Make it Rough

[00:00:16] Speaker A: Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrapped Web. Mister Brian Castle. How we doing? [00:00:22] Speaker B: Doing good. It's Friday. We are, uh, wrapping up another week here and just heading into the weekend. And then next week I have a sort of short week. I finish up at the end of Thursday, and then we're going to down to the Florida keys for almost a week. I want to have a buddy's wedding and then a little extended vacation with Amy and I. It should be fun. I'm looking forward to that. It's been several weeks since we got away, especially just the two of us. [00:00:51] Speaker A: So the whole family's going to the keys, and then you guys get a little time. [00:00:54] Speaker B: No, the kids go to. Go to the grandparents, and we go to my buddy's wedding, and then we do, like, an extra, like four days. Just. Oh, it sounds great. At a resort. Good for you. [00:01:03] Speaker A: We are doing. We're going to New York next week. My brother and his wife both turned 40 recently, so they're having a big party together. So just the two of us are coming down. We don't have grandparents here, so our trip is, like, you know, 24 hours kind of thing, but it's still. It's gonna be fun, right? [00:01:23] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. Very cool. Just a few hours ago, I'm sitting here working, and I'm like. There's, like, a little rumble, dude. I'm like, what was that like? And I told. I completely thought it was something in my house. Like, oh, it's just one of those house noises. There's probably, like a raccoon or something under. Under the house or something. I'm getting. I'm getting some texts from people in Connecticut and New York, and, like, yo, did you feel that? Yeah. [00:01:49] Speaker A: Twitter all at the same time? [00:01:51] Speaker B: Yep. [00:01:51] Speaker A: Well, my brother, same one in New York, texted me and said, was that an earthquake? You know, it was, like, in our. In our WhatsApp group with my brothers and my dad, which is like, this ongoing group chat all day. And he just writes, was that an earthquake? I thought he was joking, so I wrote back, what happened? Did you fart? Right? You know, just not thinking anything of it. And then I go to Twitter, and it's like, was that an earthquake? Was that an earthquake? New York City earthquake. And I was like, oh, an actual earthquake? Yeah, that's what we need right now, you know? [00:02:20] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:02:20] Speaker A: Threat of war on one side, a couple of earthquakes on the other. [00:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And, like, here on the east coast, like, you know, we never get earthquakes, so, like, even. And this was, like, the tiniest little rumble. Like I literally thought it was just something in my house and. And like everyone freaked out because it's like, it's the craziest thing. Yep. [00:02:38] Speaker A: Well, look, this podcast is no longer sponsored by thesis because that stuff was too strong. [00:02:43] Speaker B: Okay. [00:02:44] Speaker A: Too strong. I took it in the morning and then. [00:02:46] Speaker B: Pretty good for content though. [00:02:47] Speaker A: What's that? [00:02:48] Speaker B: Pretty good for content. [00:02:49] Speaker A: It was. It was pretty good. You know, now I'm back on. I'm back on my friend. Natural stacks, acetylcholine. [00:02:55] Speaker B: Just the regular stuff, man. [00:02:57] Speaker A: And the supplements over there, in five years they're flowing of creatine. [00:03:02] Speaker B: Do you? You know, like I work out every day and. But I don't do any supplement other than like just like protein shakes and stuff like that. And vitamins. Give it a try. Yeah, I've been thinking about it. [00:03:14] Speaker A: It's great. [00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. Yep. [00:03:16] Speaker A: Very happy with it. Do we do business on the Internet? Is that we do. [00:03:22] Speaker B: Last I checked, that one. [00:03:23] Speaker A: Talk about. [00:03:24] Speaker B: Yep. All right. All right. So yeah, I threw it out on Twitter. Got some questions. I think some of these actually kind of align with what I actually even was planning on talking about today. Anyway, so I'll just rattle off my list of three things today and I don't know which order we'll go in. I thought I would do a clarity flow update since I didn't really talk much about it last time. The customer success role has been making pretty good progress. And the strategy there. Instrumental products, my product studio, I've been working with some clients and I think I came to some learnings on iterating on like the best way to charge and bill for the, for the services that I'm doing and the best types of engagements and projects that I've been taking on. You know, I've cycled through a bunch of experiments over this year and I'm starting to feel good about what I've got going there and then on the content and YouTube and audience growth is where I'm doing a lot of work. And today I was just thinking a lot about. We talk about product market fit in this sense. I'm thinking about creator market fit and really trying to hone in on what the core topic and target audience is. [00:04:47] Speaker A: And all that kind of strategic stuff in that equation. You're the creator. [00:04:52] Speaker B: Yes. [00:04:53] Speaker A: And you're thinking, okay, okay, okay. Instead of just like what do I feel like writing about how to get. [00:04:58] Speaker B: The most traction and what's the path to growth and what makes sense long term and what am I building here and that kind of stuff. Okay, cool. [00:05:08] Speaker A: I have been a little overwhelmed with too many thoughts, too many ideas, and I feel like the right thing to do in that setting is to take a step back. [00:05:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Because you're in searching exploration mode. [00:05:25] Speaker A: Yes. [00:05:26] Speaker B: Yes. [00:05:27] Speaker A: And I have found a few. And, you know, the way I've described it is like, this cycle of, like, discovering a product, getting really excited about it, and then learning about it, talking to people involved, and then reality sets in. The good, the bad, the ugly, and then the emotions cool off and I can get to, like, a. A more sober look at the idea. [00:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah, we had a good episode last time where we sort of talked about, like, the checklist, the criteria that we're looking for. So I'm curious. I don't know if it's too soon or whatever, but, like, it might be cool to hear. You might not be able to talk about what the actual ideas are, but how you're applying those filters to what you've been looking at lately. [00:06:10] Speaker A: I think that is what's confused me because I've started to get some feedback. So the episode last time was one of those episodes where, you know, I have been having conversations about that in private. And those have come in a variety of different ways. The interesting thing is that the characteristic that resonated with the people that I spoke with this week is the set and forget. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:06:34] Speaker A: The part that you brought up as, like, the, you know, if you can, if you. [00:06:39] Speaker B: That's been, like, the elusive thing, thing that I've been wanting for so long, and I never really nailed it with any of my products. [00:06:46] Speaker A: Well, it's tough to think that way going into a product because what you're dreaming up is that people are going to use the product. You're not optimizing it so that it's used minimally. You're operating under the assumption that people are going to pay for it and then they're going to use it to get value out of it. [00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I tend to. I think about products like, does it solve a problem that people are willing to pay for? And then how do we remove as much friction to them getting that problem solved and the ultimate removal of that friction is like, they don't even have to touch it. It just works. [00:07:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that's kind of interesting that way. [00:07:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:07:29] Speaker A: So I have been using that criteria. I worked on an idea that was totally removed from that set of criteria, and that was an interesting experience because it was, it's barely even a tech product. It was just different idea when you. [00:07:48] Speaker B: Just said that the question is, because we didn't really cover this last time, are you, is SaaS still the business model that you're going for, or are you even considering stuff like, outside of what we think of as traditionally SaaS products? [00:08:06] Speaker A: So I think of sas first, but I'm not against other things. I still look at crypto in my universe. AI plus crypto is super interesting, and RWA real world assets with crypto are very interesting. So it's like financial instruments. Like one of the real world assets in crypto that's really taken off is the tokenization of treasuries. So government securities and their yields, because it's very useful in financial instruments to have that as something that you can use to get yield in certain ways. So the idea that I'm talking about now was actually a financial product, like lending loans, debt, packaging up, securitizing, selling off to hedge funds, that type of a product. So not SaaS at all. So I'm pretty, pretty open, but I default to SaaS. [00:09:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:09:05] Speaker A: I look, I think what, what's happening in consumer is interesting. I just feel like I am such an amateur. I wouldn't even know where to start on consumer. [00:09:13] Speaker B: So I'm in consumer products, you mean? Yeah. So you're generally looking at business b two B SaaS? [00:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I. Oh, when it comes to b two B SaaS, I start to split it up pretty quickly at the beginning of any thought process around self serve versus enterprise. [00:09:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's another interesting one. We unpacked that a bit last time, but, yeah, like, the self serve, that's another one to me that I've never really been that adamant that it has to be self serve because I do think that if there's enough to demand and, like, I'm totally like, it doesn't seem that difficult to hire a really good customer success and sales process and put that in place and have it run really, really well to grow the business, that seems fine to me. [00:10:07] Speaker A: Yeah. I guess if you view that as the mechanism for onboarding people and selling them type of thing in the beginning, at rally the checkout, the real issue was, is there an onboarding? [00:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:22] Speaker A: So if it's two months of work to onboard a customer, then you have to charge a lot and then you have fewer customers and you're onboarding. [00:10:30] Speaker B: That's where it gets difficult. I've run into this challenge where it's like, where it's like, yes, there is a lot of friction in the onboarding and the adoption. So we need to put people on that, but that means we need to charge a lot more. But this market doesn't pay a lot more, you know. Right. [00:10:45] Speaker A: It just changes the nature. Like, you know, I think there's a. [00:10:49] Speaker B: Lot of common advice. Obviously, the age old, like, charge more advice. Right. But there's a lot of stuff like, oh, just. Just charge thousands for setup or per month for done with you, done. You know? But, like, you can't just slap that strategy onto any product, any market. [00:11:07] Speaker A: That's right. It's got to make sense with what they're buying, what they're getting out of it, who they are, how they buy, all that. [00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:13] Speaker A: So I, you know, if you. If you get a chance to start from scratch, it feels silly to me to not at least aim for this ideal, elegant version of an online business. You know how I've been following a lot recently is our boy levels. [00:11:30] Speaker B: Right. [00:11:32] Speaker A: Because that's like the epitome, them, the 37 signals. That's why I'm going to Microconf in a few weeks. These. These very elegant, self serve, low customer support. [00:11:44] Speaker B: Like that version, the microcontroller, I feel like there are a lot of. There is probably more. There's a lot of everything in that community, but I think that there's a lot of sales on. There are teams that bootstrapped companies that have salespeople who onboard. Yeah, but anyway, like. Yeah, you're right, though. Like, you're at this. Like, let's find the, you know, we're starting from fundamentals, from the first principles. Right. Like, let's start there and explore out, you know. [00:12:17] Speaker A: Yes. [00:12:18] Speaker B: Like, if you. And that's. That's how I've always gone about it, too. Like, I've always had this checklist, this criteria, whether it's like, self serve, I want sales, or I want b. Two b SaaS. I want. It needs to be easy to onboard. It needs to be harder to onboard so that I could charge more. It needs to be this or that. And I've always checked maybe 60% of those boxes and went into a business knowing you can't find 100% perfect on it. So I know that when I pivoted from zipmessage to clarity flow, it was like I flipped the checklist. When I started zip message, the attraction to me was like, hey, this is self serve, and it's really fast to get value, and there's a viral component and it's easy to get going, but that pushes the price point down. Right. So then it's difficult, more difficult to grow. Then I flipped it with clarity flow. It's like, well, I can charge more, we can build more, we can deliver more value, we can power more of their business. But now it's harder to adopt, it's harder to onboard, it's harder to activate. Right. Yeah. And so it's like I knew those trade offs going into both of those, but it was like choosing which trade off I wanted to go with in this business. [00:13:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And inevitably, if you start looking at everything where I am now with like a little confusion, there's just so much swirling around. The home base seems to be fall in love with the industry and the problem. [00:13:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:57] Speaker A: And go in that direction with a bit of an open mind around maybe I like what this product is doing and what that product's doing, but I don't understand why they built the product the way they did or what makes them successful. So really better off to use it as a starting point, go toward the industry, start talking to people and, and then uncovering things. So that's been interesting for one particular industry and niche. Where I started off with one idea, I was looking at this recruiting hiring thing for a specific industry. And as I went further in, what ended up happening was I started becoming really interesting in the set of problems that happen after you hire them. So you find an employee and then you hire them and then from there to making them a successful employee, that's going to stay awhile. There's some really interesting things. [00:14:51] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. Interesting. [00:14:54] Speaker A: If home base is falling in love with the problem and like the audience, the market, that feels like more likely to lead to a successful research, basically to get to a good idea. One of the funny things, and I'm curious how you would think about this because I'm familiar with e commerce, so I know the software, I know the players, I know the platforms, I know the nuances. I know what makes this email service different from this email service, different from this other email service. When you go into a new market, you're unfamiliar. And so what that means is because you don't know the landscape, you don't know what else is out there. You kind of are starting off from a first principles point of view because you don't know what other people are doing. Then you start to research and then you start to find competitors. And then it's almost like I gauge