Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian and I were just working out who does the intro.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: We always forget.
Yeah. So here we go. We're gonna try to fit in a quick one. I'm gonna go shut the window before the landscapers get on this podcast.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Perfect timing. That's right. Well, it's Friday. I got my challah. I got my. I got my pastries. New pastry today. What are we talking at Huon Bakery? I don't know how to pronounce it. Koin Aman Kunaman. K o I g n a m m a n. Koin amon cunemon. Oh, my God. Like, coconut cream filling with, like, a fruit tart thing going on at the same time. Great way to start the day. My stomach unhappy. My mouth very happy.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: I'm into a lot of that. I don't know that I'm into the coconut. That usually ruins a pastry for me.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: I do not like coconut myself. This was just a coconut cream, but it was actually just pretty mild cream.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: It worked out, but that's true.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: I'm on coffee number two right now, so I'm gonna try to hold back the energy and keep it.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: That's pretty strong. Have you tried cometeer coffee? The way I'm addicted to cometeer coffee?
[00:01:27] Speaker B: I make the espresso at home, like Americano. A couple of those every day.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Fair. I do cometeer in the morning.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: I try to get it in before noon. 01:00, max. Otherwise, I'm not sleeping.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: All of your coffee consumption before noon.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: I push it to, like, one.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. I guess that's.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: That sounded unreasonable to me. But the truth is, I just have an espresso after lunch, and that's usually my last coffee of the day. And that's at about, you know, 01:00.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Yep. Yep.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Hey, there's a lawnmower.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Oh, you hear it? All right. It's fine. It's fine.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: All right, Brian, what do we got going on? What do we got going on? I'm like. I'm like a new. I'm like a sass indie hacker, okay? I'm, like, 28 years old right now.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: I'm interested. Like, you've never done this before? Yes.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: I'm asking questions on Twitter. I'm going into communities, ripple specifically. I'm posting things. I'm asking people for ideas. I'm evaluating landing page software. I'm like the.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: I'm kind of, like, the opposite. I'm like, you're technically older than me, but I'm like, I feel like I'm like the old guy who's, like, burnt out and disillusioned by sasse and trying to figure out alternatives to.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: I was just there with you, like, 90 days ago. Okay. Yeah, it was really, I was right there. I mean, I literally pivoted and gave up on a product that I worked on for, like, years. So I feel you and I have, it's actually been interesting to see where the motivation and energy comes from. And my wife, like, notices it. She's like, you got a little, you got a little bounce going on.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Little zing here.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Yes. With work.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: And it's, you know what it is for me, it's the self serve nature of the product. It's really interesting and how much agency that gives me, like, the impact that I can have on improving things.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep, yep.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: I can, like, I can feel the direct connection. Whereas in rally, there were several steps removed from the things that I did and the decisions I made to the impact, because it was like salespeople reaching out to people, trying to get them on calls, seeing what kind of inbound. And I could do my biz dev thing, and I could do, you know, talk to investors and get intros and that sort of thing, but it didn't feel very connected to any outcomes.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
I love today, like Friday, and this has become sort of a pattern for me this year because especially when I start getting loaded up with consulting projects. Right now I'm on one, and it looks like I'm gonna have a second one coming up, like next week or so when I am working on products for clients.
I really crunch all that into, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and sort of wrap it up by Thursday. So that by the end of Thursday into Friday, that's like my time. Okay. Like, we do this podcast on Friday, but this is also my day to hack on my own stuff.
You know, I squeeze in more of it in other parts of the week, too. But this is where I've already shipped some good stuff for the client project yesterday. So today I feel actually more relaxed, obviously, and open. But I'm also at a point today where I've been talking about Ripple FM, and that's been the last personal project that I shipped, and it's actually out there live. It's got a couple hundred users on it. We have a community for bootstrapped web listeners. It's linked up in the show notes. If you haven't found it yet, it's really cool. You and I have been active in there and just talking to our listeners, it's great.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: I love ripple. I find myself thinking about it several times during the day.
