"Thank you for solving my problem."

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, how was your Halloween? [00:00:23] Speaker B: It was. It was good. We divided and conquered. Last night. My older went to her friend's house, like the street over there. My. My wife took her over there. And I went with my younger daughter and her friend around our neighborhood here. [00:00:37] Speaker A: It was okay. [00:00:38] Speaker B: Yep. [00:00:39] Speaker A: Well, we had a breakthrough last night. Last night was the first Halloween that my wife and I just walked around by ourselves with friends, drink in hand, stop by a few people's houses. [00:00:49] Speaker B: Oh, that sounds super fun. [00:00:50] Speaker A: It was. It was wild. [00:00:51] Speaker B: No, no kids. [00:00:52] Speaker A: So our home was home base for all three. But so they would come. We made like a walking taco situation, like a buffet, so kids would kind of come in somehow. Like, this town has like a starting time for trick or treating. [00:01:11] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:01:12] Speaker A: I don't remember that growing up at all here it's like. No, it's 3:00. That's when trick or treating starts. [00:01:16] Speaker B: Oh, that's early. Yeah, we were out there at like six. [00:01:19] Speaker A: Okay. So we started early. And everyone was like, oh, it's too early. And it was actually quite nice because everyone was done by 7 o'clock. [00:01:25] Speaker B: Still light outside. [00:01:25] Speaker A: Yes, yes. So we had all the kids here. We had about 25 kids eating. And then they all went out on their own. And my wife and I were just free for like two, three hours. Walked around a few friends houses, had a drink. It was nice. [00:01:37] Speaker B: Oh, that sounds super fun. Yeah, man. [00:01:41] Speaker A: Halloween, weird. Weird holiday stresses me out. [00:01:45] Speaker B: Weird holiday. Lot of. A lot of Reeses and Kit Kats floating around my house. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, Candy's awful. Regular boring. CPG candy is awful. I pay attention to some. [00:02:01] Speaker B: You cooked your own? What do you got going on over there? [00:02:03] Speaker A: I mean, I go to Trader Joe's. Peanut butter cups, bro. [00:02:06] Speaker B: Those are good. We do get those in the fridge. Those are kind of insane. [00:02:10] Speaker A: Those legit. But not like having like a Reese's Pieces peanut butter cup at this point is a horror show. There's someone I follow. [00:02:18] Speaker B: I mean, I still do it. You do it. [00:02:20] Speaker A: I can't even do it. I just put it on. [00:02:21] Speaker B: Like. What? [00:02:22] Speaker A: Why? Yeah, I see some direct to consumer people on Twitter. Like one of them in particular. It's starting like a candy company. And I think it makes a lot of sense because I think the old candy, that formula hasn't changed other than for the worse in decades, is not good. [00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. I just put the order in on a new. On a new Mac for my office. Kind of psyched about that. I gotta wait three or four weeks. I got. I went with the Mac Mini. Yeah. So I've always done. Or the last several years I've done two Macs. I have a travel. I have an M1 Air. That's my. And I love that thing. I just love how light the air is. It's perfect for traveling. And I just carry it around my house and work with it in the backyard. But then here in the office, this is like quote unquote my power computer. And you know, so. But I've been waiting years. Like this one that I'm still using right now is a 2019 intel iMac. [00:03:23] Speaker A: Oh, before, before I went. Yeah. [00:03:26] Speaker B: And so, so I'm finally getting up to the Apple Silicon on the. On the main machine. And I mean the Mac Minis. The Mac Minis used to be like the lightweight Macs and technically they still are because the Mac like the Mac Studios are insane. But the. [00:03:40] Speaker A: It's flipped. [00:03:41] Speaker B: I mean the Mac Minis are super powerful now. So got like the M4 Pro, all that. And I ordered the. I received the Mac Studio display. I'm psyched to put that up too. [00:03:52] Speaker A: So you bought both of those. So you broke now? Yes. What is that? Five grand? Six grand? [00:04:00] Speaker B: I think all in. It was probably four. [00:04:02] Speaker A: Four grand. [00:04:03] Speaker B: And I'm trading in my imac, which they're giving me a nice three. $385 for and. [00:04:09] Speaker A: Okay, nice. Yeah. I had a bit of a like Macabre. I think that's the right term in this situation experience where I collected all of the, all of the laptops of all the people that I have fired over the last year and now I think everyone left in the company can get whatever Mac they want because of all the trade in value. [00:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah. You could just. Oh, so you're. You're so. Yeah. What do you do with those machines? [00:04:32] Speaker A: Do you just like not mean the left. We have like a Apple business account and representative. So we just email them with a spreadsheet of all the serial numbers and they're like, here's our offer. [00:04:42] Speaker B: No, but I mean. Okay, so you, you just go ahead and like trade them back in. You don't like keep them for. To give to other employees or whatever? [00:04:50] Speaker A: In theory we could give them to other people. I have never once given a new employee an old computer. Maybe once. [00:04:58] Speaker B: Right. [00:04:58] Speaker A: It always like. [00:05:00] Speaker B: Well, the next person we hire is not Spain old. [00:05:03] Speaker A: No, no, not sold. [00:05:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:06] Speaker A: Yeah. I would love an excuse to get a new Mac, but this imac I have, that's Four years old is perfectly good. So I have yet to find this. [00:05:13] Speaker B: I mean. Yeah, and like, this one that I've. It's five years in still on the intel chip and it still works great. I just. But I was like, you know what? Whenever they come out with this next generation M4S, that's going to be the time I finally upgrade. And they did this week, so I did. [00:05:30] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. I saw a lot of talk about it on the Twitters. What else? I just voted. Got that out of the way. [00:05:40] Speaker B: Okay, there you go. So I guess that means. I guess that means I can't spend this podcast trying to win your vote the other way. [00:05:52] Speaker A: I don't think anyone's being. No one in the country is being persuaded at this point. Right. [00:05:56] Speaker B: I did. Oh, man. I don't know if we're going to get into politics now, but I did press play on that on Trump on Rogan last night. I watched, like, the first, like, ten minutes of it. [00:06:08] Speaker A: I mean, it's. It's him. [00:06:13] Speaker B: It's him. All right. You know, it's so weird. [00:06:17] Speaker A: Overall, was your impression negative of it? It's kind of. [00:06:20] Speaker B: I mean, I didn't watch all three hours. I literally watched like, about 10 to 15 minutes. [00:06:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I