Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Hey, bootstrapped web. We are both back from vacation, and we've got so much going on on both of our ends, it's gonna be probably a jam packed episode, so. Yeah. Jordan, when did you get back?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: I got back on Saturday last week. So we've been home all week.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Feels great. Outer banks, North Carolina. Pretty cool. Never been there before.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: That sounds like a cool spot. I haven't been there either. Yeah, I got back. Middle of this. So, like, Tuesday night, I got back. So this is like one of those, like, weird, like, half weeks for me getting back into the swing of things here. We went to Chicago and drove all the way up to the upper peninsula of Michigan. Absolutely loved it. You were one of the best airbnbs I've ever stayed in. Actually, two of the best. Like, one in Chicago and one up in the upper peninsula. Both were incredible.
Makes a big difference. Like, right there in, like, you know, great part of Chicago, near the. Near the lake and everything. And then on the beach, like, we had a private beach on Lake Michigan in upper Peninsula. It was just incredible.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Oh, the up. Oh, that's right.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: You went all the way up. Yeah. That cross the bridge.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Wild. Literally wild. It's just a forest and a lake.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And then we drove up it to Lake Superior, to the pictured rocks.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Oh, you went far.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: And just really. Yeah, there's nothing up there. It's just wooded.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: You know, you're kind of like, you're almost. It feels like you're deep in the south. Like you're deep in the country.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Feels like it. Yeah. But you're super north.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, everyone's got a gun. There's, you know, a lot of pickup. Like, they. They live close to the. The ground. Like they.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Just to get through a winter. There's no.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: It was. It was definitely trump country up there. You could see that.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Did you swing by Traverse City, by chance?
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, we were. Yeah.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Nice, man. Well, yeah, North Carolina was cool. That look, it's a little boring, and it's just a beautiful kind of beach area.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: It was boring, but for us, it was like the Airbnb was the thing. We. We chilled. It was super comfortable. We are literally our own private beach. The girls loved it. So cool. It was just incredible.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. Our thing was like a house with a pool on the beach. Like, that's the advantage of there. So sitting on the beach and your kids can just, like, walk up by themselves to go to the bathroom, come back down. It was like an actual relaxing freedom. Persian. Yes. And they had waves. I haven't surfed in years.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Oh, cool.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: And I rented one for the week, and my shoulders are jacked, and I'm tan, and I got salt water, the whole thing.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Look at this guy. Yep.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: I love it. It's fun.
But now we're back. It's Friday. I went to the bakery, got my challah, called my mom like a good jewish boy, and we're ready to roll. Let's do it.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: All right, dude.
Yeah. I mean, I think we both have a lot to cover. I'll just give, like the quick rundown for me this week. I tweeted one month app. It's like a new packaging of my consulting service. Seemed to make the rounds on Twitter that I can talk about that. Basically MVP in a month with a price. And that's what it is.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: You peaked my interest.
Even just as a software person. I was like, that's a good bet. That's a good bet.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. If you want, we could talk about, like, the pricing and the strategy around that.
Also today, actually, yesterday, we launched all new pricing for clarity flow. Actually the same pricing, but different trial in that we don't have one anymore.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Okay, we need to talk about this because my big topic for today is we're going to live with self serve, and there's a bunch of stuff around pricing and a board meeting, and you're switching pricing.
And we know going into this initial launch that we're going to experiment. So we kind of have a few experiments in mind. It sounds to me like what you're doing is it's a tweak to not just pricing, but the onboarding and the mentality that goes into using the product and all that.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Yes, I can get into the thinking behind the bet. There last thing is ripple FM. It is done. I'm sending the very first invites today. I have a private podcast on it, but it is a networking community platform for podcasts. It's not just for private, it's for connecting with popular podcasts and your fellow listeners there. I just finished a whole video on it. I'm going to release that after this episode. So that's the other thing. So it's like too many things, but it's all kind of crashing into this week. So there we go.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: We need to take a step back because two weeks ago we spoke and you had this idea and you said, I'm not actually sure I'm going to build it. This is part of me launching ideas and kind of thinking through it. It's two weeks, Brian, did you build a podcast networking app in two weeks?