my emotions when I come across a competitor. What is that doing to me? Does that dissuade me because the competitor is awesome? Does it make me excited because there's competition? That's doing something similar. So that's been an interesting experience to come across different markets and then find competitors, and then I don't know what to do with the emotion. Should I pay attention to the emotion at all? [00:16:17] Speaker B: Yeah, there's always, for me, there's always the emotion with competitors, and. But I do, I tend to want to do products where there definitely are some competitors. I don't like doing completely novel new ideas. Um, I. But I, at the same time, I do really care about, um, a different. A unique differentiator, a reason, something that, like, why I think we need to build this product. Um, not the bullshit, like, I want to change the world kind of thing, but, but, like, if I'm going to enter a market, uh, I want to have a really compelling thing to put into H one. Like, here's why you should care about what we have here is you might be aware of XYZ competitors. Here's. And those are, those are fine, but this is better for this type of customer for this reason. So, basically, I want to go into a competitive market, a market that has competitors with a compelling spin. [00:17:24] Speaker A: Now, is that real, or is that positioning in market like, yes, there are competitors. Do you want to accomplish the goal differently, solve the problem in a different way? Find a unique. [00:17:39] Speaker B: The unique differentiator can manifest in different ways. It could be we do essentially what they do, except we do it for this customer, this niche customer, or we solve, we serve the same customers, but their emphasis is on this feature or this part of the problem. And our emphasis starts with this part of the problem that's a little bit. [00:17:59] Speaker A: Different, a little combo. Worldview plus feature set. [00:18:03] Speaker B: Worldview feature set. Yeah. I don't tend to want to compete on price, but sometimes that could play into it. Maybe a pricing model change. I don't know. Whatever advantage you might have in distribution, maybe they sell in a certain way, but you have a different way of reaching the market than they do. So that could be another differentiator, how. [00:18:28] Speaker A: Long they've been around. [00:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah, but the thing about competitors, though. [00:18:31] Speaker A: My normal set of competitors, the first. [00:18:32] Speaker B: Thing that I like, because the reason why I want to see that there are competitors, obviously, is that's a form of validation that businesses exist in this market. Like, people have built businesses. They've identified that there is a pain, that there is a market of customers who pay for this. So that's the first check mark that, look, people do buy products like this, but then it's a question of, then you got to go deep on talking to those customers and doing that research and all that. The thing that's challenging that I've always had a hard time with then, is not, is doing a product that is not scratching my own itch. [00:19:18] Speaker A: I worry about scratching my own itch. [00:19:21] Speaker B: Yeah, it's easy to do that, too. But I do find it. This is one of those things that I'm willing to do a business even if it's not scratching my own itch. I mean, clarity flow is sort of like that. It serves professional coaches, and I'm not a professional coach, so it's not like a deal breaker for me. [00:19:42] Speaker A: But it's not as exciting. [00:19:43] Speaker B: Not that it's not as exciting. I just found some aspects of that to be more difficult. Okay. Like getting the truly deep understanding of the problem and why it matters and what the truly best solution to the problem is from a product standpoint. When I feel the problem myself, I totally get it. When I need to get inside the heads of other people, like coaches. Sometimes it takes a few more iterations to really nail why something matters to them, if that makes sense. [00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that does make sense. One of the stories out of YC demo day this week. So YC's got demo day, and a huge portion of them are AI. So of course I'm watching everything and trying to take notes and spark ideas. One of the more interesting stories that came out of it was from a company called Archimus, and what, I've heard that name. I'd never heard of it. What they do is they automate insurance premium audits. [00:20:50] Speaker B: Okay, I definitely have not heard that right. [00:20:52] Speaker A: Like, you know what now? So what these guys did is they went and got jobs. Oh, they got full time jobs as auditors during their YC stay. And of course, that hit the nail on the head for that. So they did. [00:21:09] Speaker B: One of my favorite authors of all time, Michael Lewis. I loved this interview with him. I saw years ago, before he wrote the big short, he got a job working on Wall street, and he worked there for like two or three years. And in this, I don't know if this is true or not, but the way that he said it in the interview, he was like, I got a job in Wall street knowing that I'm going to write a book about Wall street. [00:21:33] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, his first big breakthrough was Liars poker, which was about banking. So he got invested banking job, and then he came out of it was like, well, I think it's much more fun to write books about it. [00:21:45] Speaker B: And obviously he's, he's a writer anyway. Yeah. Man, it's a fun, it's a fun exercise to do that exploration thing. I do think it's. I think, I think with competitors there's also like a, there's also like the other extreme where it's just like so crowded. Like, I can't imagine trying to. And I've ended up doing this a little bit when I was working on process kit. But like trying to compete in like the project management space or, you know, like CRMs are really competitive, like, things like that. Like, again, like if you go super niche, maybe you can do a spin on it for a very niche vertical market. But like, I don't know. That's a tough one. [00:22:26] Speaker A: I don't know how to think about that either because I, you know, I'm friends with Jane from userlist and I love the fact that that space, email marketing is unlimited. [00:22:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:22:41] Speaker A: It just goes forever. [00:22:42] Speaker B: The interesting thing about these hyper competitive markets is that they go through these cycles, right. Like every couple of years there's like a new, there's not just one dominant company for 1020 years at a time. [00:22:55] Speaker A: Nope. [00:22:55] Speaker B: But, like, it's still super competitive every year. But like every five years there's like a new leader, you know? Yeah. [00:23:02] Speaker A: In e commerce, Klaviyo dominated email marketing for Shopify, brands dominated and iPod and, you know, super success story. And then they started getting a little full of themselves and bringing pricing up. And now Sendlane, that's run by a friend of mine, Jimmy, is cleaning up behind their wake of unhappy customers. You can see the cycle like renewing itself. [00:23:32] Speaker B: And then again, there's different use cases, different target. Email marketing is so wide. I mean, you've got e commerce, email marketing, you've got SaaS, you've got just creator, just influencer, email marketing, all that kind of stuff. [00:23:47] Speaker A: Yeah. It's an interesting strategy to go for a very large market and then niche and be specialized for your niche. Right. So user list that Jane runs is email marketing for SaaS companies. And that's different from people selling physical? [00:24:03] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, man. [00:24:06] Speaker A: All right, bro. I'll be in Ahrefs if you need me. [00:24:10] Speaker B: All right. [00:24:11] Speaker A: For the first time, I have an account and I'm like bumbling my way through it. [00:24:14] Speaker B: That is such a great product. I have never used it anywhere near to its full potential, but every time I have used it, it's just so powerful. And that's an example of a great SaaS company that just continuously, continuously makes their product better. I still see them making major changes, major iterative improvements. They're hrefs. They're not. Just, like, it's not the same product from five or six years ago. Every year it gets better. So I love it. [00:24:46] Speaker A: It's pretty interesting to go through their onboarding. And, you know, one of the things, and I'll shut up. Cause I'm talking a lot this week was I levels our boy, who, you know, I'm kind of borrowing some of his philosophy. I signed up for one of his products for the first time, and I documented all of it for the team. And I used to. [00:25:07] Speaker B: I haven't used any of his products, but I'm just guessing. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm guessing it was, like, super light, like, super rough around the edges. Like. Like, just like it has. [00:25:17] Speaker A: However rough you think, it can be a lot rougher. Yeah. Like, you want to sign up for an account? Okay. Put your email address in, hit enter. [00:25:28] Speaker B: Put some cash in an envelope, and send it to this mailbox. Exactly. [00:25:31] Speaker A: Right. Next screen that comes up, it's, you know, thanks for signing up. The link is in your email. You click on the link, and, like, you don't actually have a password yet, then you need to create a password. Hit the link, another email shows up. [00:25:44] Speaker B: It's probably like a VR, like, sending you that email. [00:25:47] Speaker A: Now, as a SaaS executive, I'm looking at this basically being like, you're an idiot. You're an idiot. You're an idiot. Like, I'm reminding myself, he's not the idiot, you're the idiot. So don't. And I used it and put it into our slack group. We have a new slack channel called Brainstorm. So everyone's just like, you know, very active. I used it to give our team permission to think dirtier, rougher, easier, simpler, faster. Because we are used to careful, methodical. Because checkout requires careful and methodical. [00:26:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:27] Speaker A: And now we're about to attempt to change the underlying product and development culture of the company, which is not an easy thing. So I'm doing a lot of things to basically give people permission. Like, this is the right way to think, let's get an MVP out there. If it takes a week to do it, don't make it take three weeks just to make sure everything's buttoned up and pretty. [00:26:46] Speaker B: Like, get out in a week. Yeah, we'll see how. I mean, that's how I sort of have that. That same sort of, like, Fomo or whatever you call that. Like, when I'm looking at, like, other creators who are. Who just get, like, traction with their content, whether it's on YouTube or Twitter or anything else. And it's like, how do they get away with it being so rough and seemingly so fast to produce and just put out there and then get traction? And then I spent all this time just trying to make the most perfect, well thought out piece of content or well produced video or this or that. And I'm like, I'm just spending way too much time and I'm not, um. Yeah, it's a. [00:27:29] Speaker A: It is. [00:27:29] Speaker B: It's a frustrating. I think there's also a lot of deception, like deception in. In content where it looks like it's easy to just post this thing, but there's actually a lot of thought and effort and time and production that goes into it before it goes. Gets published, you know? [00:27:45] Speaker A: Now I hear you on that. But our boy levels is very useful for this. Yeah, because. [00:27:51] Speaker B: Because. [00:27:52] Speaker A: No, it doesn't. Because he's not getting. He's not getting his customers for interiors AI from Twitter. It's from search. So I'm redoing parts of my house, and I have this one empty room that's like my one opportunity to make it cool. Everything else is a kitchen gets used for that, a dining room gets used for that, and so on. We have this random little nook that I can make into a little sitting area. So I'm like, okay, this is fun. Let's try to use AI. Let's sign up for his products. Let's give feedback to the team. So I go and I do it. I take a picture and then I go use the product. And I'm trying to think of how to say this. It's not only rough around the edges, it's. Excuse me for, like, being rude. It's not good. [00:28:38] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [00:28:40] Speaker A: So. So there's a difference. [00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, the actual, actual thing that it delivers is not, like, usable. [00:28:45] Speaker A: No, I would say the thing it delivers is better than the product in the UX and the UX. [00:28:49] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. [00:28:50] Speaker A: The UX and the UI are like, what am I looking at? Where am I reading this? Why would this number be down here? How come I can't see the button until I scroll down? How come I can't get rid of this thing that's in my way of me trying to view this thing. Why is this thing in, like, fluorescent green? To try to get my attention. But then I have to click on the thing that doesn't have a label to the button. So some of it's bad. Now, here's the thing where I have to keep telling myself that I'm the idiot here. He doesn't fucking change it. Yeah, he just leaves it alone. [00:29:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:21] Speaker A: And it just prints money. So what is that? Is that professionalism? Is that perfectionism? Is that elitism? Is that stupidity? Is it focusing on the right things? Like what, what's going on? [00:29:36] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's like the other thing about, about him and a lot of these, you know, indie hackers who have like portfolios of multiple products is that he prioritizes having multiple products. A lot of people can look at that and say, well, why doesn't he perfect that one interiors AI product and get rid of all those rough edges? Or just go all in on that one product if it has customers, if people buy it, why not double or triple down on that? For him personally, it's such a personal decision. Right. And this is going to be different for you because you're building a different type of company. Right. But you know, for him, he's, there's a long list of things that he could spend his time on and polishing up the UI around delivering the interior AI photos is not high on that priority list because higher on that priority list for him is spin off eight other AI products that each also, also make plenty of cash. Like that's his way of growing an incredible business. It's like just keep spinning out these things, focus on just solving the problem. Everything else can be super rough around the edges because that's not what actually makes the dollars and more products in his solo indie hacker portfolio is how he wins in his worldview. [00:31:01] Speaker A: You know, I think there's truth to that. What I'm a little skeptical of is I don't, I don't know if it's prioritizing multiple products and doing more in the next thing and kind of like stopping to work on something to go to the next. It might be, it might be that he inherently intuits that it's just not worth the effort. [00:31:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:31:25] Speaker A: Like there's putting in the extra, you know, last 10% that takes 500% of time is just not, it's just doesn't have the upside. And, and it's almost like what I'm doing and I'm gonna, you know, assume other people do also is that I'm doing what I think I'm supposed to be doing. And he's based, he does whatever the hell he wants. [00:31:50] Speaker B: I mean, I think that he prioritizes that too. Like he might even, and I think a lot of other indie hackers relate to this, is that you might even know, like, there are things that I could, that we could spend time on marketing wise, growth wise, that don't fire us up right now. And it's, and it's more like I get more value. I'm speaking for me, but I think I'm speaking for other people, that