did, too. It was like a 15, 20 minutes. [00:06:26] Speaker B: Like. [00:06:26] Speaker A: Okay, it's kind of interesting because of how casual it is. [00:06:28] Speaker B: I thought it was actually interesting. Okay, so I had an interesting observation of my podcaster. [00:06:35] Speaker A: Brian, your opinion is very. [00:06:38] Speaker B: I have another point to make about podcasting in politics. Okay, before we get to that, so. So with. With Trump. You know, with Trump, I think this is, again, probably the case for most people where it's like you just can't stand the other side, so you actually avoid watching footage of the other side. Right. [00:06:54] Speaker A: Not great. [00:06:55] Speaker B: But yes, I sort of don't watch a lot. Any. Anyone's speeches or most. Most interviews, but I was like. And I usually just can't stand watching Trump. Like, I gotta watch some of this Rogan interview. [00:07:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Just to see it. [00:07:08] Speaker B: Just to see it. Right. And so. So, all right, I turned it on. Like, and I was. And I'm always interested about, like, the very beginning. Like, how do they start off? Like, they just get into the room. Like. Like, I would say the first three, three to five minutes. I was like, man, that does not come off as Trump as we know it. He seems normal. He seems down to earth. He seems actually pretty, like, alert. And on top of it, this was three to five minutes. [00:07:34] Speaker A: Is that when he got into, like, the Lincoln Bedroom. [00:07:36] Speaker B: So then the Lincoln. All right. So then it's just like, niceties and just settling in. Right. And I was like, this guy actually seems pretty normal, not like the caricature that we all know. [00:07:50] Speaker A: Right. Which was the goal of the Rogan interview. [00:07:52] Speaker B: I assume then Rogan's first, I would say, like, real question was something around, like, okay, like, it's so crazy that you, Donald Trump, became president in 2016. What was it like on day one? Or what was it like when you. When you found out that you are now the President of the United States? [00:08:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:10] Speaker B: And that's when Trump goes on like a. Literally like a 10 minute. [00:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Rogan had, like, stop him at some point. He's like, okay, I mean, like a. [00:08:18] Speaker B: 10 minute, like, what, what? He. He started with, like, the, the inauguration and the. And. And how many people were cheering for him, which many people were probably protesting. And then. But then, like, walking into the White House and how luxurious it is. Oh, beautiful. [00:08:33] Speaker A: So beautiful. [00:08:34] Speaker B: So beautiful. And like, and I made my living in luxury, and this is luxury. And, and. And then, like, and then I gotta see the Lincoln Bedroom. And then he goes. Thing that he's seeing in the Lincoln Bedroom. Yes. And then it goes on the whole backstory with like, Robert E. Lee and like, dude, the question was about how do you feel about being the new leader of the free world? [00:08:58] Speaker A: Yeah, the question was a green light to talk, my friend. That's what the question was. [00:09:01] Speaker B: Yeah, but, like, but, but. So that's when, for me as a viewer, it started to go off the rails. And I'm like, okay, this is like, think about, like. Because the question was like, dude, you just became the leader of the free world, right? What kind of impact does that have on you as a person? What are you thinking about the impact that you are personally are about to have on the whole world? And he's talking about how cool the finishings on the White House are. [00:09:32] Speaker A: And, you know, yeah, our politicians are not. They're not normal people. [00:09:37] Speaker B: No. I mean, but like, but that's. That's one. To me, it's like, man, how do you not grasp the gravity of what just happened here? [00:09:45] Speaker A: You know, I hear you, but I think overall, the podcasting format, I think. Okay, my hope is that this year it's crossed over. Until you gotta do podcasts, you gotta let people get to know you. [00:09:57] Speaker B: Absolutely do. I heard a great conversation. I'm a huge fan of the podcast Dithering, which is actually a paid podcast with John Gruber and Ben Thompson. It's all tech, okay? You know, tech, they do 15 minutes every, twice a week. The current tech news. Big, big tech news. Right? So they did an episode, I think a couple days ago on this is like the podcast election. Right? Like remember 2008, it was like the Twitter election and then, I don't know, whatever the other ones were. But like, so they. Ben Thompson made this fantastic point. Really makes you think. So you think back through the history of presidential elections and there was radio, and then television became the medium. Right. [00:10:43] Speaker A: Then the way you looked mattered. That's right. [00:10:44] Speaker B: The way you looked, the way you presented on television. And so you go back to the Nixon Kennedy debate and all that wedding, okay? So then you're in the television era and a Ronald Reagan comes up and people who are telegenic are the ones who make it to the top and become president and become candidates because they play so well. So that Ronald Reagan comedy, Obama, Donald Trump, like Clinton, you know, all of these people have presence that translates super well on television. Right now you fast forward this year is the first podcast election and you can even make the. Of course we're still very tied to television, but you can make the argument that more and more people are tuning out of television and tuning into not just social media, but podcasts. And I mean, Trump goes on Rogan and he's reaching 30 million people. [00:11:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Within. Within a few days. [00:11:44] Speaker B: But, but you go on a CNN town hall or Fox or NBC, like even Fox, which is, I think the highest rated, what are you reaching, 100,000? [00:11:53] Speaker A: Like, yeah, like a million at most. [00:11:56] Speaker B: Like a national debate or something. [00:11:58] Speaker A: But like, yeah, national debate gets, gets a lot. [00:12:00] Speaker B: But, but even that is like not that much compared to like major sporting events and other stuff, right? Yeah, and so like, but like a podcast, you are literally reaching millions upon millions of listeners. And the point that Thompson was making was that like, what does this mean in the decades to come? Right, because we're talking about long form interview. It's a very different medium. The people, like the candidates themselves literally are different when they're talking on the mic for an hour, two hours, three hours long than they are in these like quick hit TV spots, you know? [00:12:37] Speaker A: Yeah, the TV spots are awful. [00:12:39] Speaker B: So then you start like. So then it's like, well, who is. We don't know. But like, how is this going to impact the type of candidates that. [00:12:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:12:47] Speaker