I've started to use it as a sounding board that feels more private than Twitter.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: I've gotten there.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Okay, good.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: You've been hopping in there with, with questions about your work and stuff.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: I love to see that. And what's really cool about it is, yeah, we could ask the same types of things on Twitter, but, but we, the, the difference here is that, you know, that the people seeing this also listen to us. It's so like, they have so much extra context.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: Yes. You don't have to explain, and Twitter has that to a degree. But you kind of have to close your eyes and have faith that the people you want to see it are the ones that see it and respond because they have the context. This is just context is assumed and, but I gotta tell, I gotta tell you, I got a list of feature requests.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Oh, I know.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: I want a message board.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: That's what I want.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: I want a message board. I want more conversation. I want liking, like all this stuff.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm hacking on some of those today.
But, you know, we could talk about, we could talk about feature requests for it, but I, but I also want to, what I'm thinking about personally is like, winding down my time investment on this thing because it is a side project and it's not a business yet.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: To let it, to let it run a bit. Let it do some.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Let it run. I want it to grow right. And I put a little bit of growth hackery in there. There's some like, email engagement stuff going on.
I'm hoping that, like, podcasters can help spread it with their followings. I see it as an interesting way for people. Like, I have a private podcast and I'm treating it like my newsletter. It's like a way for me to be connected. I think it's better than like trying to grow a Twitter audience or, you know, but I'm also thinking about, like, I gotta work on other products that can make money sooner because this is like a thing that might be monetized in the future, but it's just a thing that I just hacked on.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Yes. And the feature requests are not nearly as important as the fundamentals being there and people coming in and just using it for what it is and look.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: And a lot of the feature requests are like things I want as a user of ripple. So that's why I'm, like, deploying them today. You know what? I kind of want this to be that way. So I'm going to deploy.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: We're just kind of in your hands there. And wherever you want to take the features, you feel free to do so.
But it has opened up new, new things in my mind.
I want to talk more about the business. I want to talk in more detail.
I want to start a private podcast. I don't know what a private podcast is.
I just want to explore.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Let me just kind of rant on why I'm excited about this. Again, I don't know if there's a business here or not, and I'm hesitant to put too much time and energy into it. But, okay, there's a few different angles on the value here, and there's already some, like, magic. Like, you're talking about it a little bit. But like, first of all, as, let's talk about the public podcast side of things, right? Like, we have a public podcast. There've been a few other public podcasts who have come on, and it's like, instantly you come on and it's like, wait, there's 40 of my listeners. There's 60 of my listeners right here in this message board. Like, I can go message them now, hear their faces. Like, that's sort of a magical feeling. Like, I felt it once I started seeing all these bootstrapped web listeners coming out.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: There wasn't a communication channel.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Tyler King from, he runs less annoying CRM. His podcast is startup to last. He hopped on and he was telling me, and this starts to make sense is that like, ripple can sort of serve like a better podcast website. Like, if your podcast is hosted already somewhere else, usually the podcast website itself, like, our podcast website for bootstrapped web, is like, there's nothing there. It's just a list of episodes. There's no communication. There's no discussion.
It's hard for us to manage.
This could serve as like a better even replacement for the podcast website if not a link to your official community.
All right, let me talk about the private podcast thing for a second.
You don't even know if, like, the term private podcast is right for it, but here is how I see it. I think that it is a better alter. It's like a new alternative for audience growth or network growth. The whole concept here is like, grow your network, right? So, like, the traditional ways that we all know about are start an email newsletter, try to get thousands of subscribers on your email newsletter, or, and or tweet, try to get a lot of Twitter followers or a YouTube channel, try to get thousands of subscribers on your YouTube channel. These are all, there's no like, when you have a huge audience, you're, you have a ton of power to do stuff and it's great.
I think that there is a middle ground between large audience that's on these big platforms with big algorithms and spam inbox filters and all that.
I see having a private podcast as a more direct line between me and my most engaged people that I'm connected to.
For example, when I put out a tweet, chances are most of my actual followers, people who follow me are not even going to see my tweet due to the algorithm. The algorithm is going to bury it.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah, you cede control to the algorithm, you don't have control.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Same thing with email newsletters. If I send an email newsletter to my, I have a couple thousand people on my personal email newsletter list, there's a pretty good chance that most of those gmails and outlooks and whatever are going to suppress the email and put it into the spam inbox or put it into the promotions tab or whatever it might be for some stupid reason.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: People love newsletters the day they subscribe and then they hate them every day after.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And even if they see my newsletter, they see so many that they're probably just going to skim over it. But if you subscribe to my podcast, whether it's bootstrap, web or my private one that I called, what's next? If you subscribe to that, you're listening. Like, you're listening out when you're walking, when you're washing the dishes, when you're driving. Like we have an actual relationship and you're literally spending time and giving attention in a way that you're not giving attention to people that you follow on Twitter. Like, to me, that is a much more interesting, like, I'm much more interested in having 50 to 100 subscribers on my private podcast than having thousands on my newsletter or my Twitter followers. Like, the 50 are so much more valuable to me being connected in that way. So if I can make ripple be seen as like, I don't know, like a better way to grow your network without having to have a huge audience.
