Because it's exactly what I saw in the video I purchased. I'm getting that. So I'm not going to churn. Right. [00:46:57] Speaker A: So, like, that danger is the expectations issue. If I thought I was getting something and I bought with that set of expectations and it didn't quite hit what I expected, that's when I cancel. [00:47:08] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. But the heart. I think the hard thing about my, about Clarity Flow and the thing that really just drags down its growth, frankly is I think it's the market, man. It's like I've tried everything to like we've shipped all the big features that, that they want. I've optimized the hell out of our purchase flow. We have some marketing channels that are starting to work for us, but we still get a good number of coaches who are totally sold on the product. They love it, but their coaching business is not working for them. [00:47:50] Speaker A: So that's what you mean by market, not your competitor landscape and what people are doing in the market that way. But like we literally have users. [00:47:58] Speaker B: Yeah, we have a lot of customers who they themselves have amazing businesses and they do great with Clarity flow. And then we get a lot of customers who do great with Clarity Flow for a couple of months and then they're like, my business slowed down. I don't need it. Maybe I'll come back. We get that a lot. [00:48:16] Speaker A: Interesting. It's almost like you need more established or professional or you know, more longevity, but those people are more likely to have more stuff stuck in other platforms. Okay. [00:48:28] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's, I think that's just one of those things. It's like I've tried. I, I know, I know that the thing that's, that's hampering growth at this point is churn, but there's just always like a steady state of customers who are just, they are becoming less active. And then at the same time we see new customers sign up every day. We see expansions and upgrades every day. [00:48:53] Speaker A: Okay. [00:48:54] Speaker B: For those succeeding people are succeeding and they're upgrading. Like they're going from our low plan to our high plan all the time. And then we also see people just kind of drop off. It's just a constant and it's, you know, I think some of the top of funnel stuff has helped, but even that, like some of these, I don't know, it's like, and all of that adds up to just a slow, slow, slow grow. A slow growing SaaS that I can't afford to just be focused on. And that's why I'm building instrumental products. There we go. [00:49:26] Speaker A: Interesting. What it makes me think of is the problem that ConvertKit had in their growth where the best users are already established and already have big lists somewhere else and you kind of have to make an offer to them. That takes away the friction around moving. So we will do everything for you. Contact us and we will get everything sorted for you. We'll do it for you. [00:49:53] Speaker B: I just to. I think it doesn't map exactly to that market or any market. And I don't think any market will map to like, because I look at an esp, an email service provider as a utility. Like, I pay for a water bill here. I'm always gonna have a water bill. I'm always gonna have an electric bill. [00:50:14] Speaker A: Sure. [00:50:15] Speaker B: And I've tried to make Clarity Flow as much of a essential utility to a coaching business as we possibly could. We now run their payments, we run their calendar, we run their forms, we run their messaging. Like we do all of that. [00:50:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:30] Speaker B: But I can't run your ability to keep a steady client flow in the door, you know, and so that's the thing, man. It's like, it's also not just like, it's not. It's been four years on this business. So, like, I know everyone. I know people like listening and I get these messages from people like, oh, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Chances are we've probably tried it. But the thing is, it's not the kind of tool where we can just offer a done for you setup service and we will set you up and make you successful. It's the kind of tool that they have to personally adopt and use every day for a long period of time. So our form of a done for you service is more of a done with you training, which CAT provides. So it's like. And it's not like a migration either. It's not like, oh, you have a big list over there now bring that list over here. No, it's not that. It's just like, are you going to decide to structure your whole business on this tool? I didn't even intend to talk this much about Clarity Flow because I'm not even working on it that much. I work on it, my team works on it. I kind of oversee them. I give them what the next thing to work on is. But I'm spending my time on instrumental products. [00:52:02] Speaker A: Very interesting bit of a puzzle. [00:52:05] Speaker B: Yeah, man. I would like to. Do you have another thing? [00:52:10] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yes. Let me. Let me bring up this topic. It's almost like I don't know where to go on this topic a little bit. So feedback is good and just kind of throwing it out into our universe. I'm trying to figure out how to blow this thing up. And I'm trying to think about how to use leverage more than we currently are. And it's not that I'm stumped on it, it's just like I don't want to. I'm willing to be kind of wasteful. I think the position that we're in is one, to be aggressive and be willing to be a little wasteful. We are a decent amount ahead of our projections when it comes to cash. And when I looked at that, I didn't want to see that as great. Let's go nice and slow. That means we can make this last a little longer. And the Runway is a little longer than it used to be. I wanted to look at that and say that means I should be more aggressive. And so I immediately said, okay, well, what can I do that has real leverage? And what I mean by leverage is like, we have a decent onboarding email sequence, but that onboarding email sequence is hugely important because we are getting a significant number of signups now. I think it's going to go up significantly over the Next, call it 90 days. And improving the conversion to activation by 10 or 20% is huge. And so I look at that and I say, well, should I have that on my to do list to improve for the next four weeks and then do like a decent job at it, or