B: That this system attracts? You know? [00:12:49] Speaker A: Now the whole thing with podcasting, I was going to say audio more than video, but the Biggest podcasts have a video component. Even if maybe they get listened to audibly more. [00:13:00] Speaker B: That's interesting too. Like I catch with YouTube clips, but. [00:13:05] Speaker A: Then you're working and you listen to it without watching it because no one suit, almost no one is watching Rogan and Trump talk back and forth for multiple hours. I mean, I guess maybe some people do. [00:13:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I. [00:13:17] Speaker A: But even if it's on YouTube, it's being played on YouTube, it's being listened to. The, the interesting thing about that is it favors authenticity. [00:13:24] Speaker B: Yes. [00:13:25] Speaker A: Which is the opposite of our politicians. [00:13:27] Speaker B: That's exactly right. That, that's what's interesting about this whole trend. [00:13:30] Speaker A: You know, I, I will, I will not challenge you. I will suggest watch J.D. vance on Rogan. [00:13:40] Speaker B: Oh, he was just on it, right? Yeah. [00:13:42] Speaker A: Yes. That feels like a peer our age. It's that one of the first times you get this authenticity of like, oh, that guy's like us, like our age. Speaks like us. [00:13:55] Speaker B: Probably not far from our age. [00:13:56] Speaker A: Right, right. The sporadic cursing here and Right. You and I, we don't curse a lot, but we throw it in here and there because it kind of makes sense sometimes if that type of politician from both sides, from all sides does better than the person who gives a slick speech and then does not expand on anything. Hopefully that's better. [00:14:19] Speaker B: I have always favored just in general trends of my, who I lean toward going back. It's always been younger, more forward thinking people. I do tend to prefer like governors over, or executives, you know, over like senators, you know. [00:14:42] Speaker A: Yeah, there's just a, there's just a reflexive, you know, just being repulsed by career politicians. You just, you just know you're being lied to. You're part of the game. You're participating in a charade and you're like, I guess I have to hope for the best because I don't trust a single thing this person says at all. [00:14:57] Speaker B: I mean, but then at the end of the day for me, of course it's, there are, there are things that, that go above those, those preferences like yeah, Trump is the executive and she is the career politician. But like I'm definitely voting for her over Trump. [00:15:13] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:15:13] Speaker B: That's where I sit, you know. [00:15:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just ideology too, but even, even that kind of getting mixed up, you know, these things. I saw a graphic once, phenomenal. You can definitely find it just on Google. It shows the history of the right and left and how the political parties in the US have swapped over time. So it's like, I think it's a Tree branch or like a snake. But it moves around in different eras throughout the country's history. [00:15:40] Speaker B: Yeah, it used to be very much the opposite of like. Yes. [00:15:43] Speaker A: What it is now is not static. It was not like this always. [00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah. My one hope. And I really. This is the thing where I always feel. I'm always very optimistic and hopeful about America in general, but about the political parties is where I feel kind of hopeless because the thing that I want most is to break out of just the two party options. [00:16:05] Speaker A: Oh, I'm not sure about that. [00:16:07] Speaker B: I just don't see a path to a third party getting to a level of viability. And I would love it. And I just don't see a path. [00:16:15] Speaker A: Yeah, same, you know. [00:16:18] Speaker B: Anyway. [00:16:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, next week we'll be having an interesting conversation. Barring some legal issues and court proceedings. [00:16:29] Speaker B: It'S definitely gonna be like, what is it, the year 2000 all over again? [00:16:33] Speaker A: That'll be fun. And whenever I think about this stuff, my conclusion is always, you know, what matters most. Make a bunch of money for my family. [00:16:43] Speaker B: There you go. [00:16:43] Speaker A: That's it, baby. [00:16:44] Speaker B: Can't argue with that. [00:16:46] Speaker A: Speaking of, what do we got going. [00:16:48] Speaker B: On, Jordan, are you on Blue sky yet? Come again? Are you on Blue Sky? [00:16:54] Speaker A: What's Blue Sky? [00:16:56] Speaker B: Blue sky is the alternative to Twitter right now. [00:17:01] Speaker A: Oh, is it a crypto thing from back in the day, like a year or two ago? [00:17:05] Speaker B: Well, it's from a couple years. So is this Jack? Yeah, Jack. I mean, what's great about it to me is like he literally recreated Twitter. It's exactly. It is Twitter. [00:17:17] Speaker A: Oh, wow. It is a clone of Twitter. [00:17:19] Speaker B: It's a clone. It's quite literally a clone of Twitter. And I don't know, something happened in the last two weeks or so. It's having a moment in our really startup tech circles. [00:17:32] Speaker A: People just get sick of all the politics on regular Twitter and are trying to. [00:17:36] Speaker B: Yeah, what I see on Blue sky in my feed is no politics really at all. It's, it's. Dude, it's. It's people in our circles, listeners of this podcast, probably a lot of them are, are now on Blue Sky. I started actively using it as much as, if not more than Twitter just about a week or two ago. And there's. There's something. I feel like it's having a. Like I signed up for Blue sky over a year ago and then I abandoned it a year ago. [00:18:03] Speaker A: I remember seeing it, but. Right. Never doing anything. [00:18:06] Speaker B: Threads also, like, I've been trying to make it work. It just hasn't Clicked for me. So we. I remain on Twitter X. But I feel like Blue sky is having a moment right now. Something. Something clicked in the last two weeks. I think I first saw Justin Jackson start to start to pull people over there. But there's. There is something happening over there. I definitely recommend people check it out because it's like they. I think one of the things they did from a product perspective that was so smart is they have this thing. What do they call it, like, lists? What is it? Hold on, let me just find it. Oh, starter packs. So there are these starter packs and I've been added to a couple of them of like, you know, like bootstrapped startup founders. And I just created one called like podcasters. And then, and then there's. So there's these starter packs that you can just send a link out to people and like, here's a whole long list of people that you could just start following right now. And so these starter packs have brought in, like, not bringing over individual users, but bringing over circles of users, groups of users. Right? So we have, you know, there's a couple of these starter packs that are