I get more value out of building something. And that's not always the correct answer. And I think you do need to sort of make it in general as an entrepreneur, you need to fight through that. Sometimes. Sometimes you just can't work on the things that you want to be doing. You have to be doing the things that you should be doing to make money as an entrepreneur and to make a product work. But I do also think that there's like, yeah, there's, there's all sorts of growth hacks and marketing tactics and strategies that we could spend time on, but like, those might just result in 5% more growth. [00:32:56] Speaker A: And, yeah, congratulations. You have a good looking blog and you're posting once a week. It's that type of thing where I'm like, yeah, but is that making the business stronger or not? [00:33:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And then if you just want to translate it to dollars, it's like, yeah, these extra marketing tactics could, could result in like a 5% growth, but like a totally, a second or third or fourth product can double or triple your overall growth because that's a totally new, you're tapping into something new. That's obviously not the case. That's not the answer for, I would say most entrepreneurs, but for some people, like, that's what they prioritize, that's what they want to. The whole point is to spend your time building what you want to be doing. Right. I don't know, it's a little rambly. [00:33:42] Speaker A: But no, I hear you. All this stuff is coming up because of this opportunity to start fresh, I think also then trying to avoid and. [00:33:53] Speaker B: Something that I've been having my eye on lately is as I look to potential products that I might build out in my little portfolio, is how do I come up with these things that just have some search volume that I can get away with? Build. Like, the only intention for this little product idea or multiple product ideas is for it to live as a side project and not go all in on any project. I talked about this episodes ago, so if I'm going to have a portfolio of essentially everything is a side hustle, then they need to have some search traffic or a way to get some initial traction and then live on as a little cash flow business. And so like building up the muscle of being able to uncover these little niche products and markets that have, like, you know, low, uh, low keyword difficulty, high search volume, and that. That kind of thing. Um, that's. That's another, uh, superpower that you can start to build up a muscle around. [00:34:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think. [00:34:52] Speaker B: And then when you matter that with the ability to build and ship something even very rough, then you can just execute, and that. That's your strategy, you know? [00:35:00] Speaker A: Right. And the danger there is that it doesn't remain self contained. Right. That it balloons into a company instead of a product or a side project. And there's. I connect this a little bit to basecamps once project overall, because these, you know, there's a. At the very end of the spectrum, the philosophy is that if you need customer support, your software just isn't done yet, that it should be done inside the software. That's how software used to be intuitive. [00:35:33] Speaker B: Right? [00:35:33] Speaker A: It should be intuitive. And all the things that the software does are self evident, and you need to continue building it until it can be done inside of there instead of someone. Now, that's on the end of the spectrum, but it's valuable as a point of view, because if you look at a side project as something you release out into the world, and maybe it's not an ongoing subscription, maybe it's based on usage. I, in my previous life working with my dad in the real estate biz, I had an array of this type of tool that was straight magic and worked every time. And I just paid it $25 every time I needed it. This piece of software, what it did was it gave me the longitude and latitude coordinates of an address. [00:36:17] Speaker B: That's it. [00:36:17] Speaker A: That's what I needed. I built this tool. I had someone on upwork build a tool that you could put in properties, and then it would tell you how far away from your subject property was, and then it would map the ones that you chose onto a map. And so whenever I would download the latest sales and then want to get it into this tool, the longitude and latitude was the key element that was missing for me. And so I take a CSV with the address, and I upload it to this tool. I pay $25, and I download a CSV with the longitude like that. You know, it's so beautiful, and the Internet's so big these days that a little thing like that can make real money. [00:36:57] Speaker B: Yeah, of course, that's like a one time sale, and it's like, you can't build a huge business on that, but, like, it's a, it's a niche little thing that like, you can. What's a huge business for one solo developer, like, you can make a great living on just that, you know? [00:37:10] Speaker A: Right. [00:37:11] Speaker B: Or just. Or just a few of those, you know. Yep, yep, yep. [00:37:15] Speaker A: So it's kind of interesting to think about. [00:37:17] Speaker B: I think this is actually sort of a good transition to clarity flow. I wanted to talk about it because, one, I want to give an update on the customer success role, but like, maybe more broadly because we were just talking about this. The transition here could be probably nobody remembers this, but back in 2020. No. When was this? It was, I think around the end of 2020, I set out to do a product studio, a portfolio of products. I set out to do product experiments. And I started, and this was like, as I was transitioning out of process kit and looking ahead at like, what I was going to do next, I was, I had a couple of different ideas. I was, I did a Twitter threads thing, I did a Sunrise KPI, and then I sort of went to zip message. And that was like a quick, that was, that was intended to be a quick idea to see because, you know, solve a little problem. And I don't know where this is going to go, but that sort of caught on and it got some traction. And then, and then I did go, like all in on that. Like, totally all in. I took a little bit of investment. I kept growing it through 2021, and then I abandoned the idea of having a portfolio and having multiple bets and 100% bootstrapping everything and having that flexibility to turn my attention to where I see the most opportunity. I decided to do the all in focus on one thing. I gave it a good three years, more than three years of full time focus. I literally sold all of my businesses in the 2020 to 2021 period, other than zip message. And then I took a little investment, took some of the cash I made from selling, went all in, hired team, went at it. Fast forward to 2024, and I've talked all about the transition from zip message to clarity, flow pivoting, plateauing, and leading to the pivot. Doing a lot of customer research. And I think some folks listening still might have the questions like, well, why are you even still doing this business? I basically transitioned from let's do a bunch of smaller product ideas and grow a little portfolio, too. Let's do the all in thing on one SaaS product. And now I'm sort of returning back to, this is just one small product in a portfolio of different things for me this year in 2024. So it's like in 2024, the status of clarity flow in my portfolio is now it's down to some portion of my time. It is still growing slowly, super slowly, which means that it's on a long term growth trajectory. I've come to the conclusion that this SaaS business is just not going to. The acceleration in growth is not going to happen quickly. I think there will be some natural acceleration as the customer base slowly grows with like, because that will accelerate word of mouth as there are more customers. But other than that, we're not going to unlock some unforeseen channel that's just going to drive tons and tons of new customers our way unless some sort of luck happens. So that's what led me to 2024, which is it can run lean and I can still