Era of Trying Stuff

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Hey, it's bootstrap Webb, and we are doing a Thursday afternoon recording, unlike our usual Friday thing. Jordan, you are heading out on vacation tomorrow. [00:00:26] Speaker B: I am heading out. This was our chance to get the podcast done. [00:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm heading out on Monday. We'll take a little break for another, at least another week or two after this. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Hopefully everybody out there listening is planning on some time off. You know, I'm looking forward to it. And annoyed by. I'm cranky. Okay, you got cranky, Jordan on the podcast today. [00:00:49] Speaker A: I'm psyched. This would be fun. [00:00:54] Speaker B: Several reasons. One, front and center is I'm getting a physical exam done today for life insurance, and I haven't eaten in a while, and I'm cranky when I don't eat. [00:01:06] Speaker A: All right, we got hangry. We've got life insurance issues. We're scrambling before vacation. It's a tasty cocktail right there. [00:01:16] Speaker B: Yes, yes. And we're ready to launch early access accounts on Monday. [00:01:22] Speaker A: Mm hmm. [00:01:23] Speaker B: And I am. How do I say this? I was frustrated by a few things this week on the product side, and, you know, so. [00:01:36] Speaker A: Yeah, man. All right. We'll get into that. We'll do some therapy on air with that. And I think I'm going to announce another product idea and a domain and a new thing today. So. So we'll get into that as well. Yet another thing on my plate. [00:01:51] Speaker B: I like it. [00:01:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, Aaron Francis, he always talked about, what is it? Like, the era of maximum effort or whatever. I feel like I'm in. And now he's on tryhard, which is awesome. I'm in some kind of era of hacking on a bunch of random ideas to my theme now, mentally, is like, forward motion. Just get some stuff going, put some new ideas out there. I'm going to share another new idea today and see where it goes. Stop with the analysis paralysis. Stop with the over strategizing everything and just start building some stuff and take it from there. Learn and go, you know, I love it. [00:02:41] Speaker B: I love it. I'm. I'm very much in a Yolo risk loving mentality. I think that's, like a combination of things. I've been reading a few books that have kind of got me into that mindset. I've been talking to my brother a lot. You know, just that sometimes the ambition bug gets you and you want to go faster, you get frustrated, you get impatient, and that's kind of how I feel right now. I'm really excited about the rosie opportunity, and I plan to be really aggressive and I am, like, marshaling all this energy to do it. [00:03:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Especially as you're coming up on this, like, getting the product into the customer's hands right now. Yeah. [00:03:25] Speaker B: It feels like I'm almost, like, pumping myself up, because it's about. Right. We talked about the Baton handoff. The baton's about to get handed off to me and the go to market side, and I'm right into vacation, which is bad timing and also great timing because we're not full general access. What we decided to do is take on five ICP accounts. Five, no more. So that doesn't count, like, peer accounts. I'll probably send it to you and some friends and say, hey, tell me what's wrong with the onboarding, what's working, what errors you're getting, whatever, things like that. [00:04:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I do wanna see. I wanna try it out. [00:04:05] Speaker B: Cool. And then five ICP accounts is. That's pretty limited. You know, that's nothing crazy. It's really intended to provide. That's good. [00:04:14] Speaker A: First batch. [00:04:15] Speaker B: Right. It's not too much, really, just intended to get a bunch of feedback. [00:04:19] Speaker A: Okay, so, like, these five, are they different? Are they all the same? Like, how did you decide on which five? [00:04:27] Speaker B: So we don't have them identified. What we have is a lot more than five that we plan to reach out to. And so basically, the people we have the best relationships with. Right. There's one partner I have in mind, and then there are a few, like, dream customers, and there's a few people that are really, really excited. My assumption is it's gonna take more than five people to reach out to and request in order to turn those into five ICP. [00:04:55] Speaker A: Right. [00:04:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Like, we all know, like, just sending the email, like, hey, you want to try it? Like, that's. They're not going to be ready to just come in today. You know, they got stuff going on. So you got to send a few more than that. [00:05:05] Speaker B: Yes. So we got that cold email got started. This week we are officially sending. Our boy Brian that we hired is doing a fantastic job. We got that. You know, when you send. When you send cold email, you need to be prepared for at least you. [00:05:22] Speaker A: Start to get the reply. Oh, yeah. [00:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah. It is not without its gfys. It is just part of it. So we got such a funny one, and I'm happy with the way I responded to it because I think this is required for early stage. Like, you're gonna get laughed at, yelled at, all that. [00:05:39] Speaker A: Of course. [00:05:40] Speaker B: So we had one cold email template that was, like, talking about missed calls. And first, I love what Brian's done for us in that. As soon as we get started, because he's a pro, we have multiple versions of things. If it was just me setting it up, it probably just start with one. [00:05:58] Speaker A: That's been my thing. I was like, oh, I'm going to a b test this. And like, for like eight months we've been sending the same email to everyone. [00:06:04] Speaker B: Okay? So look, I'm the same way. If I did it myself, we would have at least I would have convinced myself, just start with one. Just get over the barrier. But because Brian's a pro, he's got a whole bunch of stuff and permutations and personalizations. Like, hell, yeah. So one of, one of the versions of the email was like, I tried calling you, but you missed the call. Don't you want to never miss another call? Kind of a thing? [00:06:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:06:30] Speaker B: Responses were just like, no, you didn't. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, fair, let's adjust that a little bit. [00:06:41] Speaker A: That's great. Oh, wow. [00:06:45] Speaker B: One response was just, don't lie, don't lie. You know what, I think that's good advice, actually. [00:06:52] Speaker A: Yeah. I've had quite a few angry responses. A bunch actually. Ask like, how did you get my information? Like, tell me where you, of course. [00:07:01] Speaker B: I'm gonna sue you. But all this stuff leads into like, you know, we're getting underway. This week was the first time cold emails went out and one of them responded positively. So while we're recording this, Sam from my team is talking to someone in Ladenhead who runs a restoration company. So, you know it works. First day? [00:07:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you know, I started to, I got really surprised early on when, when we did get a handful of positive replies and then they just, every, every week we get negatives and positives, you know, and it's just, I've been amazing. And the other thing I noticed is that because I do track the link clicks with, with some source stuff. So I could see there are definitely people who come and, and trial us who don't reply to the emails, but they clearly received one. Like, we sent them an email, they don't reply to us, but they do go to the site and sign up. [00:07:56] Speaker B: So it is like, it is a little bit like broadcast. It doesn't have to be direct response. They don't actually have to respond. [00:08:08] Speaker A: Oh, exactly. The whole point is to me, it's literally going and knocking on people's doors. That's what it like. Look, we hate cold, cold email, we hate cold outreach, we hate receiving it. But the fact of the matter is, to me, it's like the only way that I know of to go out to your best, ideal customers, you know? Cause you do the research to build the right lists with the right people. That's the key to making it work. You can't just spray and pray. So like, you do that research upfront and these are the people who are not searching you. You're not going to win them through SEO and maybe not even through ads because they're not searching, but they are perfect. So this is how you go knock on their door. [00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Especially if what you're doing isn't that well known. I mean, all of us, you know, when we launch something new, it's not well known. So they just don't know about you. They might not know about the category, the solution, all that stuff. [00:09:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:02] Speaker B: Yes. [00:09:03] Speaker A: Yeah, man. [00:09:05] Speaker B: So you want me to talk about my frustration? [00:09:07] Speaker A: Let's hear it, dude. [00:09:09] Speaker B: Okay. I'm going to try to talk about this in such a way that it isn't pointing fingers because ultimately it actually gets pointed at me. So this week I had several frustrations this week. They're all understandable, but they're difficult to deal with. We are having challenges around design and the reason for that is because the designer that we've been working with for four years is changing careers. And, you know, that's awesome for him. I'm very, very happy for him. Great dude has done fantastic work for us, has been great to work with. [00:09:51] Speaker A: He was a contractor or on your team? [00:09:54] Speaker B: Yes, always been a contractor. But we worked very closely and it worked for everyone. It was like this great situation for everyone involved. But now we have a website that is, it's up and published, but there's a lot more to do there. And we have the admin, which obviously there's a lot more to do there. So we have a foundation. We have enough to launch a website and launch into early access. But we need more work going into the future and it is a pretty specific case. Right. You need to hire a designer. We want it to be freelance. We don't want to take on someone full time and they need to take over an existing design system and expand from there. Right. It's not go off and create your own. So you really need to adapt to an existing style and language and infrastructure basically. And I see that as on me, that's my job. Right. If the dev team and the product team are saying we're starting to be slowed down because design isn't getting us what we need in time because he's starting to focus elsewhere. That's on me. [00:11:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:03] Speaker B: And so a lot of the frustration I've had this week is because I know it's my fault. So we've had challenges there, and we are going into early access. We said to ourselves, early access is an MVP. It's not going to be perfect. We should not wait until it's perfect. Therefore, we know it's going to be, you know, imperfect. [00:11:25] Speaker A: So, yeah, sorry, go. [00:11:28] Speaker B: I was going to say, I always agree