floating around. Startup founders, Laravel people, Ruby people, podcasters. Like, so you get in a couple of these, then you start to gain followers and all of your friends are following the same people. And so it's like there was a really smart hack for them to pull. I think somebody at bluesky recognized that the way to get people to come over, like, they have to come over. They're not just going to start fresh on a new network here. They have to bring their friends over. And that's why Threads hasn't really connected for me because, like, only, you know, only a few people that I actually connect with on Twitter are also over there. So. Super interesting. [00:20:10] Speaker A: I'm going to get myself onto Blue Sky. [00:20:11] Speaker B: Yeah, man. All right, let's talk about real business, y'all. [00:20:18] Speaker A: All right. All right. You want me to go? [00:20:20] Speaker B: Yeah, go ahead. [00:20:21] Speaker A: All right, cool. So something great happened this week. You know, we, we are. With the new product, you got users, you got paying users. You're not 100% sure if you're actually doing well or not. You know, like, they put the credit card in. Seven day trial went through. We see some usage, MRR is climbing, but you don't really know if you're doing a good job. The truth is, I assume we're not doing a good job yet because the product is early. So this week we had a few testimonials come in and comments on intercom that. That, you know, that show us, like, the first inklings of. Oh, okay, this is solving the problem. You know, we had one of these, like, just wanted to let you guys know, we've been using it for two weeks. It's incredible. [00:21:17] Speaker B: Oh, hell yeah. [00:21:17] Speaker A: Almost nobody can tell that it's an AI. Thank you so much. You guys are onto something like one of those type of messages. [00:21:24] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [00:21:24] Speaker A: And I was like, oh, my God. That is like, you know, that's. [00:21:27] Speaker B: That's. That's life. [00:21:28] Speaker A: Yes. [00:21:28] Speaker B: And you know, when. When those kind of messages come in, it's so. It's so nice because, like, you know, you do know that there are people, like, really happy customers, but very few of them actually write a message like that. [00:21:42] Speaker A: Yes. [00:21:42] Speaker B: And, like, 95% of the messages are, I've got a problem, something's not working. Or, yeah, help. [00:21:48] Speaker A: Yes. How do I cancel my trial? You know, like, he's like, yeah, or. [00:21:52] Speaker B: There'S a bug here. Or this is not. Or how do I do this? Or it's a feature request or something. Because it's not quite solving their problem yet. Right? Yes. [00:21:59] Speaker A: Happy people are kind of quiet. [00:22:02] Speaker B: They are quiet. They're quiet because they're happy. Yeah. [00:22:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So in the absence of, like, happy comments, you just fill it with your own doubt along with all the negative things that come in. Support and help. And I. This. What about that? This didn't work. Can I upload this? [00:22:18] Speaker B: So that. [00:22:18] Speaker A: That just felt. That felt great. [00:22:20] Speaker B: Especially unprompted, when that stuff comes in, like. Yeah, unprompted. Yep. [00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great. I take a screenshot, send it to my investors, you know. [00:22:27] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, send it to the team. Yes. [00:22:30] Speaker A: And it's the team. Right. And make sure everyone sees it. And we are. We've got nice momentum. Signups are increasing steadily. Cost of registrations from our ads are decreasing. Overall, I'm looking at things with a blended cac. So basically, how much are we spending on all marketing activities? Between all of our stuff, between the writer, the SEO, the ads, the ad form, and, like, all the stuff. And then I just take that divided by the number of signups in the month. [00:23:00] Speaker B: Yep. [00:23:01] Speaker A: I say, okay, this is about how much we're spending per sign up. And that's just creeping down, which it started off too high, so it could not stay where it was. And the hope was it's going down. So now it is starting to go down. Tuesday next week, we launch the new onboarding. It is sharp. It is the best onboarding that I've created in a product because we said this got to be self serve. People have to be able to do this on their own. [00:23:27] Speaker B: I want to ask you about the onboarding, but before, I just want to call attention to the thing that you said. So the testimonial, they said that like their customers can't tell the difference, that this is AI. [00:23:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:38] Speaker B: That's crazy. [00:23:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's crazy because people don't expect AI. People expect two things. A human or voicemail and you know, voicemail the second it starts talking. [00:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:49] Speaker A: Thanks for calling H W Pest Control. Yeah, of course we're not available. Leave a message. Like everyone knows exactly. Instinctually, as soon as the voicemail starts, you know, it's voicemail. [00:24:00] Speaker B: It's also interesting to me that the business wants their customers to not know that it's AI. [00:24:05] Speaker A: It depends on the business and we are building in the feature. Basically we like to make requests. We'd like to make relatively complex requests into dead simple options. So we don't want you to have to train Rosie to talk about whether or not she's an AI or not when asked. We just want you to check this box or not. Do you want Rosie to admit to being an AI, you know, or do you want. [00:24:34] Speaker B: Okay, that's like a setting. [00:24:36] Speaker A: That's the thing. All these things that are kind of like murky we just want to turn into settings. [00:24:40] Speaker B: Yep. [00:24:41] Speaker A: So for example, there's like a legal disclaimer. Thanks for calling, you know, HH Pest Control. This call may be recorded for training purposes. Like that's a legal setting and you can just check that off. So you can have that or not have that. And that's what our lawyers basically said, you should probably have that. But if you give them the choice and mark that in your database, you're clear. So all these different things, we just kind of want to make very, very simple choices. [00:25:05] Speaker B: I like it. Yeah. [00:25:06] Speaker A: So all this stuff is kind of happening all at the same time. We launch the onboarding and then in November we expand channels so that, that's like what's coming up in November to go beyond Meta, TikTok, influencers, YouTube and just start to expand outward. [00:25:23] Speaker B: Very cool. I like it, man. Trying to think if I have any questions. [00:25:28] Speaker A: I think you were going to say. [00:25:29] Speaker B: Something about the onboarding. Yeah. Like what's like the big change that's going to be launching. [00:25:37] Speaker A: So the guided part of it. So