give it the love that it needs through customer success and one developer. So basically, I pared down the team to one developer, and I just recently hired a customer success person to really focus on helping customers onboard and get value from it. Meanwhile, I am reducing and chipping away at the number of hours that I spend managing the product, and that's basically the status of it. And so I hired Kat in customer success about a month ago, a little bit more than a month ago. She has now I'm pretty psyched about the progress that she's made because she has now completely taken over the support inbox and we're starting to do more calls with customers. Like, she is doing the calls with customers, both asynchronous and live calls with helping customers onboard. So right away, I'm not saying this happened overnight, but now my inbox is definitely quieter than it was two weeks ago because she is taking these tickets that I was taking before. So that's like, I'm literally chipping away hours from what I do on that business. I think it's awesome. And it's also pretty cool because like, she's super talented and the hours that I do spend on clarity flow are strategic. I'm coaching her or collaborating with her on ideas for like, how things that she can be doing to help more customers convert, which also has the effect. The strategy is like, as customers convert more through customer success, they will churn less. And I can focus my time then on taking the feature requests and deciding with my one developer which ones I'm going to queue up for her to do or not. I don't know. That's just been the story on clarity flow. I'm happy to basically hold it long term and give it the time that it needs to slowly grow and throw off a little profit along the way. While I now focus most of my attention on instrumental products and content, you. [00:43:18] Speaker A: Know, it sounds to me, if we're thinking back to, you know, our bootstrap origins, it sounds to me like a pretty classic setup of an agency with services revenue. [00:43:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:34] Speaker A: With a product on the side, and you work on the product and you let it grow, and when it makes sense, you go in on the product. [00:43:40] Speaker B: If it makes sense. Like one of my clients right now at instrumental product teamwork did it. [00:43:44] Speaker A: Basecamp did it. This is like a normal. [00:43:47] Speaker B: You're exactly right. And it is so, so common. Literally. One of my great clients that I'm working with right now through instrumental products, they are a well established SaaS product company, and I am brought in to do UI and UX improvements throughout their app. They've been around like over eight years, and they only went all in on it like three or four years ago because it was just a little side hustle that just sat there for a while until. Until it really grew. Yeah. [00:44:21] Speaker A: Cause most SaaS is evil in that way and it takes three years, and after the first two years, you're like, oh my God, how long is this going to be? [00:44:29] Speaker B: Here I am in 24 with clarity flow, which I think is a great product. I literally use it. I don't do live calls other than podcasts these days. It's all asynchronous through clarity flow. I talked to my team through it. I talk to customers through it all the time. We've got a great little customer base. It does continue to grow. So I feel like it took me. I wish it didn't take me three years to circle back around to where it is now, but I feel like it is the type of small SaaS business that I like to have in my portfolio as a small thing, not my full time focus. It's currently the most valuable version of this business. I wish it had been this since the beginning. It is what it is. [00:45:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I hear that. [00:45:24] Speaker B: Because I still actually like to work on it as a product. I like to collaborate with both Kat, my customer success, and Sandy, the developer. But it's also pretty refreshing to just open my eyes up to instrumental products, which I'm having a blast kind of building that, making some pretty good revenue through it now and then, the content stuff. So talk more about that if you want. [00:45:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think we've been going for an hour. That's true, but I can keep going. [00:45:57] Speaker B: I wanted to talk about one thing when it comes to instrumental products. While it's sort of on my mind, I have iterated through. So I started taking on some client work. This goes back to the end of last year, around November, December, and I've iterated through multiple models of offering services over the last five, six months now. And it started out with coaching. I was doing this product strategy coaching and with that I was doing a bit of live and mostly async coaching. And I pretty quickly soured on that model of I just, I don't know, it like calls and even, even async, asynchronous coaching for me is like too much talking and energy and disruptive for the amount of revenue that I can get from it and all that. Then I sort of had a few clients in. What I was doing was like product strategy sprints, where it was like two or three week sprints, where I'm not really doing much design development work. It's more like let's plan out a big new roadmap, typically overhauling the onboarding experience for your SaaS. Let's just plan it out and talk about the strategy, or talk about some big complicated new feature that you need to build. That was okay, but it wasn't ideal because in one case it was like, well, that actually turned into more design work than I actually thought. Like I'll just whip up a rough wireframe in Figma that turned into becoming like a really, really detailed Figma document that took me a lot of hours. Or like, in another case it was like, all right, I think the strategy and ideas I'm offering here are helpful, but it's not super actionable. It's not as actionable as I would have hoped, or it's not as tangible as a final product as what I would hope. So, fast forward to now, I have a small roster of clients who where I'm just offering design and development services for software. And in one case it's the ideal, which is building a totally new app from scratch. In the other case it's this Ui ux. Basically I give them tailwind CSS templates. You are HTML tailwind CSS, you can go apply it to your app. These are good because it's right in my wheelhouse. Either full stack building something new from the ground up, like a version one, or the UI UX stuff. But even that, it's like no matter how long these engagements are, I now really like to boil it down to billing by the weekend. You know, I. Over my career, I've done, I've experimented with hourly. I used to do like just big project quotes back in the day. Right. I've done like flat retainers for quote unquote unlimited of this or that. I like this because it's like I currently have like a standard weekly rate. It's lower now than what it will be in the next couple of months. Like that, you know, but it's, but it's pretty good, I think. And it works for me. And whether I'm doing just design UI Ux stuff or if I'm building full stack like with, with a new product, that's the rate per week. And I can just give you a quote on like here's what I expect for what we're talking about, the number of weeks. Maybe we'll start with something small. That can just be two or three, a two or three week engagement. In some cases we're just getting into a two or three month or four month engagement. Right now it's mostly just me. I do have my. The way that I'm scaling this out, the way that I see this scaling out because I'm taking on more leads now. And I have reached my personal capacity in terms of hours. Like right now in April, I'm booked. I can't take on more projects. So I am talking to people about booking in May. And beyond that, I would like to book multiple projects and not just have a waiting list and that kind of thing. The way that this will scale out is in the short term. I've already done this. I've brought on one developer from my existing indian team, the