with that in principle. And then in practice, when I look at the app and it doesn't look the way I want it to, I get frustrated. [00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Just in terms of, like, design standards on apps, even like, MVP or version one apps, to me, like, there always is. There's always a baseline standard of quality, no matter what stage you're at. [00:11:52] Speaker B: Okay, good way to put it. [00:11:53] Speaker A: To me, the whole point of an MVP or a limited scope, it's not limited quality, it's limited scope. It's like deciding not to build X, Y and Z features yet, but the features that we are building, they need to work on all screens. They need to, like, there shouldn't be bugs, at least not super obvious ones. You know, it's like, to me, it's like a level of respect, like professional respect and building things with integrity. I mean, yeah, look, we're not. We're professionals. Meaning, like, we're in the big leagues here. [00:12:31] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:12:32] Speaker A: Doesn't matter how. How small our companies are, we are playing in the big leagues. We have to act like it. Like. Yeah, that means, like, not shipping garbage. Yeah. You know, like, I had this thing when early on in my career, I started as a web designer at a web agency. This was one of, I feel like I got really lucky with having a first job in this industry at a web design agency that was working on big globally known brand websites. I was in my early twenties. First career. First job in my career. That means I'm doing HTML design on these sites on Pepsi and at and T and discover card and stuff like that. And, you know, like, you can't ship. Like, these things are gonna be seen by so many thousands of visitors. Like, you cannot ship garbage. And so I would, I was like, still learning. I was an amateur. So I was like, I was giving stuff to my manager and she would just send it right back. She's like, nope, got, like, keep. Keep working. And, like, a couple years of that just really honed into me. Like, you cannot deliver anything that doesn't meet a baseline level of quality. And so then after that, when I went out on my own, you know, that got drilled into me. So that, so then I, like, I hired other freelancers and other designers and stuff who don't, who don't come from that, like, agency background, experience, and they would deliver stuff to me, it's like, dude, did you even look at this before you like, why do. That's what frustrates me. It sounds like it's frustrating you where it's like, you got to have your own standards. Like, it shouldn't leave your own desk until it meets a high level of quality, you know, because it's, because then it's like disrespectful to your manager or your boss or your customer or someone. Because standards, they shouldn't have to spend their time even having to qa something at that level, you know? [00:14:23] Speaker B: Yeah. So it isn't this a difficult topic because, again, I don't, I don't want to point fingers, but I'm really happy we talked about it because you articulated better than I did around why I was frustrated. So what I did was I wanted to be helpful because, look, there are, there are circumstances around it. Specifically, we cut down the team. There aren't a lot of people. And that means we're asking each person to do a lot. And then what you're really asking someone to do is functionality and form and the design of it. And it is true that the functionality has to work first, and then you get to decide how much time are we going to put a on the design side before we're willing to push it out into early access. And we've told ourselves and we've told each other we're going to push it, we're going to go faster, we're going to go looser. So there's some degree of it being my fault. I set that strategy. I agreed to it. I said, yes, that's how we do it. Here's where the problem is. I want it to be helpful. So I opened up a new Google Doc, right, simple as possible. And I start going through the app and I start writing comments. 45 minutes in, I'm like, this is actually not okay, because this is not. Not that it's not my job. I'm above it, but like, why am. [00:15:44] Speaker A: I spending all this time typing out? Like, why should I have to point out these things that are right and. [00:15:50] Speaker B: It'S not coming from a place of, why do I have to spend my time doing it. That's not it. It's. What you're talking about is actually where it is. It's. Why did this leave your desk? [00:16:00] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:16:00] Speaker B: Yes. That's not. Okay, funny you mentioned your story. I'm glad you told it. I had a very similar experience. My first job out of college was at Solomon Smith Barney, and I used to work an analyst there. What you work on is you work on the documents. And so when you work on some $800 million revolving credit facility, and you're the one that needs to put the book together to send out to the 40 investors who say, yes, we're in on this deal or not, I would do something similar, and I would push it out to my boss, and they'd be like, absolutely not. Are you kidding me? But what they would say, they would. They would have that level of indignance over this table is this wide, and the table below it is not the same width. Are you out of your mind? Make it perfect. [00:16:46] Speaker A: Like, how do you not see that? [00:16:47] Speaker B: Yes. Make it perfect. [00:16:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:49] Speaker B: And I took that with me in my career, and I can find a mistake on any document, any PDF, any slide deck, anything immediately. And that, I think it actually ends up helping you and the people