before you got to the admin and you got to like, you know, the page that said what do you want to call Your agent, if not Rosie, what's your business name? Do you want it to be, you know, casual, formal or professional? Right. The first thing you saw and then you had to look on the left hand panel and click on settings and start to explore. [00:26:03] Speaker B: Right. [00:26:03] Speaker A: And what we did in this is we just made it very, very guided. [00:26:07] Speaker B: Yep. [00:26:08] Speaker A: So it's this, then this, then this, and then step two, and then step three, and then tada, you're done. And then everything else. [00:26:13] Speaker B: Now you have like an up and running. Yeah. [00:26:15] Speaker A: Yes. And what we tried to do is we tried to insert the things that we believed were absolutely necessary in order to launch a successful agent. And anything other than absolutely necessary. [00:26:28] Speaker B: Yes. [00:26:29] Speaker A: We put at the end and said recommended, like keep exploring. [00:26:33] Speaker B: I'd love to hear you say that. That's dead on. I literally this morning before this call, I was working on a. An app for a client that I'm working with, working on the onboarding for this app. And that's exactly the strategy in general that I try to do with these sort of guided onboarding things. You are pulling the thing that they need to build, the thing that they need to create in the app, like the core thing that gets them to become an active user. And then just that thing might have 10, 20 different settings and customizations that you can make to it, but really only like 2 or 3 are critical. Like what's the name of the thing? And maybe this or that thing. And then like if you just want to launch it as is, you could so go so there. But maybe a smaller link, like other customizations, you can dive into the menus and the settings and do that. But step one, like what's the name of the thing? Step two, what's this one? Setting. Step three, click go or activate. [00:27:37] Speaker A: Yes, or publish, wherever that line is. One side of it is mandatory, required in order to get the value. The other side of it is optional. What happened to us was that we looked over at the side with the optional pieces and there were too many and instead of saying, well, let's move some of those over to the mandatory, we just remove the features. This is a bit of an experiment to see do we have it right that the core of what people want is actually much smaller than where the product was and people don't actually care about appointments yet, we just removed appointments. It's a really valuable feature. It wasn't 100% reliable, so instead of fixing it or jamming it, we just removed it and our plan is to add it back in when we know it Is awesome. And part of my strategy there is to define the base tier and build up a customer base on the base tier, keep working on the higher value features and then introduce them into an existing customer base at a higher price. So let's just say, for example, let's just use round numbers. We get to $25,000 a month with the base tier. 50 bucks. Let's just call it right. 500 customers. Let's just round numbers at that point in time. Let's say three months from today, we're there. That's like a nice goal. If we then can introduce appointments when we know it works really well. We've listened to feedback, we know exactly what the feature should do and how it should work. And then we introduce that as a $99 a month tier. My goal is to then be able to pull, call it 10 to 20% of the existing customer base and then effectively double our revenue so we can get 100 people out of the 500 to go to the hundred dollar tier. All of a sudden we add significant revenue when we add a feature instead of having it in right now when it's actually not necessary for the base tier. And it actually doesn't work that well. So actually creates friction to conversion, to growth, to churn issues, all that. [00:29:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:39] Speaker A: So that's kind of what I think over the next few months. [00:29:42] Speaker B: I like that. Kind of like, like build like a. Think of the MRR growth as like a layer cake. Like it literally is. Right. Like a base, A base tier is going to have this growth and then. And then we're going to introduce this thing which adds a whole new color to the graph and that's going to have this higher level of arpu and yes. [00:30:00] Speaker A: And then if we take those four or five key features that we removed and if we keep introducing them one at a time to the higher tier, it'll just convert more and more people over the next six or so months as we release those. [00:30:15] Speaker B: I did that to a certain extent with Clarity Flow. We've always had our core thing like the conversational messages in the base. And then when we introduced Clarity Flow Commerce, which our big stripe integration to sell coaching stuff, that was a big driver. And we only made that available in our middle tier and up. Okay. And so that was a big primer. [00:30:39] Speaker A: Let people identify themselves. [00:30:40] Speaker B: I mean you can see it in the graphs. Like not only is it converting more new customers, but the expansion revenue, it's just like upgrades. Revenues like that started to tick up once we launched that. And a few Other features too, like custom domains were like that as well. [00:30:58] Speaker A: We just keep making more attractive. Keep making more attractive. [00:31:02] Speaker B: But we're circling back now. We're about to launch forms and we recently launched appointment booking. And so with these. We still want versions of those features on the base tier, but with some limits. Right. [00:31:16] Speaker A: You don't want to leave them behind entirely. So want to make that base tier very attractive. [00:31:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:31:21] Speaker A: I think that's the next year for us is to understand which feature goes where. Is this something everyone needs is something higher tiers? My, my concern and my focus around that expansion revenue is because right now we are reliant on paid advertising. And as long as we are relying on paid advertising, any dollar that we can create from upgrades instead of totally net new customers that we had to go out and buy is going to end up making a huge, huge difference for sure. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm considering like lowering the price in the base. I think that base tier needs to be big. Big. [00:31:54] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [00:31:55] Speaker A: Relatively speaking to the other, other tier. So we can pull from it. [00:31:59] Speaker B: Yeah, man, we'll see. [00:32:00] Speaker A: All right. What do you got going on? [00:32:02] Speaker B: I just typed into my notes for this thing. I typed the storm. [00:32:06] Speaker A: Okay. [00:32:09] Speaker B: I feel like I'm in a storm. Like it's. The rain has begun and, and the storm and we're not even at the. At. At the. At the most intense part of the storm yet. But it's, it's. It's not just cloudy skies. Like now we're in it and it's getting more intense. All right, let me there. And it's, it's all like, I guess, pretty good problems to deal with, but it doesn't make it any less stressful. I just feel a massive crunch of forces coming at me that all of them seem like high priority and I just don't have even close to the amount of time in my day that I need. So things get pushed off and I'm dealing with that by hiring. I have two new developers starting with me on Monday, but that's not even going to solve the whole problem. And even bringing on two brand new developers means that's even more work. All right, so like, the list of forces right now are number one, the consulting pipeline has started to explode this quarter. Like, multiple projects are now booked and happening. [00:33:34] Speaker A: Okay. [00:33:35] Speaker B: I've got multiple other ones that are in the proposal stage and I would say most of them are pretty likely to like, accept the proposals. I told one of those proposals yesterday. Like, hey, I told you the start date could be November 15th. Like, now that start date is first week of December. So now, like, the projected availability pushes out a little bit, but there's a limit on that because I don't want. I don't want it to get to a point where, like, a new lead is interested in starting a project now, and I have to tell them, like, my start time is three months out. Like, that's just. That's. That's enough for someone to say, like, I'll just find another option because that's too far out, you know? So I don't like to push out my waiting list farther than, like, a month, six weeks. So I have a couple that are coming through. And then. And these are all, like, really good projects too. Like, really, really great people as clients. Really interesting, good product concepts that I'm excited to build, that I think really have legs. So they're all really good in that sense. But I have. So I need a team to start to execute more of these simultaneously. That's why two developers are coming on to work with me and on the consulting projects. So. So there's that big force, and the time of. That looks like a lot of time invested in proposals and revising proposals and coming to terms, and then the time of actually making sure that each one of these products, like my active projects, are getting serviced every week. And we're. And we're still on track in terms of our timeline. And with these new developers coming on, I spent a lot of this past week, like, just preparing for their Monday next week, like my developer, on Clarity Flow. Like, we've got a flow, we've got a workflow. We know how we communicate. We know exactly how we do things. Sure, it takes time, but I need to communicate, like, look, this is how we communicate. This is how my development workflow goes. We use linear. We use linear for this, we use Slack for that. I need to make all this stuff clear, and then I need to actually assign them projects to work on. So I spend a lot of time speccing out issues to be their first tasks for them to do, you know, and that always takes more time. And the frustration that a lot of people have with hiring is like, oh, in this time, I could have just done it myself. And that's absolutely true. But I need to get this to a point where we are able to execute multiple projects without me doing all the work myself. Right. So there's that. But then, like, at the same time, there's Clarity Flow happening, so that's going fairly well. Um, okay. Like, we Just like the forms feature is like my developer has finished her job of building it. You know, I talked a few weeks back about how the cycles usually go. Like I go deep for a week and I prepare a new feature, I design it and I start, I build the first 10%, then I hand it off to her and she spends about six weeks building out the rest. And then at the end of the six weeks it comes back to me to do deep dive Q and A and testing and polishing and finishing up everything and I probably send some stuff back to her to fix and then we do a deployment, testing and all this stuff. It's now at the end of her six week cycle on that she has finished all of her tasks, checked off all of her lists and now it's back to my plate waiting for me to even just open it and look at it. And I should have looked at it like Monday of this week. I have not had time. It's going to push to next week. And so that's like a whole finished, that's a major new feature. Forms, like custom forms in Clarity Flow, it's done being pushed out and it's just sitting there on a branch waiting for me to look at it. And so that means we're still at least two or three weeks away from getting that shipped. And then, oh, and then the last thing is Clarity Flows like marketing. So you know, we have our organic channels, we're getting customers and signups and stuff. But like our demo needs an update. Like the video demo for Clarity Flow, which takes a brand new visitor to our website who's trying to get as much information about it as possible before they make the purchase decision because we don't offer a free trial anymore. The video demo is like critical and we still have an old one from like at least a year ago. I need to recreate that and rerecord it and re edit it and include all the new features in it and all that. And I have no idea when that's going to happen. It's not going to be soon, but it needs to happen in order to help drive conversions for Clarity Flow. And that's important. So all of these things are time sensitive. All of these things are important. I, there's only one of me. I don't, I don't know what to do about that. [00:38:53] Speaker A: Okay, what's, what's your, what's your way out? Well, what, you know, what path do you see to getting out of the storm? [00:39:01] Speaker B: Hiring? So the thing, and I also talked about hiring the video Editor, which I'm in really good talks with someone we haven't finalized yet, but that's probably going to move forward or I hope it does. But yeah, the hiring thing with the developers is it's going to be more time intensive for a couple of weeks, but my hope is that we're just going to settle into a groove and my hope is that both of these developers really are great and all the developers that I've worked with from this team in India have been really good. Some of them have been outstandingly great and they just pick things up and they, and they can, they can, they can be super productive pretty quickly within a couple of weeks. Others were slower to get to that point. Like it took them a couple of months to get to a really good productive level. I don't, I just don't know what's going to, what, what the experience is going to be with these two brand new developers. That remains to be seen. But I know that once I get through, once I can transition from my current state of things where I am 100% responsible for every active client project. Yeah, that's, I have at least two and maybe a growing team of trusted developers that I can assign to projects. Then it's like, okay, now we were, right now we're still sort of running and then I'm trying to like lift off the ground and get to like a flying