same one that staffs up clarity, flow. We have a good arrangement where I have this one person who's sort of on an as needed basis, not full time, not even really part time. There will be weeks when this person is not even needed at all. But in some of my projects I can hand off just a couple of tickets, a couple of tasks to help me move faster to ship the thing beyond 100%. Yes. It's still basically all me. I'm designing and developing, but a few of the. All right, we need some. Some of the plumbing work done over here. Here. Just go take that while I work on this more important part of the project. Right. And then like beyond that, what I would like to get to is when we get a few more really big projects that I can't fully. Like, I have a small network of other like full stack designer developer people that I'm friends with, mostly us based, who I would love to collaborate with, whether it's just on a project basis or something more long term as, like, either a long term employment thing or partnership or something like that, where we're able to take on. So, like, right now, I'm building a new product from scratch for a client, and I'm doing the UX thing. It would probably be difficult to build another app from scratch for a different client at the same time. But if I had another full stack person with my level of skills, like, they could sort of own that, and I can contribute a little bit, but, like. And then we can start to multiply it out beyond just me. [00:52:09] Speaker A: Okay. I mean, that's going to be the next phase is okay. Now, if you're at 100% capacity, what happens? I'm very names on a list. [00:52:18] Speaker B: As soon as we have the client demand, I'm going to be reaching out to these people and bringing them on. But in the short term, I've got my person in India who can help me be more efficient in my projects. [00:52:32] Speaker A: What I've been seeing and really interested in from, like, an agency and services point of view is the resurgence of flat price design and development. [00:52:48] Speaker B: Like the classic productized, quote, unquote unlimited thing for. Yes. [00:52:55] Speaker A: So design pickle. Right. The old school one. My understanding is they're like, $30 million a year. [00:53:01] Speaker B: Huge. Yeah. [00:53:02] Speaker A: Okay, so that's. [00:53:03] Speaker B: I mean, that's. [00:53:03] Speaker A: That's interesting. The fact that the market for that type of a service is that big is damn interesting. I started following this guy Brett. [00:53:14] Speaker B: Design joy. [00:53:15] Speaker A: Design joy. And that's really interesting, because now people hate him. [00:53:21] Speaker B: I. That's fine. I have no opinion of. I don't know, but I have no opinion. [00:53:26] Speaker A: But I just think it's. [00:53:28] Speaker B: I've always said this. Back in the days when I was doing productized course consulting stuff, I love that model. I think it's. There's all these different models of productized services, and the one that I love the most is that I say, quote unquote, unlimited. Cause it's not really unlimited. It's like x dollars a month for. You can queue up as, like, with design pickle. I think it's something. I don't know exactly, but it's like something like, you get, like, one design request a day or something like that. Which. Right. [00:54:01] Speaker A: Or you can pay for different tiers. [00:54:02] Speaker B: You can pay more. Essentially, it's like, you might call it unlimited, but it's really, like 30 per month. Cause it's 30 days in a month, right? Yes. [00:54:10] Speaker A: And they're all somewhere between, like, three and $8,000 a month. [00:54:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:54:15] Speaker A: And that gives you some room. And I came across another culture, the. [00:54:20] Speaker B: Other way to think about this, too. And I love thinking about. And, like, WP curve with Dan Norris, like, back in the day, was one of the. One of the early ones of this. But another way to think about these services is they are like an insurance policy. Like, you want to have somebody just. You just pay monthly for WP curve or whatever the present day versions of that business are, to just oversee your website, and there will be months where you don't use them at all, but you're paying for them, and then there are months where you need them, like, today. So you send your request today and you get it done, and you don't need to deal with finding someone on the spot. And that is, like, it's worth paying for six months of that type of service if you only need it in one of those months, just to have that peace of mind, you know, I. [00:55:05] Speaker A: Think a lot of calculations get projected onto it. Right. It's that insurance policy version of it with WP curve. And people need help with WordPress. [00:55:13] Speaker B: Yes. [00:55:13] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense in the design sense. It's, you know, a full time employee is expensive and risky. And, yeah, I'm interested in these because they seem to be. Not only do they seem to be scaling beyond what we would think. You know, one person's gonna do this, and that's cool. You're gonna make a great living at $25,000 a month. Our boy Brett does $120,000 a month by himself. Like, that's. [00:55:39] Speaker B: Huh. So you could hate on it all you want, but, like, it works for him. Same thing with levels. It's like, you could hate on that style of indie hacking, but, like, it works for them really well. [00:55:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm only hating on it because $120,000 isn't hitting my bank account every month. That's the only reason I'm hating. But the leverage that the tools, including AI tools, now bring to that game is very interesting around things like design, content creation, and there's different ways, I. [00:56:08] Speaker B: Think, to scale that and be profitable. Right? Like, someone. Like, with Brett, with designjoy, my understanding is that it's just him. So, like, I would think that the way that you really scale that is most of the people who are. It's more like the insurance policy model, where most of the clients aren't banging down your door every single day. So you just have this. All the clients who aren't using your services are basically paying for the ones who are using your services today, right? Yes. [00:56:36] Speaker A: We assume $5,000 is too high of a price for that type of insurance. It's not right for someone. It's not because an employee on staff. [00:56:44] Speaker B: Is, and that was the alternative is you look at what Russ Perry did with, with design pickle, and he executed like a madman with, with growing out the team and the operations and the recruit. [00:56:58] Speaker A: It's not an accident. [00:56:59] Speaker B: The recruiting of, like, all the designers and the managers and the processes and the systems to run design pickle are just insanely good. And that's how that, you know, you. [00:57:09] Speaker A: Got to take your hat, your hats off to making the most of that opportunity. It's a far cry from where design joy is to get to that. There is a moment of arbitrage. I just want to mention this in case it's useful to others. There's a moment of arbitrage between these types of services and these AI solutions. Right now, in e commerce, what's happening is a proliferation of AI tools that take your product page literally. Give us the URL of your product page, and we will spit out ad, creative, TikTok, scripts, reels, shorts, it does all of it for you. And at the same time, right now, there are agencies that charge five or $10,000 a month to do the exact same thing. And in between those two, there's some arbitrage to be had for a certain amount. [00:57:57] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure there is. I mean, I had it going with audience ops for a while there, and I tried to experiment with the unlimited model, but it always came back to, we just sort of need to do flat fee for a flat number of articles a month. And I don't know that that works today anymore. But essentially, like with instrumental products, I am essentially growing a small, I call it a