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Yes, pretty much, yes.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Okay. I'm not technical, but I'm interested in what's happening. What is the state of technology and frameworks that allows you to do that? That's, you know, yeah, we can maybe.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Also talk about, like, what's the state of my mental craziness that gets me, that makes me, like, hack on that for two weeks straight. But, yeah, there's that.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I did talk to you one night at, like, 11:00 p.m. my time, and you were like, I'm finishing this thing up. So you've been working on it. It's not like it just magically came.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Yeah, this was. I did a lot of it before the vacation. I hacked on it during the vacation, on the plane, in the hotels, on the free time, and finished it up this week. And that was my goal. It was to get it to a, quote, unquote, like, finished state so that I can definitely want to invite people to start joining it and listening to mine and forming their own communities.
But, like, this is one of those ideas that I just really wanted to exist and build it and get it out there, but not spend months on it. I'm ready to move on, but I do want to see it into the wild and see where it goes.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: It's like an in between. It's like ideas one thing, building an app is another thing, and then spending six months on marketing it is a different thing. It sounds like you're in this in between phase.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Okay. So I mentioned all the different things between clarity, flow, and one month app. And I talked about Sunrise Dashboard, still on my. Yep, radar is something I want to get to. Ripple FM is something I'm super psyched about. I love the concept. I love how it came together, but I treat that more as, like a passion project or like a little seed of something that, like, I want to see in the world. Let's see if it grows into something.
I also see it as a benefit for me. It's a way to grow your network. That's the headline. And I want to grow my network through this podcasting medium.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: And I. Yeah, very interesting. And I. I either pinged you on DM or tweeted publicly that I felt. I felt the need for it. I wanted to do a lightweight podcast and send it out to people who would be interested in something lightweight, because I was. I was arguing with Ian Landsman. Hey, Ian. About friend.com and about the founder who, you know, the headline raised $2.5 million, spent 1.8 of it on a domain.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And so that's exactly what it's for.
It's that kind of thing. Two sides of it. There's private podcasts and there's public podcasts, meaning you can connect with, like, we should have the listeners of bootstrapped web connect with us and connect with each other through ripple FM. Like, you literally go in there and you put in, these are my favorite podcasts. It connects to the directory and then you can see who else is fans of your favorite podcast. That's like one side of it. The other side is private podcasts where you're like, I have a private podcast and anyone can start one right now. It's all totally free.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: The need that I felt was not just the ability to create, like produce an audio podcast or video. The need that I really felt was to be able to send it out to people. So I wanted to jump on with Ian and basically say, hey, let's have a fun conversation for 20 minutes about this. And then after that, Beeble for me to be able to send it out or notify people that follow bootstrap web, and at the same time, for Ian to be able to notify and send an email or whatever form of communication to let people know for his podcast. And it's like this, this blending of those audiences and communities.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: Yeah, it literally does those things.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, fun.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Subscribe to it. You get notified when there's a new episode, also when there's discussions happening around the episodes that you listen to. Like, there's all of that. Is there?
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Cool, cool. That's exciting.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: All right, let's talk pricing. Okay, so you're thinking pricing. I'm doing some pricing experiments. Where should we begin? Yeah, over to you.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Okay, cool. Let's talk about this week. The last few weeks, I have focused a lot on pricing. It is a huge lever. It matters.
Incorporates our approach to the market, what we think is going to happen, what competitors are doing. This soup, all of us know pricing is this. Weird signs that none of us actually have an answer to. It's this thing, but it really matters.