You know, like it's just a different channel for, for putting your ideas out there and having people listen to what you have to say.
I don't know. I don't know. How do we make this a product or a business that can actually grow? I don't know the answer to that.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's the part where you don't need to know whatever magic is happening. Just keep harnessing it and then see where it goes. It's partly out of necessity that you need to just see where it goes, because you're not going to focus all your time on it.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I've already moved on to other product ideas. I'm starting to hack on stuff that can actually be an actual business a lot sooner.
But this is something that's there. And bootstrapped web. We're still. And I've set it up as a leaderboard, too. Now, when you go on, you can not only search for your favorite podcast, you see the list of podcasts we're for right now. We are still number one on the leaderboard, baby.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Yes. Whatever advantage we can take, you know, that's fine. Yeah.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: But I would be more than happy for the other podcasts to overtake us by sharing ripple with their audience.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Right. My first million just needs to come in and just claim their podcast page, and then. There you go.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Cool. All right, well, look, this week.
This week we started advertising, and it has been very interesting.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: All right, what are we learning?
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Okay. What we're learning is we have.
I think we've talked about it as, like, we have multiple hurdles.
We need to see if we know who to target, then we need to see if we can get those people to the site, then we need to see if we can convert them into trial, then we need to see if we can convert them into paid, and then we can see if we can retain them. So, straightforward kind of funnel scenario. But the self serve nature of the signups and the fact that we are able to just turn the faucet on by spending money on ads has created a lot of pressure right at the point of the landing page. So after someone clicks on the ad.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: I have a question, though. Okay. About this step in the funnel. Okay. You're about to talk about the landing page, but I'm curious about the ads. Like, how easy have you found it to actually go buy traffic, like targeted traffic?
Because can you spend money and get hundreds of visitors to the website?
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Okay, so meta. I have a friend on Twitter. His name's David Herman, and he's an ad buyer, media buyer for, like, great brands. He complains about meta endlessly.
You can feel the torment through the tweets. And I've always just kind of felt bad for him. But, you know, what are you gonna do? We started messing with meta, and I immediately understood to a different degree what he was talking about. So dealing with meta ads is not easy. I think if we did it without an agency, I don't know where we would have gotten. First of all, my ad account is banned. I have no idea.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Oh dude, the web of nonsense of just trying to like log into your Facebook or meta account. You can't tell Facebook players manager like, dude, I've been in that web of a nightmare so many times that I've given up. I just don't, I don't spend money there, it's done.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: So I have to kind of acknowledge like, yes, you can buy traffic. Like, my answer to your question is yes, but I cannot leave out the amount of friction required to get through.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Dude. The number of different admin interfaces for business owners on the meta network is. I don't know how any professional builder on the Internet. This is like malpractice. This is like product malpractice.
That's what it is.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: So it is as severe as Brian and I are making out to be. So I have no access to our metads because for some reason my personal ad account is banned and anything having to do with business manager and advertising is connected to your personal Facebook.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Ridiculous.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: I have no idea how to appeal it. I'm, I'm just locked out. I'm the founder of the company and I am locked out of anything to do with it. Thankfully, we hire.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Like, it's at a point where I'm like, how does Meta actually have a business? How do people spend money? I tried to spend money with them.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: And they make an enormous amount of money.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: It's not even a small thing.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Like, you gotta be like David on Twitter who does this for a living every single day and just cries through it. That's it.
So once we got through that friction, yes, we can buy traffic. Now there are, we are in the ramp up period. So our ad account is currently throttled, so we can only spend like $50 a day.
Our target spend per day is several times that.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: Okay, so we are okay, but even that.
Okay, so can you get clicks though? And are those clicks?