around you, especially the people that work for you, the people that send things to you 100%. [00:17:09] Speaker A: I think it starts to become, like a blessing and a curse, like, for me, as I've gone on to my own products and everything, it breeds a level of perfectionism. I see every pixel and every detail, and I have to make it right before I'm willing to put it out. But, you know, but I do find, like, the way to trim down the scope is, like, trim down your appetite of what you're gonna build. But the things that you do build have to be. Have to have a level of quality, you know, like, yeah, like, going back to that, like, with the web design agency, it was like, the other thing was, I just remember over and over again, my manager, I would try to build something that's really challenging to design and build in the browser, and she'd be like, well, it works on Coca Cola's website, and we're building Pepsi's website. So they built it. We have to figure out how to build it. So go back and figure out how to build it over and over again. And I'm just like, oh, but I was so frustrated at the time. But looking back on it now, I'm so much better overall. And then the muscle of figuring out how to figure things out quickly, you know, all that. [00:18:19] Speaker B: Well, I think I properly expressed myself without being a jerk, but also effectively pointing at the standards that we have for ourselves and saying, I hear you. We want to go fast. This does not meet our standards. And we're going on Monday to early access. So let it reach our standards by Monday. [00:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:18:43] Speaker B: Well, that's my side of things. Unless you want to talk about, you know, life insurance. What do you got going? [00:18:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I got. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about this new thing that I am finding myself spending a lot of time on this week. [00:18:56] Speaker B: Okay, give us some background. [00:18:57] Speaker A: At the same time, you know, again, I'm hacking on multiple things, one of them being, like, looking for my next design and ui gig with a, looking for another client or two to sink my teeth into in August and September. I wonder if there's any SaaS companies who need a designer, who needs to build. [00:19:19] Speaker B: You don't want to work with me, bro. [00:19:25] Speaker A: That's always hovering. And I'm talking to a few different people considering some short term, some long term ideas there. I talked about sunrise dashboard last time. That's one product idea that I'm putting out there, but I'm not building that product just yet. Right now I'm just collecting feedback from the surveys. I got some pretty good information. I want to start building an SEO system to explore that. That would be the next thing to do on that one. Clarity flow. There's some projects that I'm overseeing with my team. I can talk more about that another time. We'll be shipping some interesting changes soon. Here's what I'm spending every day and the late nights on this week. It's a new thing. You can check it out at Ripple FM. That is the new landing page for something new. The headline that I just came up with this, this morning, and I got it out there, I mean, I've been working on this for a while, but the way that I'm communicating it came together today. The headline there is, it's a new way to grow your network. And this was one of the ideas that I was alluding to a few weeks back on this show where I got really excited and kind of fired up about something. And I don't necessarily think it's a great business idea for me to work on. Right. In terms of generating revenue or cash in the near term. It's not that, but it's something that I can't stop thinking about, and I ended up starting to build it. Ripple FM is essentially a new way to grow your network. And you do that through private podcasts or joining a private podcast community. It's a new type of podcasting platform that again lets you either start a private podcast or a semi private podcast that has a community element where all of your listeners can sign up and join and connect with each other, connect with you, and then also sort of like connect and network into other adjacent podcast communities. There's a lot of different dimensions to this. I have started to record my own new private podcast today. I recorded the 7th solo episode for that. I haven't released any of them yet. I'm going to be releasing it on Ripple FM. I'm hoping to get the mvp of this thing built and shipped by this weekend. Hopefully just enough for me to be the first private podcast on the network and start inviting people to create their profile and subscribe to mine. But the other thing that I'm looking for right now is I would like a handful of other people who would be interested in posting their podcasts to this network and for them to grow their communities. So, you know, the landing page is up there, Ripple FM. There's an email sign up to request an invite and then there's going to be a survey. Yeah, it's just something that I'm really excited about. I think that I didn't really explain all of it here. I think another part of it is the connections between podcasters, their listeners, and the listeners with other listeners. Any podcaster will tell you, Jordan, you and I both know that we have listeners who probably don't miss an episode of this show, but we've only met a very small handful of them in person. Orlando actually know who they are. Most of them, they know us, but we don't know them. And they have so much in common with us, and they have so much in common with each other. And they have so much in common with adjacent podcasts