studio. But if this were to scale out, it would become like a development shop, a development agency, and this time around, like, I am not trying to productize it. Essentially, the only productized parts of this are the pricing model, which is a weekly rate, and every project is going to need a different number of weeks. And I want to get to a point where the product builds were using the same tech stack. Currently it's rails. I'm also learning Laravel and tall stack just to find the most efficient way to build and ship high quality products. And then we can really reuse and repurpose the same stacks and processes and workloads for building stuff. But every product we work on will be different, whether it's with clients, whether it's my own products. In some cases. I talk to clients where we can have a partnership, like a cash equity mix. And it's been interesting. [00:59:25] Speaker A: Yeah. I feel like maybe it can be a little prioritized. [00:59:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Like a product development thing. [00:59:35] Speaker A: Yes. Like, okay, so a good example I saw recently is called 72 hours websites. [00:59:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I saw a lot of those. [00:59:42] Speaker A: When I was doing productized, self explanatory 72 hours website.com. Like, it's self explanatory. [00:59:47] Speaker B: Where you get websites then. Absolutely. It can be productized, but software. [00:59:53] Speaker A: Say again? [00:59:53] Speaker B: Say if it's websites, it absolutely can be. [00:59:57] Speaker A: Okay, so let me challenge. Okay, let me challenge because I know where you go. Oh, products are special, high end thought process. If a website can be, you know, done in for $2,500 in 72 hours, maybe a product can't be done in 72 hours for $2,500. But can't a base product be done for $50,000 in two months? [01:00:24] Speaker B: It totally depends on the product. That's the thing. Websites, especially marketing websites, like cookie cutter marketing websites, which most marketing websites are, can be boiled down to. Look, every website needs a good homepage, a good hero section, a good. About us, a pricing page, a contact form. There's your cookie cutter website. Right. There's going to be variations on that, but that's what you need. And you can absolutely productize that, as so many businesses have. That's why you see so many themes and things like that. Sure. Right. It's just scheme products. You're definitely right that there are. The whole theme of what I'm trying to do with my content is, like, how can we find the fastest, most efficient way to build and ship products? Right. So you can do. [01:01:16] Speaker A: Right. [01:01:17] Speaker B: But just to give you an idea, like, I've given proposals now, like, multiple proposals this year with clients, and some of them I'm working on, and some of them haven't come through yet. And everyone, and there's been a really high variation in the number of weeks that I'm quoting for what they want. [01:01:37] Speaker A: And that's complexity and ambition. [01:01:39] Speaker B: Complexity and ambition. Yeah. The one that I'm doing right now happens to be a relatively small one. And it was, it's, it's a two month project. And I would say that's, as for me, that's as small as it gets in terms of, like, like, going from literally just a concept to shipping a version, one that, that users, we're not talking about levels. Level of quality. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a little bit more polished. Than that. But essentially this product that I'm building is like, you might think of it as like a one feature product. There are more things. Like you got to be able to log in and pay for it and this and that. But like, you're doing one, right. You're doing one thing in this product. And that to me is a two month build and that. And frankly, that's like, I think, faster than what most teams would build this sort of thing in, you know. [01:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I believe you. I trust your expertise more than mine. And, and I think we should both remain skeptical. [01:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah. But, like, there are other proposals where I was like, this is a little bit more complex than that. It's a four month build. And there was another one that was like I quoted as like a six month build because there's just more pieces to it, you know? Yeah, you're right, though. Like, it can definitely get faster. And as we do, like, as my company does more and more products with the same tech stack and we get faster and we, and we get better, it can absolutely get faster. But to the point of productized, that is still, it's not to a point where I could just put a price point on a web page to say, like, purchase the thing. To me, I still think it would be like, this is the price per week and here's the number of weeks. [01:03:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I hear you. But that really, that feels familiar in terms of what the feedback would be around a design service where you're like, how could I possibly know how complex your design needs are compared to someone else's? How could I just put a price tag for one size? [01:03:46] Speaker B: Well, this is where I sort of differ from, I think most other developers. And I kind of get frustrated when people talk about, oh, software development is so unpredictable. So you have to convince clients that here's your hourly rate and they just have to roll with you for however many hours or weeks it's going to take. And you're going to be all agile and you're going to learn along the way and then they should be just be able to roll with those extended costs if it takes longer. Like, no, f, that. I think that the way that I quote projects and the way that I give proposals is, look, I can look at what you're trying to build, what you want to build and I, and if it's predictable, like, if it's something that, like, I clearly know how that can be built and I can, I can have a rough estimation, like, that's gonna take eight weeks to build and ship that I will tell you it will take eight weeks to build and ship that. And if it takes me nine or ten weeks, like, I'm okay with that, and I won't charge more because it's like, all right, I guessed a little bit off, but I, but I can, I can definitely get close enough. And. But then there are gonna be other pieces, and I've, and I've had these discussions with clients where it's like, okay, now that piece that you're talking about, that's interesting, but it's unpredictable, it's new, it's novel. So that's going to require technical research. And so in that case, I tell them, like, look, this part of the project is just going to be, here's my quote for how long we're going to research it, and we'll come out with our findings. And once we research it and then we know how to build it, then I can give you the quote on how long it'll take to actually build. And typically during the research, we actually build, like, half of it because we're prototyping. But so I try to be as, I try to set expectations because, look, if you're hiring a developer to build your product, you got to know how much you're going to invest in this thing. You can't just say, like, yeah, I'm cool with that weekly rate. Let's do the agile thing and see what happens. Like, no, yeah, good luck. [01:05:49] Speaker A: Jeez. Yeah, no, it's interesting. One of the YC companies that came out on this demo day was a react app in a prompt. So you go to this thing and you say, I want a CRM. [01:06:06] Speaker B: I mean, that's coming, if it's not already. Mostly here. Yeah, that's right. [01:06:10] Speaker A: So you go into the, that's it. You put a prompt. I would like an app that is a CRM for, you know, barbers, and you hit enter and this thing builds and gives you all the stuff for a react app. And it's definitely not good enough to go out and, you know, put out there on the market and start selling right away. [01:06:31] Speaker B: Levels. Good. Fun stuff, man. Cool. [01:06:39] Speaker A: All right, I like it. Have a great weekend, everyone. [01:06:43] Speaker B: See ya.