So what happened was very fortuitous timing. Our plan has always been to launch self serve, and for that, you need pricing published. Either this week, I think it will actually happen today or Monday. So the last few weeks, it's almost like I, like, apologized to my team. Almost. I didn't apologize. I just said, you're going to see me be a little schizophrenic about pricing, and I'm going to change my mind five times. But this is the nature of pricing. I can either make it private and you can't be involved in it, or I'll make it public. And you have to almost forgive my.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: Schizophrenia because it's especially this early. Of course. It's. It's all over the place. So can you remind me, where was your thinking on the pricing for Rosie, like, two weeks ago? Like, what was your assumption back then? And then we'll get to what it is.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Okay, so we. You know, my tendency in general, I think this comes from the bootstrap mentality, comes from my experience at Card hook, so on, is to charge more.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: My mentality is make something valuable and charge appropriately. And it is much easier to build a good business with $300 a month as the average revenue per user than it is at $50 a month. It's just, you know, it's easier, fewer people, higher quality businesses, all the stuff that goes with the lower churn, everything else. So my thinking in general was, let's go a little higher. One of our competitors is. I'm ignoring enterprise stuff. One of our competitors is at like $350 a month and $550 a month. Okay. That's a premium product for businesses that needed $6,000 a year. It's. It's a decent amount of money, and I like that. It's attractive. Hell, yeah.
Our other competitor on the other end of things is at $59 a month. Unlimited. Everything not as good of a product. They're going for scale. It got spun out of Google, like, you know, a different type of mentality.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: Are those competitors more or less targeting the same customers or markethood as each other and as you.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: Nope. Nope. So the lower priced one is targeting SMB, self serve, mass quantity, more generic approach. And the 355 50 competitor is home services, specifically. Like the founder ran his own, like, painting or pest company and, like, very specific niche.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: So they're both small businesses, but that one is, the higher priced one is.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Niched down vertical and the end the sales process to go with it. So sign up for a demo, not self serve, compared to $59 a month self serve. Okay, got it. I saw that. And not just because of where the competitors are, but also, in my analysis, I ended up in between those two.
And I keep telling myself, this is going to change. This isn't final. We can change it. So this is an initial stab at pricing. I was at about $199 a month and then a second tier. We're not going to open up a second tier because we don't have those features built. So one of the challenges in our pricing is that we don't want it to be just based on minutes used. We also want it to be based on value and how that connects with the type of business that needs more sophisticated features like CRM integration and API access and more things. So this first launch is basically just of the lower tier, and then we're going to open up the middle t. We actually designed it in the pricing page and then just hit it.
So then we had all these conversations and where we ended up over the last two weeks was at $99 a month. And I said, I want to bring it down. I want to open up the bottom of the, you know, I want to open up the funnel, I want more, and so on. So we were at 99 249 and then custom. That was my plan going into this week before we had the board meeting.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Okay. So now the board meeting. And like you said, it feels like this just happened. It's because three months just flies by very fast these days.
So the board meeting was good. You know, I am.
I feel some pressure to do a good job as CEO because I just pivoted. And it's not like I asked a lot of permission from the investors. I just kind of did it. I made sure that, you know, lead investor was on board. But it's a bit of a bold move, you know, to go from an e commerce checkout, raise money for it, and then be like, you know what? Actually, how about an AI voice product?
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: So it's not that I'm on thin ice, but I gotta mind my P's and Q's. I think that's appropriate.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: No one's putting any pressure. I'm putting pressure on myself because I'm assuming if I'm an investor on the other end of emails, I want to see the CEO, you know, play things straight, do all the right stuff.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: I think it's good to hear you say that. I think there's so, so much. I definitely relate where it's like, you know, we, we just assume that, that there is this perception, but it's really just putting the pressure on ourselves. But I think to a certain extent, that can be healthy.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, we're. We're adults here. We're responsible. We want to behave a certain way, we want to keep a certain reputation, so on. Okay. So going into this board meeting, I was like, how do I make this a good board meeting? So I do my research, like how to run board meetings. You know, a lot of VC blogs have this blog post and a lot of them are really good because it's something that's genuinely helpful to founders that have raised money. So I go into this board meeting focused on, like, how, how are we going to make this a good meeting? It turned out to be just so helpful. And the way it's helpful, it's related to the conversation about the domain name that we'll have later for friend.com dot.
What the board meeting helped us with is that rock and I, two things. One, we're very close to the problem. We're staring at it every day. We're literally close to it. An investor who's on a few boards and focuses on investments and that sort of thing is not as close to it. So it's always good to have a little perspective when your face has been stuck up against it for months.