to ours, like other shows in our community of startups and podcasts and tech and all that. To me, it's kind of crazy that these podcasts and their listener bases are not more networked. And I think that Twitter has been failing on that front. Our industry is one of the only industries that is still really active on Twitter. And even then, I still feel like it's not only super noisy and annoying, but it's actually pretty bad at connecting like minded people to each other. Right. It's changed. [00:24:02] Speaker B: It's changed. It's not a community, it's a news. [00:24:05] Speaker A: Platform more than anything else, essentially. Yeah. And then the other thing that has been eating at me is this idea that, like, yeah, I am connected to a bunch of people in our circles. I'm in a handful of private slacks and group chats and some telegram groups, but each of those is like, all right, five people over here, ten people over there. I'm in a one with a few hundred over there. And then, and it's like different people. And I'm in a few mastermind groups over here, some, some private DM's over there. Everything is so disconnected. [00:24:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:24:36] Speaker A: Where do I go to connect with anyone who knows me and is listening to the same content that I'm listening to? [00:24:43] Speaker B: Like, yeah, that, that's a worthy goal. Like that problem, because a lot of people, a lot of people experience it. I feel the same way. It takes real work to keep up with my Portland slack and this business slack and this other community and this other one. I end up living in slack. But then anyone who doesn't, it just, it does keep your world much smaller than it would be normally. [00:25:09] Speaker A: And so my hypothesis on that, the way to solve that problem is podcasts. Like, I think that podcasts, that's the glue is the connective tissue that a network can be built around. In my opinion, this is kind of like a big idea, a big hairy problem to solve. And it's kind of scary to me that I'm even trying to solve it because it's not a bootstrapper friendly type startup idea, and I'm not even approaching it that way. I'm just approaching it like, this is a problem that I really, really want to see solved well, and I'm really in it and I want to do it. So, yeah, very cool. Let me. Because the thing is like, one concept here is that anytime somebody signs up to subscribe to someone's podcast, they're creating a profile and they can list their favorite podcasts that they listen to on their profile. Right. I don't know. I might put in mixergy and my first million and, I don't know, a handful of others. [00:26:18] Speaker B: Mostly technical and mostly technical. [00:26:21] Speaker A: Sure. And so I put that into my profile. Other listeners create their profiles of which ones they listen to. And using that database of connection of people and podcasts that they listen to, we can connect people together so that I know who I should follow and who I should be in a community with. So, like, even if these large podcasters out there don't come join Ripple FM, there can still be like unofficial communities of listeners who like those public shows. So that's, that's one element of it. The other element is this private podcasting idea. Like, I've been in a group where we have a private podcast where multiple people contribute to the same feed, and it's a way to stay in touch with. This is one of my many small groups that I'm still a part of. Right. So I think it's a really fantastic way to stay in touch with a small network. That's another use case for a private podcast in a small community. Of course you can do something else where it's like if you're a public podcaster, you can have a vip community for your audience here. [00:27:28] Speaker B: Yeah, there's more to go for. Sure. Can I ask a few questions? I want. I'm gonna try to stay high level because the goals are the most important thing, the exact features on how it gets done is the stuff to be worked out. [00:27:43] Speaker A: Yep. [00:27:44] Speaker B: But a few big questions. You mentioned existing podcasts, right? Like ours, and mostly technical and. Okay, let's just like start, start there. You called it a publishing platform. I don't know if I got that right. Yeah, right. I'm assuming you're not trying to pull anyone off of Spotify to go publish on your platform instead of Spotify. [00:28:08] Speaker A: Yeah, so I would. Spotify is always going to be its own thing because they've claimed their own thing. Right. [00:28:15] Speaker B: It's an aggregator. It's a platform. You kind of have to be there. Sure. Like a YouTube. [00:28:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And then there's like big name people who will sign deals with Spotify to go exclusive. Right. But. Okay, so that's like its own thing. But let's look at everything else. And I guess I'm more focused on the small and medium sized and by medium sized, still pretty big. [00:28:38] Speaker B: Yeah, still big. Right. But like a podcast like ours, do we publish our episode there as well as the other platforms? Apple, Spotify and so on? Or is it like a hosting page. [00:28:49] Speaker A: Where, like, my thought right now is that public podcasts like ours and others, nothing changes. We continue to publish our Bootstrap web public podcast the way we always have. Right. If we want to or if other people want to, they can start just a community on Ripple FM and not even have a podcast on the platform. Just use the community feature. That's one way to use it. And it could actually be a way for existing podcasts to grow their audience. Because Ripple is a network of podcast fans and it connects. If you like bootstrapped