[00:17:39] Speaker A: We're not clicks. We're getting signups.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Signups, nice.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: So we're spending. So here's what I did last night. I'm not gonna share. This is partly why I want a private podcast. Cause I wanna be able to talk about this stuff. I don't wanna share the numbers here, but what the numbers do for me is I say when we spend $50 a day, we get this much traffic and we get this many trials. That means if you, let's just round numbers here, let's say if we ten x the daily spend, if that, then ten xs the daily signups. And then I multiply that by 30. And then I multiply that by a conversion rate from trial to paid. And then I multiply that by an average revenue per user. And then I remove from that the amount of ad spend plus the ad management that we're paying the agency.
And, oh, my God, this is a real opportunity.
So, of course, it never works out, according to that math, quite the way you want it.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: The math changes as you grow in numbers. And I.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Yes, but it's still important to just go through the math and say, am I even playing the right game here?
So that.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: I guess what I was asking, though, was that. What I was asking was, especially since you're in this AI space, and we talked about how you're sort of in this new category, how easy or difficult is it to find targeted users who are actually interested in that, given that it's a new space?
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Okay, so there's some very interesting things around this.
I'm thinking back to yesterday when one of the founders of the agency that we work with sent me a talk that he just did at a conference. And it's a 20 minutes talk. I'll ask him if it's okay if I share it. If so, I'll tweet it. And the talk was about targeting exactly what you're talking about. How do you find people who are interested in your thing? And his take on it was that over the last few years, there have been significant hurdles thrown in the way of good targeting, specifically around privacy and Apple's updates.
We've talked about this in the context of e commerce and how much it impacted e commerce and Apple's plans to build their own ad network.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: All these other things for those who might not be up to speed on it, it's basically like about a year ago, Apple, they show you a pop up whenever you start using a new service. Like, do you want to share your information with Facebook or with Google or with whatever this is? Most people opt out of that.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: The biggest thing is that they have made it very difficult to track conversion. And so you can advertise, but then you don't know who's converting, and then it's very difficult to keep targeting based on that. That's the machine that Facebook built through the interest graph. Okay, so Hamza, the founder of the agency we work with, one of the founders, his talk was based on the fact that the new version of targeting is the algorithm. And so what platforms like reels and TikTok do is they effectively do the targeting work for the advertiser, and they do that through their own activity graph. If I watch something on TikTok and I spend more than 6 seconds on it, they log that as a factor. If I like something, they like it as a factor. If I follow someone that they, their behavior impacts my interest graph also.
So his argument is effectively, what you need to do is create good content and then let the algorithm do its thing. That's basically your best option right now. Let the algorithm go out and find the people. And the way to do that is to create good, engaging content. And then the algorithm will put you onto the right graph and show your content and your advertising to the right people, which is why they make their ads feel like content.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Right. We talked about the video ads, and so that's sort of like seeding content and like stuff that can be engaged with, which informs the ad platforms on how to serve your ads.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Right? Yes, you're at their mercy. But it also means that they have by far the best data available. They know views, likes, connections, DM's. They see absolutely every bit of behavior, and they have a lot of interest in your ads being successful.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: It seems less about, like, I feel like a couple of years ago it was more about, like, uploading your customer lists and doing like, lookalike audiences and analyzing them. And now it's more like, let's just trust the Facebooks and the Googles and the algorithms of the world to they're much smarter than whatever retargeting we might be able to do.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Right? Given the constraints around privacy and tracking, you're better off with the algorithm doing its thing. And I think we talked about this last week. What this agency is doing is, is mixing content type with script. So one content type will be like man on the street. So it's the guy walking on the sidewalk holding his phone. That's one content type, and another one will be directly head on to a computer talking, and then this other one will be something else. So these different things. And then we have multiple scripts, and we run each of the scripts through each of the content types, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of varieties, and we're only a few hundred bucks in, but some of them are clear winners. And so we scrape all the other ones, we keep the clear winners, and we start iterating from the winners and experimenting and so on.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: I love it. All right, so you're paying for traffic, you've got clicks and signups. Now what?
[00:23:29] Speaker A: Yes, yes. So now it's like one hurdle in the funnel.