Secondly, rock and I come from the bootstrap background. We want to build a healthy business, and that's our focus. And we do a lot of our calculations in that way, and that is not always compatible with building a venture scale business.
And going into this conversation, we wanted to get into the pricing conversation. It was the largest part of the board meeting.
And what it helped us understand was we have multiple audiences, right? We have ourselves, we have our customers, we have our business financials and health, and we have the capital markets, we have investors.
And right now, I think we were weighing things too much toward building a healthy, profitable business. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it was skewed too far in that direction. And what it really meant is that we were seeding a large part of the market to the lower end by saying, no, no, we have higher quality and we're going to charge more and we're going to make a bunch of money that way.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: It's like less about revenue, it's more about, like, land grab right then, right now.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Okay. That's exactly the way to put it. It is a land grab. And the reason some of these markets and AI are so interesting is because there are large parts of the economy that have widespread problems. Normally, when that situation exists, there are a ton of solutions aimed at those problems. That's how capitalism works, right? It fills in those gaps.
This is a very strange scenario right now. The very, very widespread problems don't have this type of solution because the solution was not possible.
That creates a new space in the vacuum to be filled. That's literally the land grab, new space on the map that did not exist. All of a sudden, new territory opened up on the board and now there's a rush. And so that is what makes our product and business interesting at venture scale. It's if that spot is going to get filled in three or four years from today, there are a million, if not several million small businesses in the US that use an AI voice solution.
If that's the case, the number one or number two in the market are going to have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of customers. And if you want to attract capital, you need to make the argument that you are likely to be that number one or number two in the market. And the way to do that is not to grow on efficient revenue growth and margin. It is to grab land. And that's why today, when we flip our pricing page, we will be at $49 a month.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: It's a really good way to put it. And it's really like the traditional VC mindset and the whole strategy, the whole point of. But it's about the land grab. It's. It's not about, like, I'll talk about my clarity flow pricing. It's like literally the opposite spectrum and strategy, right?
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Not wrong.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: I want to hear more about this. 49. $49. So is there a trial? Is there, is it. How does that work?
[00:18:45] Speaker B: There is a seven day free trial.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Pretty aggressive. That's like, try the thing and then, you know, buy it or don't buy it.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: And credit card up front or when.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: They'Re ready to go, credit card at the critical moment in the onboarding is how I would put it. So you go to the pricing page, you click on get started, you put in your login, and then you put in your business URL, business name, and URL. After that, you see a little spinny thing. Your agent, your Rosie agent is being built. We just scrape your URL and then you get dropped into the admin with your Rosie account. You have not put in your credit card yet. You set up, you add training PDF's, you add faqs, you choose tone, you can do all the things. And then when you are ready to test it, when you want to hear the voice, you want to call it and interact with it, you click on, I'm ready for my Rosie number. Credit card mobile comes up, seven day free trial. Go. And then one very critical piece of it, your account gets locked after seven days. There's no, like, oh, I haven't used my 50 minutes, like, no, you have seven days to decide and that's it.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: So that's our starting point. What I would love to do is put account creation, literally the username and password on the other side of the agent creation.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: That's what I like to do. Use that really as like a lead gen on the homepage.
Yes. Super interesting, man. Where are you at on it? Is it live?
[00:20:21] Speaker B: It will be live by the end of today. So we did the pricing page, all that. And I'm trying to contain myself. I want to make the site awesome, but I want it live. So we're going live first and then improving it later. So we have right now, if you go to landing page, you don't even see the product, you don't see the admin. So we have a bunch of screenshots ad. We'll just start doing that all next week. But today the only thing that changes is it goes from a landing page to a landing page with a pricing page where you can sign up.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I know that you're not targeting SaaS with this, but I told you I really am interested in trying it and seeing if there's some way I could maybe use it to throw a phone number on the clarity flow website. I think that's actually critical to the strategy that I'm taking now with interesting charging upfront because people need their questions answered before they pay money, you know.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: So just to address that before we throw it back to you, the thing we do, we have a. We have a public Rosie number that we're working on so that you can just call us and interact with it. And it is trained on our software product.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I want to call that later. Yeah.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Yes. So, so we have, like, you know, I did it with an investor yesterday on the phone. We called it and I said, do you have a free trial? What happens when the free trial ends? And while listening to that on speakerphone, I was showing the investor on screen the faq. I asked it not the exact question that I put into the training, but similar. And it understood that it was a similar enough question. And then it read verbatim what I wanted it to read. It really is this thing that takes text. It takes like, this is how I would want to answer someone who asked that question. And it turns it into this conversational speech.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Interesting. And I.