web, then other listeners of bootstrapped web also tend to like my first million. So there's that recommendation engine that could grow over time. So it could be like a way to grow your podcast. That's one way for the existing podcaster. Does that answer your question? [00:29:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Like, we don't. [00:29:51] Speaker A: Like. That's one, I would say. [00:29:54] Speaker B: Right. So I could jump on the platform and start my own private podcast, and then people could listen to it, follow it, subscribe to it. [00:30:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So here's the other thing. [00:30:06] Speaker B: Or I could not. But I could still participate in the community and basically jump in there and say, this is what we have in common. You're just using the fact that the podcast that you're interested in. That's the thread. [00:30:16] Speaker A: Yeah. The podcast that you're interested in is the way to identify what and who you're interested in. [00:30:22] Speaker B: It's a bit of a personality test. Like my mix of podcasts. I mean, that's literally what I'm interested in. [00:30:28] Speaker A: Literally. And it's like if we subscribe to podcasts and actually listen to them on a regular basis, we're not just casually interested in these topics. We're obsessed with these topics. [00:30:39] Speaker B: Topics like, obsessed enough to hand over hours of your week to it. [00:30:43] Speaker A: Hours like your drives, your washing the dishes. Like you. You only devote that attention to things that you are super into. And you don't only listen to one. If you listen to us, you probably listen to, like, five other similar business podcasts. [00:31:00] Speaker B: You listen to multiple personality. It is expressing your personality in many ways. The things you should listen to. [00:31:07] Speaker A: Four different podcasts about the New York Mets. Like, you know, and I listen to, like, and I listen to. Hey, they're not. They're not so bad right now. I listen to, like, another five podcasts about politics, you know, and news. And then. And then a bunch about business. And then a bunch about business, you know, SMB. [00:31:29] Speaker B: I listen to franchise stuff. I listen to tech stuff. I listen to Israel. I listen to politics. Yeah. That's like, my interests. [00:31:37] Speaker A: Yeah. What was I going to say? [00:31:41] Speaker B: Cool. [00:31:41] Speaker A: The other thing about. Okay, so I've been recording these private podcasts of my own. I'm seven episodes in. This is also a really interesting thing. Now, posting your own private podcast is not going to be for everyone. [00:31:52] Speaker B: Sure. [00:31:53] Speaker A: But I'm finding something interesting about it. Right. Like, okay, we are, like, unusually open here on bootstrapped web. We share a lot about our lives and our business and everything, but it's still somewhat surface level, to be completely honest. We don't share everything. [00:32:08] Speaker B: There's a lot we have to hold back. We feel like we have to hold back. Sure. [00:32:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think there's also like, we still edit ourselves, not like we're misleading anyone, but we still edit ourselves because we know we're just putting it out there in total public view for anyone to subscribe to, right? [00:32:27] Speaker B: Yes. [00:32:28] Speaker A: And I talked about how I've been for many years now in this private podcast slack group with like ten or 20 friends. These are like long time friend business relationships, and that's where we are completely, 100% open and sharing it all because we know it's totally, totally private and we know exactly who's in that group and we're very careful about. That's why we carefully don't invite other people, because we share it all in there. [00:33:03] Speaker B: There's a direct correlation between value and how open you can be. [00:33:07] Speaker A: Yeah, but the issue there is that it is so closed and we've shared so much that we can't really open it up to more people. So this ripple FM, I see as sort of a middle ground between those two extremes. And I've noticed this as I'm recording these private podcasts. They're like ten or 20 minutes each. I'm talking about the work that I'm doing, but also my mindset, and I'm finding myself to talk more openly than I do here on bootstrapped web. Still, I have it in my mind that, okay, more than just ten friends are going to join this. It could be like 50 or 100. So I have to be mindful of that. But I'm speaking with a level of openness and vulnerability. I can't speak now and sharing details that I wouldn't normally just share on Bootstrap web, because I know that once I release this, I'm literally going to see all the people and know them by name on who is actually listening, and they're going to be one message away or one dm away in the ripple community once they get access to these apps. So I'm finding there's a level of openness and a different kind of content quality to the private podcasting thing than you would normally hear. I think that's an interesting angle, and I think it's something. It's so weird to try to invent a new. I'm not inventing anything new here, but it's like, I think it's a new content medium. I think it's a new way to. I wrote in the headline, it's a new way to grow your personal network, because I also think that, like, your network is so much more valuable or so much more useful than an audience. Yeah. People talk about like, oh, it's great to have a huge audience. Only very, very few people actually have the luxury of having a massive audience. Right. But if you have a network of 50 people, 20 people even, who are so tuned into you and your story, that is worth so much in business. [00:35:21] Speaker B: In life, it taps into their networks and their friends and their experiences. Yeah, this is like the stuff. I mean, this is a lot of the value that you and I get out of this podcast. [00:35:30] Speaker A: 100%. 