state with like a, you know, like. And because I felt that with audience ops in the first six months of that going back to 2015, it was like, okay, a lot of hustle right now, a lot of figuring out our processes, getting the right team on board, a lot of learning experiences there. But then eventually we got to this state where we're just at like a cruising altitude of like okay, now we've got projects coming in, we've got team executing, we've got sales happening. And I could see that at the, at the end of a road, it's not too far in the distance, but we're still on that like liftoff stage right now with this. [00:41:12] Speaker A: As an outsider, it feels unlikely to be solved without one higher level hire. [00:41:24] Speaker B: That'Ll be the next. That's the next thing that I'm, that I'm, that's on my mind and I don't even know what that's going to look like. [00:41:30] Speaker A: Right. Is that a pm Is that a. [00:41:33] Speaker B: Yeah, like, I don't know, you know, that's what I've been thinking. So, you know, I can't help but think like two or three Steps ahead. Yeah, the first step ahead is just go from me to a couple of junior developers working under my direction. Right. But yeah, definitely the next step after that is somebody more senior. And I don't, I don't know if that's just somebody who's good with talking to clients and can be more of just an account manager and like a project manager or do I need. Or do I need like a full stack developer who can own a whole project? Someone more like my skill set. [00:42:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean the good thing is you seem to have enough demand that there is some room to raise prices in order to absorb the expense of an additional person or two. [00:42:20] Speaker B: I mean that's going to happen and just to be. And this is another thing like with the sales on this, it's promoted as one month app. That's the website. Right. I do offer a proposal for a one month project, but that's the starting point. Like almost every project that I end up doing ends up being more than a month or even signs on at the very beginning for it to be two or three months. And like part of my job and part of the service is like, let me hear out your idea. Here's my take on what a four week version of that idea looks like. We're going to cut a lot of scope and focus just on these things. First, that's your four week, here's your six week, here's your eight week. And sometimes it's like a 12 week. And so that's been my method of logistically extending the timeframe. But also it adds the cost, you know, but the, yeah, at some point in 2025, early 25, like the next wave of leads is going to have a higher rate than what I have right now, for sure. You know. [00:43:29] Speaker A: Cool. All right, well, we're going to see you through the storm. Doesn't sound. [00:43:33] Speaker B: Sorry, I didn't even, I didn't even talk about the other thing that I'm, that I'm. Because like part of, part of servicing all of this is building my components library for instrumental. [00:43:43] Speaker A: Okay, the longer term. [00:43:45] Speaker B: It's longer term, but I'm building it right now because I'm using it in my current projects. [00:43:52] Speaker A: Do you find that it's taken longer to do. [00:43:55] Speaker B: Like, I'm literally, I'm slowing down to speed up essentially. Like I could keep building the projects like I've been building the projects all year, which would be fine. But look, it's a, it's a goal to have this components library a, as its own product. I do want to. I. It's. It's definitely a high priority for me to have a more digital self serve product and not just build an agency here, but it's also something to power the agency to, to make it easier to delegate to developers to spin up Rails applications with a components library. Like that's a high priority. So the projects that I'm actively working on right now, while I'm building them, I'm building the components for these products. So I was talking about the onboarding thing. One of the generators, one of the components in this thing is an onboarding flow, like a simple starter onboarding flow for your Rails app. I built that yesterday and it's a component and it's a thing in my client's project. Modals, buttons, tailwind configurations, all this stuff that I happen to be building the features for. And I happen to have components I'm productizing those and working on. And so I've been building the Rails generators for these things and making it a product that a developer could use anyway. So that's also taking a lot of my time. I don't know how. Like it's crazy to hear me even talk about it out loud. [00:45:36] Speaker A: Oh yeah, hold on. I forgot this other thing that's 25% of my brain. [00:45:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Like to try to help listeners understand what this actually looked like in practice. It's like obviously not all those things are happening in any single day. Usually one of those things happens in a day and everything else waits and then tomorrow I work on one of those things again and then everything else is on hold. [00:46:00] Speaker A: And do you like to separate. Separate out by days like Monday, Tuesday, I'm going to focus on this like morning or. Yeah. [00:46:09] Speaker B: By days I usually like to know, like there's one most important thing this has to be done today. Like I know what my thing is today. And usually I can usually a couple other things fit into the day or make their way in, but intrude or at least like emails about those things or messages or give someone an update on this. But I don't finish my day until that one thing is checked off. Because the last thing I want is what I was supposed to do today gets thrown over the fence to tomorrow. That's the thing I try to avoid. [00:46:51] Speaker A: That's how everyone else works. So congratulations on that. Discipline. [00:46:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just like. But a lot of stuff is just sitting there waiting. Nothing's happening, you know, that's what happens anyway. What else you got? [00:47:08] Speaker A: I don't know, man. I think that's it look, I got something. I got a board meeting coming up in two weeks. Starting to think about that. I don't know if maybe I talked about this last week, but maybe it was this week. But I had a funny moment where we're trying to minimize meetings and we relooked at all of our regular meetings because we have six people on the team now. So it's worth looking at everything and making sure we're not just doing things because we used to do them that way. And so the go to market side started joining the Tuesday engineering meeting. And because it was. There were already four people on there product plus engineering. And so Sam and I started joining on Tuesdays. And so Tuesday came around. We like, zoom opens up and there's six people. And it like hit me like, oh, it's just us. This is the whole team right here. [00:48:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:48:03] Speaker A: You know, and I like, said something. I was like, hold on. How does that