What's Next?

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, it's Friday. It's July 12. I'm back from vacation. [00:00:25] Speaker B: You're back in the States. You took a week off and. Yeah, back at it. When did you actually get back from the trip? [00:00:31] Speaker A: We got back Sunday night, so we were gone for, like, five days. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Oh, so you were around this whole week? [00:00:38] Speaker A: This week I was around. [00:00:39] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Yep. Got it. [00:00:40] Speaker A: Yep. We went away. You know, our kids are at camp. They come back tomorrow. So, you know, we went away. We had a great time. Mexico City is cool. Happy to talk about that. That place is a fun break to take. [00:00:52] Speaker B: Looks awesome. I always hear great things about it. That's a spot I want to check out for sure. [00:00:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that was cool. And that's good to be home. And, you know, we took advantage of the kids being away. We, like, went out to dinners and hung out. It was great. Of course, what that means for my wife is basically, like, all the house projects possible, just all of them, but the house looks very lived in now. Finally. [00:01:15] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep. Very cool. Yeah, my kids are. Yeah, they're still going day camp. They've got one more week of day camp. And then. So I'll be around next week. I could record next Friday, but then the week after I'm on vacation. So we're heading out to Chicago and then driving around Lake Michigan up to the upper peninsula. [00:01:35] Speaker A: Very cool. [00:01:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:37] Speaker A: So you're going to be here when I'm actually in North Carolina. So next Friday I'm not around, so maybe we'll do a podcast on Thursday or something like that. [00:01:44] Speaker B: All right. Yeah. Very cool. Cool. [00:01:47] Speaker A: Well, it's summer, but we are no Europeans here. We're keeping busy. Yup. You announced something on Twitter. [00:01:56] Speaker B: I did. [00:01:58] Speaker A: You know what? We want to talk about that. [00:02:01] Speaker B: Okay. I'll talk about that. To set it up a little bit. I feel like this past week, especially the week and a half, I've been. I feel like I've finally broken out of a, like, a funk that I've been in where I sort of had, like, analysis paralysis throughout the year. You might have heard it on the podcast, or I'm talking about ideas that I'm getting excited about. And then I. And then I put them down, like, nope, not doing that. And then I get really excited about another idea. Like, no, no, I'm not going to do that. But then, you know, so I've had, like, four or five of these ideas for potential next products, and I. And I keep making the mistake of, like, building them up and building them up and feeling like they have to be the perfect right idea. And I send them to friends like you and others, like, hey, what do you think of this? And then they poke holes in the logic and, like, reasons why it won't work and, like, you know, being helpful in that way. And then, yeah. And so I've been a little bit, like, hesitant to pull the trigger on to actually move forward. I did break out of that. I settled on one idea that I really like a lot. It's called sunrise dashboard.com. today I put up that page, put out a tweet, and, yeah, that's out there. So, sunrisedashboard.com, it is one dashboard to gather up all of your metrics and report them in one place. You can get automated reports. So all the different tools and services, all the different apps. So think like, your traffic analytics, your stripe, your payments, your marketing tools, maybe your help desk, maybe stuff coming out of your database, like things that you need to keep a pulse on. You can pipe into this dashboard and have it send you automated reports on a daily basis, a weekly basis, monthly, whatever it is. [00:03:58] Speaker A: Okay, so it's not just numbers, it's other data also. [00:04:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So it could. The way that I like to think about it in terms of these metrics is like, it's not a replacement for your Google Analytics or whatever pixel you put on your website, for your traffic and whatnot. It's more like it takes snapshots of your key metrics from your traffic tool, from your marketing tool, from your email tool, from your social media profiles, from your payments tool. So every day or every hour of every day, you need to take a snapshot of what the number was, and then that's going to pipe into this dashboard, graph it over time. So essentially, it's like all the key numbers that you really care about from ten plus different tools and services all gathered together in a single dashboard. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Okay, I got a lot of questions. [00:04:58] Speaker B: This is very interesting. There's more to it, but that's where it starts. [00:05:01] Speaker A: Okay? That's the core promise, is this will give you a pulse check based on the tools that you want to be in your field of view on a regular basis. X interval. Yes. So now, you said, for example, there's. [00:05:15] Speaker B: Also the question of, like, okay, well, why is that important? Right. Number one, we all want to check our numbers, like today. What's the current state of things? Number two, what's our history? What were the trends in the past that led us to today? And that's not just like a single graph. You need to look at the relationships between, okay, there was the traffic trended this way and then trials trended that way and then activations trended this way and what was like a leading indicator from this to that. Like