100%. Right. And that. And honestly, for me, this idea is, I'm not treating it like I'm building this and launching it to make money tomorrow from it. The ROI for me is like, I want it to exist for myself. And the benefit that I get is the network, like, growing and strengthening my personal network. Because I know for a fact that when I have a strong network, I have a strong lead flow of clients for consulting. I have a strong network to help me launch my products. I have potential customers for my products. I have partners readily available to work with me. The network effects. I'm customer number one of this thing. If I get nothing more out of this than just that, then that's great. But I think that there's something bigger here, and I think other people should be able to benefit from that kind of network effects of having a podcast or being a listener. Like, literally, just the fact that you listen to podcasts makes you a candidate to get some value out of this. If it were like, you don't have to start a private podcast, but you can join a group where other listeners of your favorite podcasts are, and that could be beneficial to you for the network. [00:36:48] Speaker B: Yeah. This week, the designer problem I'm facing, I got introduced to a potential new designer to work with through this network. [00:37:00] Speaker A: There you go. That's exactly it. [00:37:02] Speaker B: You know, what I want to point out for a sec is sometimes there are products or businesses that we go after, and they are maybe help me think through this for a second. They're very problem focused where there's like an existing pain. This is the type of business experiencing it. You know, e commerce companies off of Shopify have bad checkouts. Let's go get them. Better checkouts. What you're talking about right now, how do we describe this type of a thing? It is a bit conceptual. It is a bit like something I want to see in the world. It's less about, this is so painful that people are willing to pay for it, right? I don't know. What is this like an aspirational concept? I don't know how to describe that, but you see what I'm saying? [00:37:54] Speaker A: This is why I don't think this is a good bootstrapper friendly business idea. Okay. I don't, because, like, sunrise dashboard, I think does qualify as, like, a pretty straightforward idea for a SaaS product that I can charge SaaS prices for. Maybe there's a consultant component to. I could market it with SEO. Like, and I plan to do those things. Like, that's a project that I plan to work on and I'm talking a lot about that on my private podcast. So that is like, that's potentially one of my next business ventures is Sunrise dashboard. Ripple FM is the closest thing I can think of is, like, a social networking platform. I'm not trying to make it like the next Facebook or Twitter, but, like, I think it could be like, a niche social networking platform. It's a marketplace. It's a social network. There's not a clear monetization strategy out front. Why would people pay for this? I'm not planning on charging people to do it, at least not in the beginning. I have ideas for once. It is a network. There could be ways to monetize it that would be so far out in the future. So in the short term, like, I'm not thinking about how to monetize it. I'm just thinking about how to make it valuable, you know? And that's what it is. [00:39:25] Speaker B: You know, it's cool that you have these two, these two versions of ambitions going at the same time between Sunrise and Ripple. I'm very curious. [00:39:38] Speaker A: It's also interesting how I'm building it because it's like with Sunrise right now, I'm really just in research mode and a little bit of marketing mode. I'm doing some SEO stuff. I'm not building anything just yet. I'm not convinced that I'm going to build it. [00:39:51] Speaker B: Sure. [00:39:52] Speaker A: I'm learning with this one. I just started building it because I wanted to build it and I want to publish my podcast. I could hear all the people listening, like, oh, why don't you just put the podcast on any podcast host, put your MVP, this thing, in a telegram group and just test the waters to see if you're going to have enough interest to then convince yourself that you can go forward with the larger vision. I hear you. And I thought that's what I was going to do. I wrote in my tweet, I think I'm going to do a transistor podcast and then a telegram group. And then I started wiring that up, and then it's like, oh, I need a form for them to register themselves. I need to put everyone's profile. Do I put that in a Google sheet? I guess I need zapier to hook these up. Now I'm paying for five different tools. And then it's like, yeah, I know people are interested in wanting to hear my private podcast. I got about 100 people who expressed interest. So, like, then what? Do I migrate them all off of the telegram into this other idea? [00:40:59] Speaker B: Like, yeah, lose all the subscriptions. Is there, like, a starting point to use? Some of these concepts are well understood. [00:41:09] Speaker A: I'm building in rails. I've been honing my own rails app template. I've got all the basic boilerplate stuff built into it. So yesterday, I built out the ability to post audio episodes and have a podcast feed that's working. So I think my next thing is to just make sure there's a user subscription flow. I got to build that piece out. And the MVP in my mind is me as the first