should I find someone and pay them, you know, 75 hundred bucks to do a really good job and talk to a bunch of customers and talk to our team and write an incredible 10 part email sequence that does a better job? And then how do I think that way in a lot of other places also? So we open an affiliate program. We have affiliate software. That's not like a small thing. You can't just throw out an affiliate page and just have affiliates coming to you. You gotta go do stuff. So who can I hire as a freelancer to do that? I am not happy that we are not posting videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube every single day, every single week. And should I just kind of feel guilty and put it on my to do list and kind of try to do it? Or should I find someone for, you know, 5,000 bucks a month to create videos for us? [00:54:52] Speaker B: Creating videos, like showing off the product, showing use cases, like what A combination. [00:54:59] Speaker A: Of things, Content for our ICP that has to do with our product and that doesn't have to do with our product. I mean, I'm seeing some pretty interesting innovation in the B2C space on TikTok. And so you might have A product. Let's just say, I don't know, some, like, pill you take that makes your, you know, stomach feel better. I don't know. But you can come up with hundreds of video ideas for that. [00:55:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:55:27] Speaker A: So we have this phone call thing that's very universal to small businesses. You can come up with ideas forever. [00:55:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like they're there. So. Yeah, like, running a. Running a local small business is. There's. That's like a. That's got to be like a. A goldmine of just like, little content ideas. Like dealing with customers every day, like. [00:55:47] Speaker A: And funny things, small things. Show the product, show the phone. I mean, there's an endless number of things so that I feel like there. [00:55:56] Speaker B: Are people that do this. [00:55:58] Speaker A: Like, I think it's all out there. [00:55:59] Speaker B: Freelancers. [00:56:00] Speaker A: Right. I almost feel like I'm back in my cart hook. Like Hustler days, like, before we even, like, raised any money where I just kind of sat in my house, I was like, how do I just make things happen? And that's kind of the mindset I'm trying to take because we. We are now on a consistent growth path. But we'll talk about next week, you know, 20, 25 goals. But I have a very specific goal of a million ARR. By June. And if we just kind of go according to what we're doing right now, maybe we'll get there, but I want to double it. You know, what are we doing here? I should really. So that's where my head has been at. Like, okay, things are kind of working. We've got a bunch of stuff to figure out. But then it feels like it's my job specifically on the team to be like, how do we manufacture luck one to many Distribution. You know, I got an introduction to the CEO of one of, like, these home service software companies, and I'm just kind of grinding in that way. Like, how do I make something pop? [00:57:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, man. I could talk about so many different things. Like, one is video. Like, I am recording more videos now because I just hired a video editor to handle all the publishing. So that's been. So right now I have like a queue of probably like seven new videos that are now handed off to him and they'll be rolling out this month. [00:57:37] Speaker A: Clarity. Flow. Related. [00:57:38] Speaker B: No. [00:57:39] Speaker A: Okay. [00:57:39] Speaker B: Instrumental. [00:57:40] Speaker A: Okay. Instrumental. Attracting people to do projects to build their apps. Or are you starting to get more into. [00:57:48] Speaker B: Most of these videos are showing the instrumental.dev components library and showing what I'm building there. Some of them are a little bit more generic. Like how to build stuff in Rails. So like one of the things in the components library is we have an authentication component. It's built on top of the new Rails 8 authentication. So I have a video on how to do Rails 8 authentication. Now I have a second video on how to upgrade it with instrumental authentication. And so then I've got a bunch of other videos about our instrumental scaffolds. I have a video course now called Uncommon Tailwind css. Okay, so you're teaching how I build. It's teaching, but it's more like showing. It's more like check this out. Here's my approach to designing and building this type of thing and here's why I think it works like this. And look how easy it is to implement using the instrumental components library. So that I have a bunch of that video content recorded and starting to roll out this month. But yeah, the goal there is a just to have a steady flow of content coming out on my channel which should hopefully grow the audience, which should bring leads into an email. That tailwind course is going to be like a lead magnet. So that's like one mini course which hopefully over the course of the next year will be one of five or seven of these mini courses that are lead magnets for emails. Grow the email list, grow the YouTube channel that brings buyers for the components product which should be launching by January. That's what I see as like the low end product offer from Instrumentl products. Buy that for a few hundred bucks and you get our awesome tool set. You can upgrade from there to maybe like a middle tier which might be like a coach, like a done with you, like Async product coaching. Like use our components. But you're building and I'm giving you some feedback on it. [01:00:03] Speaker A: Something in between that and higher. [01:00:05] Speaker B: But the main upgrade is like hey, you just want to build a product and you see how we build with components. You can hire us. Projects are three months long and let's do it. And by the way, I'm booking those for Q1 right now. So that's the service that we're doing actively now that's been all the revenue in 2024 is doing that service, the MVPs as a service. And in 2025 I want to build this business out with like not just getting leads from my network of word of mouth and people that I know, but getting leads from an audience funnel that drives that, you know. [01:00:51] Speaker A: So these videos are entry points and together they can create these courses and you can create additional courses over time, just