I don't want to niche yet. Maybe I'll regret that. But who cares about regretting something that you can easily change later? I don't want to niche yet. I think this thing might just be.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Super wide and super interesting. Dude, I love it.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Okay, so walk us through pricing.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: All right.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: From a different point of view, it's funny.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: So we also start at $49, but it's like the opposite strategy. This is the bootstrap strategy, right.
The headline is, like, as of yesterday, we have killed our free trial. There is no more free trial whatsoever. If you want to. And this is an experiment. I'm literally on day two of this experiment. I'm going to give it probably at least two months to see where we're at and then go from there. Maybe we'll keep it or maybe we'll tweak it.
All right, I want to unpack this.
So it's no free trial. You pay upfront, and we're offering a 60 day money back guarantee.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Okay. You flipped it, right? Instead of free trial, it's no pay and be invested, but there's no risk you can still get your money.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: It's interesting the progression that we went through, like, starting, going back to zip message. It was low priced, and then pretty early on, I went to premium with totally free plan forever with low prices. And then fast forward to switching to clarity flow. That was when we killed the freemium play, but we went to a more traditional, like, 14 day free trial with no credit card up front. That's been the status quo up until yesterday.
Similar to you, like, where we had, like, no credit card up front, but you put in your credit card when you want to activate, like, the good features, but it does cut off at 14 days. So that's been the situation. And we would get our number of trials every month, and a handful of them convert, and some of them are just tire kickers. Some of them are really good. Some of them need a lot of support. Some of them should get more support, but instead, they drift away.
And Kat on the team is customer success, and she's incredible.
Customers love her, and she's really helpful, and she's helped to convert a lot of these trials, and she sends async messages and does live calls with customers.
But a lot of them, they're trialing without a credit card.
A lot of them literally don't respond.
Or they might respond three months later or something like that.
This bet to remove the free trial, obviously, we're going to drastically cut down the number of people who enter our funnel, but the thinking here is they've just paid to come in. They're going to be more engaged and more serious, so they're more likely to actually respond to cats messages when they're.
It's not a requirement. Like, we don't have a required set up fee or set up service or talk to, like, you don't have to talk some you can sell, you can self purchase and sell onboard. We have videos and stuff.
But the thinking is that people who buy are going to be more engaged and more committed to the process of getting set up.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: And my people, more committed.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And my thought a few months ago, Washington, maybe we'll introduce a setup fee, like a paid setup service that's worked in the past for stuff that I've done and I've seen other SaaS do this where you pay, I don't know, like $1,000 to get a concierge setup service. And that would create more engagement and more commitment from the customer. This is a different take on that. We're not doing a setup fee, but you do need to pay upfront and, yeah.
Clarity flow needs something. We need to juice growth. And this is a new experiment. We do have another big feature coming. We're doing appointments, like a calendly alternative built into clarity flow. A lot of customers have been asking for that, so that's coming and that should help as well. But really we needed to change the game, at least try a different model.
And, you know, I went into this, like, basically with the assumption that, like, all right, once we kill the trial, like nobody's gonna buy, we're going to.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Kill the business overnight and see you choke off that. That flow of trials.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So it launched yesterday morning and it went all of yesterday with no purchases. So I'm like, oh, shit. All right, here we go.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Were you getting trials every day before then?
[00:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: So you used to a flow of activity?
[00:27:00] Speaker A: I'm used to multiple trials a day, yeah.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: And usually a conversion a day, usually.
And so I woke up this morning to a purchase, like, someone, someone paid. I was like, okay.