podcaster posting episodes that people can join and people can join my community. So there needs to be a flow for people to create their own profiles and subscribe to my podcast. And I want to personally recruit a handful of other people who might want to podcast on this thing as well. [00:42:01] Speaker B: I mean, it makes me interested to do a different. This other thing, this. This private. [00:42:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, like, I would encourage you or anyone else to have your own private podcast feed. Yeah. [00:42:14] Speaker B: I don't even know what it would be. [00:42:16] Speaker A: It could be like, I posted seven episodes. [00:42:20] Speaker B: It's not even, like, a show. I guess everyone can do whatever they want. [00:42:23] Speaker A: Whatever they want, dude. Like, I posted seven episodes. The first one was like, how I came up with the idea for Sunrise Dashboard. The second one was the idea for ripple. The third one was the SEO play and how I'm doing programmatic SEO. The fourth one was how I'm trying to sustain myself with consulting, maybe, and my thoughts and history there. I'm doing an episode about clarity flow and what's happening over there. I did an episode about my tech stack. Whatever you're working on and whatever's on your mind. Some people go even more personal. I listen to some people's solo podcasts that they just put out publicly, and some people are just personal lives, parenthood, whatever it might be. [00:43:07] Speaker B: Yeah, very interesting, because it feels like a closer connection than something you publish on Spotify. [00:43:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I know that some companies also use private internal podcasts as, like, a yemenite company network, keeping people in the loop on things like that's another potential use case. I don't know. It's the idea that I thought it's too crazy to even work on. And that's why I went forward with sunrise dashboard. But it's something that I just cannot stop thinking about, and I want to do it. And I'm in this era of hacking on new ideas and getting stuff going. Found myself working on it this week. So here we go. [00:43:54] Speaker B: I love it. I'm very happy to hear that. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes and trying it if it gets to that point. [00:44:00] Speaker A: Well, I'm going on vacation on Monday, and my goal is to have something shippable before then. I don't know if that's possible. [00:44:08] Speaker B: I have found myself. You know, it's summer. I usually think of summer. I chill back a little bit. I found myself really motivated. [00:44:16] Speaker A: I'm never laid back. I'm always motivated. [00:44:18] Speaker B: Really. I try to get myself. I think my nature is a bit lazy. So I kind of either I let it go or I fight it. It's easy to let it go. [00:44:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:26] Speaker B: But it does not feel like I'm fighting anything. I lose track of the time. I'm up reading. [00:44:35] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, we both have vacations coming up, and I'm going into this one in sort of a weird mindset because, like I said, I have these ideas that I'm hacking on, which, like, the ripple fm, like, I'm working on it. So that means I'm, like, really fired up and I'm spending late nights, which means I'm going to want to work on it probably during vacation. And also, like, I'm also looking for my next consulting gig for August. So that puts me in sort of a stressed mindset of, like, I feel if I'm relaxing, I feel guilty. [00:45:14] Speaker B: Okay. [00:45:14] Speaker A: It's like I'm not doing enough to keep things sustainable around here. So I'm going into this vacation with a little bit of nervous guilt and fire and. [00:45:29] Speaker B: Okay. [00:45:29] Speaker A: And I don't know. We'll see. I mean, at the same time, I do need some relaxation. It's sort of like a flying and then driving vacation. Going to Chicago and then up to the upper peninsula in Michigan. So some airbnbs and then some long driving days and some beach days and all that. [00:45:49] Speaker B: Driving is long distance driving is my favorite idea time that I have. [00:45:53] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, me too. [00:45:53] Speaker B: I don't even do it on purpose. I just really. I look around and go, everyone's asleep. It's just me. In the road for the next 2 hours. And just being forced to actually think about something for a while is relatively rare because there's, you know, there's so much distraction at all times. Go get some lunch. Look at Twitter. [00:46:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:10] Speaker B: Do work for half an hour, then don't do then. So just thinking for an extended period of time is relatively rare. That's why I get it's bad, but, like, 1030, 11:00 at night comes around, I start reading and I get wound back up. And at 1230, I'm like, Jesus, I gotta go take a melatonin gummy to get to bed or something. [00:46:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Our vacations, and like most weekend days are, we. We tend to do a lot in the first half of the day. Like, we're all early risers. We'll go hang out at the beach half the day and then by. By the afternoon. Hey there. We got a dad. [00:46:50] Speaker B: Yes. Someone's here and she says that she's a nurse. Okay. This is Daphne, my youngest, and she's letting me know that life insurance doctor is here, so I got a boogie. [00:47:01] Speaker A: All right. Kidding. Well, Daphne called it. That's the end of today. [00:47:08] Speaker B: Thanks for listening, everyone. [00:47:09] Speaker A: All right, later, folks. [00:47:10] Speaker B: Take it easy. Talk soon.