more Entry points. [01:00:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Courses like not selling. Like these are free email lead magnets, you know. [01:01:03] Speaker A: Right. Value. [01:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:04] Speaker A: In a bucket. [01:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah. But the, for the most part, the content is just going to be like YouTube content we're going to reap. And my editor is going to be cutting clips out for shorts, for YouTube shorts for TikTok, shorts for whatever else. Like that's, that's all the legwork that I don't want to be doing. So I think it's actually working well. Like right now, this is week one of him of his retainer. So like I've already been able to record like three new videos this just this week because all I need to do is I got the camera right there, I just flip it on, record something and I spend like less than an hour doing that and dropping it to Dropbox. And the thought is everything else is he's going to take care of it. [01:01:52] Speaker A: So YouTube is. YouTube is the home base, the hub for the main video. And then the snippets that come out of it, the clips that come out of it, those can be put onto the individual networks. Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Blue sky, whatever. [01:02:07] Speaker B: That's the thought. Yeah. [01:02:08] Speaker A: So it sounds to me one of the things I feel like I'm behind on. I use YouTube, I don't use YouTube. I watch YouTube videos when they're embedded on sites and that's how I come across YouTube. But I very rarely go to YouTube and I discount it my mind and I feel like that's a mistake. [01:02:24] Speaker B: Oh yeah, it's okay. First of all, I spent a lot of time on YouTube, like at home. That's my. [01:02:33] Speaker A: When I'm not watching entertainment. [01:02:35] Speaker B: Well, when I'm not watching like a Netflix show or something. [01:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:02:37] Speaker B: Usually at the end of every night, like I flip over to YouTube and I just watch YouTube. Shit. [01:02:42] Speaker A: Cool. [01:02:43] Speaker B: Because I don't have cable, you know. [01:02:46] Speaker A: Yeah. I feel like I should have more confidence in YouTube and just I truly in our, in our mind. [01:02:53] Speaker B: And for that reason I use different accounts. Like my personal Gmail is where I watch NBA highlights on YouTube and watch my favorite bands live performances on YouTube. Right. But then my work account is where I'll see like coding stuff and marketing stuff and tech and all that stuff. [01:03:12] Speaker A: Cool, cool. Yeah. I have, I created a Rosie account on YouTube and I post there like the demo on the homepage is there and it's just. Yeah, it's just interesting. People comment on it, they're asking questions. [01:03:27] Speaker B: I've been saying it for a year and I'VE been disappointed in myself for not executing on this because I really believe that if you want to be doing content marketing, I feel like that has to be video content marketing now. Yes, people will be successful with their written form blogs and their newsletters. Yes, that stuff, you can certainly build an audience. But I think if you, I like, if you think about it like a discovery platform, the way to expose yourself to more new people who have never heard of you, people who've never heard of our podcast. Those people are not going to just find our podcast. This podcast is not a lead magnet. We're not, we're not attracting new people. We have like the same like 1,000 people who just listen to us every week. [01:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah, this is the end of the line. [01:04:14] Speaker B: We, we've hit the ceiling, you know, and we love you. A thousand people, but there's not going to be like a second thousand, you. [01:04:20] Speaker A: Know, growth from here. [01:04:23] Speaker B: You know, talk about a plateau. I mean, but, but the, the discovery platforms, I think, I think the, it's YouTube, man. Like, that's where people. Because YouTube is so algorithm driven and that's where the algorithm actually works well, is on YouTube. [01:04:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that discovery there, you know, it's. [01:04:45] Speaker B: Discovery when you go on, when anyone like. And also people think about YouTube like, oh, it's a search engine and you should have all these videos that optimize for keywords and like, yeah, you might get some drive by views from keywords. But the game on YouTube is the algorithm. And the algorithm is smart. Like, it just serves. If you go on your homepage on YouTube, it's going to serve things that you are interested in. [01:05:14] Speaker A: It doesn't devolve into fistfights at school cafeterias. [01:05:18] Speaker B: No, dude, it's literally based on what you watch. And then it's just going to give you more of what you want. And it's like. And if you're publishing quality content, that's the other thing that I love about conceptually about investing in YouTube is that like it literally rewards quality content. Not just production quality, but like it has to be interesting. So if you put a lot of creative effort into serving people well with your content, it actually works. It actually works. But you have to do it consistently over a long period of time and it's very difficult to do. And that's, that's why it's hard. Not, that's why not everyone does it. But the people who do do it, like they have large audiences and that. And, but that's what I'm saying is like you could write really good tweets all year long or really good blog posts all year long. And you're not just going to be discovered, but you could create really good videos and YouTube will expose you to more and more people. You know, that's why I think it's worth investing in video and that's, that's why I am, you know, cool. [01:06:26] Speaker A: I love it. So we got one more episode next week. We'll talk a little bit, a little bit about end of year goals for next year. We've talked about this. I think you and I are relatively on the same page when it comes to, you know, setting goals. [01:06:41] Speaker B: I have a good one for 2025. This is going to be a cliffhanger for next week but I know what my goal is. It's different for 2025 and I'm pretty excited about it and nervous about it, so. [01:06:53] Speaker A: Okay. I like it. Hell yeah. Until next time. Thanks, everyone. [01:06:58] Speaker B: Later. Bye.