We have more confidence in our ability to tackle, like, we're not done. We don't know the best thing possible on the ad, creative and everything else, but we know that we can get traffic and then we can multiply the scale. Okay, cool. So not surprisingly, the next piece of focus is, well, once they click on the ad and then they land. Right now they're landing on our homepage.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Right. So we want to like align the landing page, the headline, with what the ad set.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Right. And so then you come to the next problem. What do you do with the, with the funnel? What do you do with the first page after the click? You and I have talked about optimizing the homepage as effectively a sales page. And I still agree with that.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: I don't want to create multiple pages and product tours and different places. I just want all the information to make a decision on the homepage effectively.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: I feel like ads eventually go to multiple landing pages, though, right? Like matching landing page to ad.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. Because sometimes we will have, let's say we specifically want to target home service companies or lawyers or doctors or service professionals or whatever you do want the landing page to match. And so the last few days, what I have been thinking about is, what's the right way to do that? Is it landing pages? Is it work with a designer, is it optimizedly type of thing that works on top of your site, that alters content on the homepage directly?
So that is now firmly on my plate, what to do, how to set us up to be able to iterate, experiment, change our mind, have control without like, waiting for our engineering team to, you know, to get to our marketing needs. Like what, what should we do with that? That's the next question.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: My thought would, first of all, just on the homepage thing, I tend to think of, like, the homepage is really just like, you're sort of just like optimizing for the top number one thing that you want to be searched and found for and known for. Like, you're not really optimizing for ads or for targeted niche campaigns on your homepage. You know, what was I going to say? So, yeah, and like the optimizely, or like, I guess there are tools that can like, you know, personalize the content, I guess optimizely does that. I think Brennan's write message does that sort of thing.
Those seem like pretty cool tools. But I find that I would think at this stage, at this early stage, it's over optimizing or over technical thinking on that, I would just fire up multiple landing pages to see your top five bets, your top five targeted bets that you think are most promising. Start running ads to these five pages and then dial in.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: Okay. I was a little resentful of your smart ass tweet, by the way.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: I said I was joking.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Platform. And of course, what does Brian say? Hmm?
[00:26:37] Speaker B: What'd you say? HTML, intel and css. That's all it takes.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Very funny. Way to, way to poke at my inadequacies.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: No, I wasn't trying to do that, but I genuinely do think that, yeah, I mean, I guess you could get by with a random page builder. Any of them off the shelf.
I feel like every time I've tried to do that though, it.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: I know.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: It's so much harder than what they promise.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: That's right, it gets in the way. So look, I actually went through this entire decision process cycle and I actually ended up where you suggested, which is the irony. I actually approached our designer and was like, can you just help me build landing pages so that we don't get. Cause every page builder I looked into, I was like, this is just gonna get in my way.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Like I'm just gonna have to become.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: An expert in unbounce.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: I was even thinking about it after that tweet, I was even thinking about it. What you could do, and I think this is actually legit. Way to go. Is like have your designer design a super high end HTML css one pager sales page with all the styling and branding and look and feel. Nothing too fancy, very clean, but like super professional, fast loading, really important, mobile optimized, really important. Those are a given these days.
Just HTML and css, that's your template.
You can then literally take the source code of that, drop it into chat GPT and say, here's my updated copy for the next version. Give me the next version of this same landing page.
I literally do that all the time myself, just in my own work. I design a page once or I design a component once and then I feed into chat GPT. I'm like, here, I want to iterate on this. Just give me the new version of this with these changes and then it spits me back. And then what it'll do is like, it'll, it'll take the original designed HTML Css that your designer did, then it'll swap in your new words.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: So I can just in natural language say, change the headline to this changes sub headline.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: You could upload a document, you could just write paste like a bunch of paragraphs of new copy and say, I.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Can ask it to come up with.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Very, put this new copy into this HTML page. Here's the code, here's the new copy, done.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: And then hand it over to our frontend devs to just throw into the, into the frame.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Then chat. GPT sends you back a new HTML file. That's the new coded version with your copy in it. You could give it to your devs and have them deploy it. Dude, deploying an HTML page is so easy. Now I literally go to Cloudflare. I think they call it cloudflare pages.
Okay. It's free.
You sign up for that, they put a box on the page, a drag and drop box.
[00:29:27] Speaker A: You just toss it in there.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: You literally toss your HTML into this box. It is live on the Internet. Done.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Okay. So then rock just needs to set up like the domain or subdomain, whatever that I need to work within.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: I map the domain to that, to that HTML. Cloudflare. If you look at, let's see, sunrisedashboard.com, comma, my landing page for that. That's what that is. It's HTML on a Cloudflare page.