It was like roughly 24 hours in. We got the first purchase. Okay, we got one. And I don't know if that person's going to ask for a refund yet, but we'll see and we'll see where we're at about two months from now.
This was also a good opportunity to actually optimize our checkout flow. Like our in app pricing. Like, we have the public pricing page, but then in the app there's the page where you see the plans and you can purchase and go. Literally, we haven't touched that since like, day one of zip message. It's been the same old, confusing, too much information, checkout flow for the last three years. And we just never touched it, never got around to it. Okay.
This was an opportunity.
Like, I designed it, but my team implemented it, and much cleaner, simpler in app pricing and purchase flow. And. Yeah. So that. That should help regardless of whether we keep the no trial or not. Like, now we have a much cleaner optimized checkout flow. So that's good, too.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: Okay, so different approaches. Not right, not wrong, not good, not bad.
Speaking of ways to spend money, this was one of the more fun stories this week. Come on.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
Young kid friend. Yeah.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: This young kid, Avi Feldman, I think, or Shiftman Avi Schiffman.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: All I know about this thing is the video that made the rounds on Twitter. And, like. Like everyone else, I'm looking at this, I'm like, what is this? What the hell is this?
[00:28:58] Speaker B: I mean, I. I don't know if it was part of the strategy, but it was insane, which was, I guess, part of the whole thing. Anyway, this kid, Avi, I think one of these, like, Harvard wonder kidde type, right? When he was 18, he built, like, an Airbnb clone for ukrainian refugees and people in Europe who want to house them, and he went viral. He's like, you know, one of these, like, you touch it, turns to gold type of thing. Okay, cool. So goes off and raises $2.5 million for an AI wearable. And anything that I get wrong in this story, I don't care. It's just fun.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: So goes off, raises 2.5 million, takes an open source library called friend. Okay. Buys friend.com as a domain, takes the open source library, jams it into a hardware wearable.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: So you know much more about this than I do.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: How much did this kid raise?
[00:29:52] Speaker B: 2.5 million.
[00:29:54] Speaker A: And he spent 1.8 of that on the domain?
[00:29:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: And that video from Sandwich was probably $200,000 also.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: I love it. I love it. Okay. Now, here's the thing.
I don't even think he made, like, a big stick of it. People were just like, are you insane? How much did that domain cost? And he was like, 1.8 million. And people were like, what's wrong with you? And he explained, we're leasing it. We didn't pay $1.8 million. It's like a three year lease with an option to buy at the end, right? So what happened afterward is a lot of people came out with, here's my domain story. Right? A lot of, like, big time founders explain it. One of them, I forget the domain, but it was like a three year lease with an option to buy. If you miss one payment, it goes back to the owner. And he explained this logic. The logic that I think applies to Avi and friend.com was. It's just a bet with unlimited upside. Right. The upside is friend.com is an amazing domain. You get a bunch of attention. You get a. I think, I think the video got 16 million views in 24 hours. Like, it worked. But he probably spent, what, $30,000 for the first month? I don't know, 25, $50,000, whatever. And the upside is, if it works, who cares? You're just going to raise a $40 million round and buy the domain for the 1.8 million. It doesn't even bother you.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: I don't know about this, like, lease to buy thing with domain. I didn't know that's a thing, bro.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: We in America, Jack. Everything's financed.
Yeah. So the downside is limited. What's the downside? It flops. And then you don't buy the domain, and then you just give it back to them.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Who cares? Yeah.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: So I love you.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: You'll know what's what by then.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: Yeah, right. And a lot of people were like, you know, talking bad about it, and I was like, no, I think if you look at it, and this is a bit related to a pricing conversation, if you look at it with a normal business mindset, like revenue more than expenses, it makes absolutely no sense.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: If you look at it from, hey, I'm in the capital markets. I need to attract attention and capital, and I get 16 million views for a $50,000 investment, plus my video, I gotta. My company's off the ground. Like, your company has never been off the ground. And I don't think that's, I don't.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: Think that's my bet for friend.com is he'll, he'll keep the domain and it will evolve into something that is not what they showed on that video, because the hardware AI thing is ridiculous. That's not gonna work.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: I am not sure about that.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: When I saw it before I pressed play on the video, I was like, oh, this is gonna be the VC backed version of those. Is it like therapy AI or what's the one where it's like an AI friend AI?