feel? [00:48:05] Speaker B: You like it? You like the smaller team versus versus, like, if you think back to when you had like, I don't know, like cardhook, like a huge team. Not huge huge, but like, you had a lot more people than you have now. [00:48:17] Speaker A: Yes. It's definitely, you know, 20, 25 is still. There's distance between people, there's distance between myself and there's. There's more distance. [00:48:25] Speaker B: Yeah. What do you like better? [00:48:27] Speaker A: I really. This is more fun. I like the 20 plus because it gives me this super power feeling of, oh my God, look how much is happening without me. Right. Like, that is that aspect. And seeing people form relationships on their own and seeing inside jokes that I'm not a part of. And like, that, that is the fun of the 20, 25 people. But the six people is literally just more fun. Like, okay, it's just us. Like, it's just casual. So before that meeting started, I was like, I just want to say this is awesome. Thank you for being here. You know, if this was not the right thing, you would not be here. Maybe there was some pain in getting there, but some good. And I just kind of saw everyone's like, face. Just like a little smile. Like, yeah, this is fun. This is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a combination of the smaller, tiny team and the little beginnings of momentum and like, excitement. And like this, we might be onto something. Let's see what happens here. It keeps growing. The numbers keep going up. Like that combination. I was like, oh, man, I haven't felt that in a long time. And that's. That's as good as it Gets just optimism. [00:49:38] Speaker B: Nice, you know? Yeah, like, I, like when I was working on audience ops, I had around 25 people on that team. And now I'm down to like three or four of us on Clarity Flow, plus two more coming in on the consulting stuff and maybe a video editor soon. But, like, the. I. I do like the smaller team better, I think, but it was, it was also great for me with, with the larger one. But. But we are super different in how we interact with our teams. I think you're much more in touch, personally, I think. And, and you're doing, you're doing a lot more face to face, even if it's remotely. But still, like, I'm just so leaned into Async that, like, sometimes I forget that I have all these people, like, being productive for my businesses that, like, you know, like, it's not like I'm completely out of touch with them because I, I do communicate with them on a daily basis, but it's either text messages or the occasional video message. We're not really hopping on. On meetings. But yeah, in audience apps, there was, there was the level of management where I. There were Most of those 25 people, like, I did not interact with at all on a daily basis. It was their managers who did. [00:50:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I feel like I have a bit more paranoia now around if everyone's happy. [00:51:01] Speaker B: Yep. I have that sometimes too with my best team members. Right. Like, I really don't want to lose them, you know? [00:51:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you want to lose them? And then I'm not sure. Like, well, if it's too async that I haven't seen them and they haven't seen me and we haven't formed that bond and we can't go out to lunch together. And so there's some paranoia there. I don't know if it's like a people pleaser thing or a middle child thing, but I live in a little. A little hum of paranoia around, are they happy? Is this good for them? Like, do I need to do anything else? Can I do anything else? My conclusion is usually the best thing I can do for them is success, not like giant outcome, buy a house success. I mean, just momentum and energy and excitement and signups and revenue growth. And that is what keeps people engaged and happy and interested and motivated much more than me giving a good speech or me seeing them more often. So that's kind of how I usually end up. Like, all right, don't go tell them to, you know, buy lunch on the company kind of thing. Get more signups. [00:52:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [00:52:05] Speaker A: People want to be part of that much more than anything else. [00:52:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, man. For sure. I guess one more thing that this was actually the thing I was going to talk about. [00:52:15] Speaker A: I got a hard stop in just a minute. [00:52:17] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. This is like a quick one I just want to call attention to. I'm such a fan of 37signals and especially Jason Fried's thinking and writing on concepts. And I thought he had a really good one this past week. I think it was called like, he put it like sort of like a blog post. V1 is for us. And it's talking about dog fooding your own or scratching your own itch with brand new products, getting off the ground. And they talked about their experiences with like different, like how Basecamp was very much scratched their own itch and some new product that they're working on. Like, it almost wasn't and now it. [00:52:58] Speaker A: Is and like email is for them. That's interesting concept. [00:53:01] Speaker B: Yeah. But they really talked in depth about what it, what it feels like to like, in terms of like deciding what goes into your V1, what goes into the first version of what you're building. Like, it's so true that it's so much easier and more powerful and you're probably going to be more successful if you are literally solving your own personal problem because you are customer number one. And it just resonated with me a lot because what I'm building with Instrumentl.dev feels like the most. I am the customer for this. Like, I'm building it for literally, quite literally for myself, more so than any other product that I've ever done. And that means it's going to be super opinionated, at least the first version of it, because I know exactly how I want this type of product to be and how I've been unhappy with similar products. But just hearing them talk about it and DHH and Jason on their podcast talking about the same idea, like it just really hit home. I think it's a good. Listen, it's a good reminder of like what. Because they were talking about how it really dictates your road map. Like you know exactly where. What you need to build next. Because. Because like they were talking about how they use their, their tool internally at 37signals and their team got really upset that they were being forced to use their own tool because it's not quite good enough yet to solve their own problems. And that's your roadmap. You know, you know how to solve your own problems. Yeah. [00:54:35] Speaker A: And I agree what you're doing now is the closest. For me, the closest thing would be open a schnitzel restaurant in town. Because I want good schnitzel, and my mom's not around right now. [00:54:42] Speaker B: Hey, I'll be customer number one. Hell, yeah. [00:54:46] Speaker A: All right, brother. Have a great weekend. [00:54:47] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. Later, folks.