Okay. Whenever I have a new idea that I throw up on the Internet, that's what I do. I do HTML, I design it in HTML, I throw it up on the cloudflare. That's it.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Very, very, like, it's a step by step process that definitely you can do. And like anyone non technical, you're more than non technical, by the way, you're not. Yes. So it's incredibly easy. And I think that that's more optimized than going to like a page builder or a WordPress or a webflow or whatever you're adding in because you're adding in so much tooling, that's unnecessary. But you're also adding in bloat. That actually literally slows down the webpage, which is not good.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: I didn't like anything I saw. They look like they have a good bunch of features. And the sinking feeling I kept getting was, I'm going to end up spending all my time on this instead of coming up with ideas on what should be on the page.
And I do have this sense of that our game is going to be won or lost in the optimization of the funnel.
Like we have the budget to buy traffic. That is not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is making that spend somewhere near profitable, somewhere so that the payback period is two or three months and not eight to twelve months, and then we can grow the way we want to. And so I'm getting used to the fact. It really brings me back to my e commerce days, where I was the one responsible for optimizing the funnel, and we hired someone to run traffic, and then we took our conversion rate from 1.5% to 2% to 2.5% to 3%. And that's how the business succeeded.
[00:31:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: And it was done in a way where I just would wake up and think, what should I try today? What if I move this button here and this button there and added a credit card symbol and put the guarantee bigger? And I had so much fun doing that. The prospect of doing that for this business sounds like so much fun that I just want to set up a system where I can succeed in accomplishing it and not get discouraged and hung up on tech and waiting a week for this thing and that. Yeah.
[00:32:05] Speaker B: And that's the thing is, like, all these extra tooling in the chain just slows down the momentum and it gets frustrating. And then now we're taking. This happens to me all the time. Like, now I'm taking my eye off the ball. Like, look, I just need to test these top three, three to five ideas for campaigns, you know? Cause that's what's gonna actually move the business. You know? Move the needle for the business.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's like, story of my life.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: You know, you are good, though. You have the discipline to kind of just work your way through it until you understand it and can do it yourself. And I feel like I get a lot of.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Is unbelievable.
It has changed the game for busting through those annoying technical roadblocks and also just replacing stuff that even. Also, for me, where it's used to be, just a year ago or two, it would have been like, all right, I've got all these HTML pages. It's just such a grind for me to hack through and have to wrap every paragraph in an HTML paragraph tag. I should just go higher a va to go do that. Okay, so now I gotta go on upwork and find a va and then hire them. And now I'm waiting a week for them to come back to me. I could have just done it myself in a couple of hours. Now it's five minutes. Here's some text, here's a design, send it to chap GPT. It sends me back all coded up. Just copy and paste. Done.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: Okay, we're gonna need to take this offline, get a little tutorial session, because part of the excitement of the last few weeks has this real like determination to learn new things. And that feels like one of these things that will give me the superpowers I need to enjoy this challenge 100%.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: I would love to do that. I mean, this relates exactly. I've been kind of freaking out over the speed that I'm able to build full rails apps now with AI in my tool chain. It's unbelievable because it used to be like, I mean, ripple came together in a month trip and I was on vacation for one of those weeks. And it's just because of what, what I'm just describing to you about. Just an HTML page can be applied to any tech stack. Like when you need to just grind out a lot of code, AI does it for you. Just give it the directions and then, you know, you like a developer knows how to finalize it and tweak it and fix it and all that. But like it's so much faster than doing it ourselves.
It's unbelievable, you know?
[00:34:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Cool. Well that's. I'm going to be deep in funnel land for the next few, I mean, foreseeable future.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: How about you? I know we don't have that much more time because I have a hard stop today.
[00:34:58] Speaker B: I mean, you know, my, my, I'm sort of up in the air in between what I should focus on next product wise. I have a couple of ideas.
I mean, I talked about like Sunrise dashboard. That's sort of one of them. I'm also tinkering with programmatic SEO, which started as like a marketing play for the Sunrise dashboard idea. But as I'm getting more into it, I'm like, well, there might be some software here for doing programmatic SEO content.
That's something that I'm thinking and tinkering with.
But the other thing that's on my mind is even those ideas or any SaaS idea is like, that's still a long game.
It's going to take a while to get something.
I could build stuff fast, but making it a business is still not fast.