[00:32:40] Speaker B: Like therapy or something like that?
[00:32:42] Speaker A: There's one. I forgot the name of it. There's some site where you could just talk to an AI chatbot, and it's like youre, you know, companionship.
I thought this. And there's like some, some like, bootstrapper stuff. I think. I think levels might be doing one of those. Sure.
And so, like, when I saw the thing, I was like, oh, this is going to be the VC version of that.
I think that's where it'll probably end up going. That would be my guess.
[00:33:05] Speaker B: So the thing is, in reality that's everyone's guess. Everyone's guess is very unlikely to work. So what this kid did, I think is he sprinkled a little bit of leverage into that risk with the domain name and now it's got a little bit better chance to make it. And if it doesn't make it, who cares? The whole point was to put in, you know, a few hundred thousand bucks each. And if it works, we're geniuses. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't bother anyone because it's just money that's supposed to be put into bets.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Love it.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: I love it.
And that is why I'm going to debate Ian about it. Or maybe the next story on Ripple FM. Hell yeah.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: There you go. Love it.
Yeah, I guess. Let me talk for a minute about one month app.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: So unlike Ripple, which I was hacking on every day straight for the last three weeks, this was something that I put together in 2 hours, I should say. I've been actually doing the service for a few months and thinking about this offer for several months. But this is what I've always loved about productized services or productized consulting is unlike software, unlike anything else. You don't have to spend months or weeks or even days building it in order to launch it and get customers. You just need a landing page, if even that.
This was like a dialing. So one month app is my productized consulting offer. This is like a dialing in of what I've been doing as a consultant, working with SAS, I talked about tailormadeui.com dot. So now I have two sides of what I do as a consultant.
Tailormade ui.com is Ui Ux for established SaaS products that need improvement upgrade on their UI and UX that's aimed at established SaaS and that's a great option for me and for them. I think it's been working out great.
This is an option for startups, for founders who have an idea. They want a quality MVP built. They don't want to do the stupid no code thing, but they also don't want to spend multiple months and hundreds of thousands of dollars on an agency or hiring a development team. They don't want to deal with all that.
I firmly believe as a full stack Rails app developer I think that you can get a super simple, tight scope MVP fully ready to use app in a month. That's aggressive and people seeing that are going to misread it and say like, oh, you can't build a whole SaaS app in a month.
I say, yes, you can, as long as the scope is super tight, number one. And I mean like tight. Like not everything you want to be in the product is going to be in the MVP, but the most important thing or two things is going to be in there.
And if you have the right stack, and by stack I mean like a stack that works really well for the developer. For me, that's rails and tailwind and stimulus and turbo and all that. But I also have my own app template that I've been using on my own stuff and honing it and crafting it. So all of my UI components and everything are built into that. It's got authentication, it's got accounts and teams and all the boilerplate stuff and custom mobile and dark mode. All that is in there. So when I get started on a new app, I'm going, I'm working on the business logic, on the features.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: You don't have to do anything that has already been done multiple times.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: So the thinking with Onemonth app is it's an offer and I put the price on it. This is the starting price. It's going to be higher later. It's $10,000 for a one month scope.
And my thinking on that is first and foremost, I really do want to deliver for you an actual MVP that you could actually give to customers, put it in their hands and have them sign up and use and get the core value. Like, it's not going to be half an app. Like, it's not going to be like unfinished in terms of, like, you can't even get any value from this. Like, you should have some value in a month.
But the thinking is that like there, of course there's going to be more work to do after the month. Right?
[00:37:37] Speaker B: Some people will take it off on their own.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So then I, then I have a couple of retainer options as like optional add ons. It's like one option is like, okay, one month, great, we're done.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: It's yours.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: It's yours. Either I can hand it off to your team, or we pause and you do some customer development and you come back in six months and we'll continue. That's fine. Or I've got two retainers. One is called just keep the lights on retainer. And that is like a low cost. We're not really actively building anything, but me and my team, we're around to keep the lights on, monitor the server, quick bug fixes. You get a small handful of hours a month. That's we're around so you can start to onboard users. And if things go wrong, we're here. That's what that retainer is for. Then the other one is more active development. That's my standard weekly retainer. We've got additional features that we want to build. Me and my team will continue to hack on that. And since you're a past client, you get priority access to that retainer.
And that's the structure of it.
I've always loved to do. This is productize consulting, and it's been an evolution.
I've done a couple of these MVP apps for clients and for myself already this year, but that was more general consulting, and now it's learning from all that honing in on my app template and everything and packaging it up, and I think this works. So I put that out on Twitter. I had two calls this week. One is booked for next week, a third is booked for next week. And looks like I have at least one project probably coming through. But as of today, it's still open for August and September, and I'm looking to actually book more projects at this point, to be honest, I have the team ready to go.
It's still me doing all the design and development and direction. But if and when we book more projects, I would like to see this grow into a small productized agency that I can oversee and run.
Like the team is ready to scale and the systems are there.
So that's something that I'm looking at doing. We'll see where it goes.
[00:40:07] Speaker B: You have the capacity.
I find it so attractive, it makes me want to start a side project.
When I think about the last. So it was. We counted. It was 91 days from the time of making the decision to build Rosie to the first user account created. And, like, you know, a real stranger in the app.
The work that goes into the business logic and everything else is one thing. To actually have it all come together and come together means, like, what's now on the Internet, and you can click on it and register, and it creates an account for you. You can invite a teammate and all the stuff that actually makes it into a commercialized product.
[00:40:53] Speaker A: Yeah, there's to be, like, some form of onboarding, like, doesn't have to be a crazy wizard or anything, but, like, when a customer signs up, they need to be oriented and know where to go and navigate and use it, you know? Yes.
[00:41:04] Speaker B: And there's a lot of things people expect out of a software product now that you actually can ignore.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: And all these weird things like authorization, password reset. It just takes a lot of time.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: And there's so much time that goes, honestly, into the UI and the UX and the design and the clean of it.
And that's what's all built in out of the box for me. I've done all that work already. You see it on Ripple FM. I used my template on that.
The structure and navigation and how it's all mobile and dark.
All that is in there and the menus and the dropdowns and the modals. I don't have to design and implement and wire these up again on every project. You know, that stuff like the business logic takes time, but the UI and the tightening up also takes time.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: That's what makes things stretch out into weeks and all these decisions. And how do you want to handle this thing? Yeah, I think it's very attractive. I like seeing the posts on Twitter from.
From people running very, very focused solutions.
Like turning this type of file into that type of file can actually make you $30,000 a month.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: And here's how I did it. Like, I love those. Those are beautiful people. You know, it's. It's easy to get lost in the shuffle of big numbers, but that's real life changing money. $30,000 a month will change your life in a hurry.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: For sure, man. For sure. I mean, you know, and that's this consulting stuff for me, it's. For me, it's my sustainability, to be honest. You know, I'm back to fully bootstrapping and working on my products. But this is like the, like, I could do, like the one off consulting gigs, like, just myself directly.
A lot of feast and famine with that. Between tailor made Ui and one month app and the package of those two together, I see that as the basis for. I could form an ongoing agency with this. And I have the team and operations ready to go. It's just firing up the lead flow so far. I'm just putting it out there on this podcast and on twitter. I could do more to know, do like, the outreach stuff and the marketing stuff, but, um.
[00:43:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Listed word of mouth.
[00:43:36] Speaker A: Yeah, this is short. Yeah.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: The short term cash flow.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: While. While you invest in other things.
[00:43:42] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:43:43] Speaker B: All right, well, let's. Let's do it. We're back. It's August.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: Yes, sir.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: I'm not going anywhere for a few weeks.
[00:43:49] Speaker A: No. Yeah, neither am I. Back at. It is super hot here, but, yeah, we're gonna. We're going to keep at it. Cool.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: Enjoy the weekend. Thanks for listening, everybody.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: See you, folks.