So I'm thinking more about what can I build and sell as a shorter term product revenue? That's not consulting.
I'm not interested really in info products anymore. I used to do the productized course. I'm just not interested in creating courses or writing books and stuff like that.
I build stuff.
I'm starting to open my mind to the idea of some sort of either releasing my app template, but I'm thinking more about a components library.
All the components that I build, all the features that I build and all the different products that I work on, I componentize them mostly for my own use because I know I'm going to build this thing again. I make it a reusable, configurable component with all my tailwind UI, like tailwind designing and the interfaces how I want them.
I'm thinking through ideas for what a components library product or membership might look like where you, and I'm sort of less interested in the traditional SaaS model. So I'm thinking a lot about things that I can charge a little bit more for either a lifetime access or a year license to something, which opens up the possibility for once a product like that exists.
You know, we're talking about advertising here. Like that's something that I could actually buy traffic to. Like I can't buy traffic to a $19 a month SaaS product. No, no, but something that I charge like $500 for or like an option for like $1,000 package. Like, I don't know, I'm just throwing numbers and ideas out here. I don't know what form this is all going to take, but this is something that I already have in my possession. I have my own UI components, library and app template that I've been crafting and improving with every project that I do. So it's something that's like that I am always improving anyway. And it's the idea of selling your byproducts. Yeah, it's very direct and I've always been sort of closed off to the idea of doing that because there are so many components libraries out there. There's UI libraries, there's app templates.
Why just do another one?
Are all these smarter than me developers going to pick apart my code and make fun of me?
But as I start to think more about it, I started to think about, well, there are some unique things that I can offer, especially more of a focus on UI design and making it more configurable, especially for rails maybe having Laravel versions.
And then I started to think even more about like, well, what does a modern components library product look like? Yes, you get the components, but maybe there's an AI element where.
Here's my component for, for a multi panel setup like settings menu for your app, you can get my code. You can see my video on how to implement it and how to customize it, or you can just click this button and send all that code over to AI and have it custom tweak it to your needs and give you the new customized version off of my original component, all that built in, because right now you'd have to copy and paste into chat GPT and have it do its thing.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: But there's some value to add on top of the components themselves.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm thinking if you're familiar with laricasts or tailwind UI, those are great libraries and memberships for having access to these components.
But taking it a step further of like, okay, you're looking at this page inside a laricast. Now let's take the code and AI, transform it to something more specific that I need. You know, like, that's what my service is too. Like when I work with clients, it's like I take components that I design or their existing app and I improve them.
So those are like the little directions that my mind is starting to go. Like, these are things that I can build and ship in the not too distant future and start to start to.
I think of my income as a pie chart right now. A lot of it is consulting. A little bit of it is product revenue. A little bit of it is like income from, from clarity flow. And if I can get that pie to be more product and start to carve away the consulting, that would be good. And so anything I can do, it's a little bit of analysis paralysis and too many ideas, too many products. I've got ripple over here, I've got sunrise dashboard over there. I've got programmatic SEO. So I'm trying not to.
It's a lot of scatterbrain nonsense, but I'm trying to figure it out.
[00:40:56] Speaker A: I will say from my point of view, and I'm gonna guess from listener point of view, you are not too paralyzed. You are thinking about a lot of things. There isn't a lot of analysis, but there's not too much paralysis. Things are moving. So I think, you know, I think it's good that you put pressure on yourself to, like, make decisions faster.
That's what all the productivity has come out of. You've just determined, hey, I gotta make decisions faster and push things out more often.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: I think you're right about that. Like, especially the second half of this year. Now I'm much more in the mindset of like, okay, just go and build, like. Cause the first half of this year, I was, I was literally only analyzing. Yeah. And I just wasn't building anything. I was like, what if I do this direction? What if I do that and I wasn't actually shipping and now, now it's like, all right, idea for ripple. Take a month and ship it. Idea for this? Take a month and ship it. You know, that's cool in theory.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: Well, we're gonna see. We're gonna see what comes next.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yep. Yep.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: I got a new mastermind going on.
[00:41:59] Speaker B: Nice, dude.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: That's always fun. A lot of new energy in there.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Same. Same set of problems. Very similar. Friend of ours. I'll hold off on talking about it until I talk with him about it first.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for listening, folks. And if you want to keep the conversation going, hop into ripple. There's a link in the show notes, this. See you later, folks.