you need this like historic context and to connect the dots. So that's like the history. And then the third piece is looking into the future forecasting. We could all do the little dotted line thing where we project our current graph and just keep it going into the future. If nothing changes, here's where our graph will head into the future. Okay, sure. That's if nothing changes. But we want to game out different scenarios. We cut churn, how is that going to impact our future? Or what if we double our traffic? How's that going to impact our future? You know, what if we focus on activations, then how, how can that, you know, so we want to play with the numbers play. You know, we've talked about like spreadsheets where we kind of plug in different scenarios. We want to compare and sort of compete these scenarios and game out the what ifs. So that's the other. Like when you have all of your metrics history in the app and when you have all of today's numbers in the app, it opens up possibility on like, how can that become really useful to you? Not, not just in the reporting and the alerting piece and stuff, but it's also like helping you make better decisions about what to prioritize, to focus on going forward. The last piece, and this is sort of interesting to me, is like an AI element, right? So like, well, okay, two more pieces I wanted to talk about. [00:07:19] Speaker A: Okay, is that about forecasting? [00:07:22] Speaker B: It'll be related. So, okay, before I even get to the AI, there's one more new element to this, and that is journaling. Right? So something that I've done for a long time is I have like a, not just my regular journal, but like a log, like a change log of like what happened in my business. Like the key events, right? Okay. [00:07:42] Speaker A: Like we launched this campaign, changed price. [00:07:44] Speaker B: We changed prices, we launched a new feature, we launched a marketing campaign or some market event happened that impacts us. [00:07:52] Speaker A: Okay. [00:07:52] Speaker B: Anything that would impact us, I try to log them in notion. I've been good and bad about it, but I like to do it because I want to know, like, all right, what date did that happen and then what were the numbers at the time and what was the aftermath of the impact of that? So there's going to be this journaling piece built into sunrise dashboard, where you can jot down key events of what happened. And those entries, those journal entries will be linked to your metric snapshots at the time, and then you can see the relationships between those. That's also something that's a little bit of a twist on this type of product. Now, let's take the final step of infusing AIH. So you have all of your different metrics from all your different tools piped into this one dashboard. It's been taking snapshots of the metrics in the history going back as far as you want. So you have all that history, you have all these relationships, you have your journal entries of what happened in your business. All of that is information that can train the built in AI assistance so that the AI has the complete history and context of your business. [00:09:05] Speaker A: Okay? [00:09:06] Speaker B: So that the AI can help you spot trends, help you spot patterns in the data, in leading indicators and whatnot. That maybe you are not completely obvious to you. It could help you suggest ideas for recommendations, what to focus on next. It can suggest ideas for forecasting. Like you can like chat, GPT alone can't just do that because it doesn't have all of your business history fed into it as context. So that's the other kind of twist that I think is interesting. [00:09:40] Speaker A: Okay, so the picture that formed in my mind as you're speaking is it's an existing pattern. This is, you're describing what business owners do, but it's not an existing behavior because there isn't a way to do it. But everyone kind of, I mean, I go to loops and I hit refresh and I see how many email subscribers we have, and then I go to Google Analytics, I hit refresh, and I see how many visitors we got, and then I go to this other thing and I have many sales. So I'm doing it, I'm following that same pattern, and then it's up to me to synthesize that. But I have no memory. I don't know how that looked a week ago, let alone two months ago. [00:10:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:30] Speaker A: And even working with existing patterns, but you are looking to create a new behavior, basically putting it on one place. [00:10:38] Speaker B: I think that could be true, that could be fair, that it's like sort of a little bit of behavior change and maybe, which is generally not ideal for a new product, in my opinion. [00:10:48] Speaker A: Right, right. There are ten competitors that do the same thing. [00:10:50] Speaker B: There are competitors in this. It definitely is a category. So another reason why I'm interested in this is I've done actually the first project that I'm doing on this whole thing. I haven't started building anything on this product yet. The first project has been SEO. I've been really spending several days in Ahrefs coming up with a list of SEO key terms. And what has been really interesting about this particular idea is that it is an established category with search volume, and it is not competitive from an SEO standpoint, somewhat competitive, but it's not insanely difficult in the competitiveness. That's the channel that I am focused. I'm actually working on that before I'm even working on any sort of coding. Through that research, I started to look at the competitors. There's a few that are probably pretty well known. Like Gecko board is a pretty well known one that's been around for a while. I think Databox is one, and there's a long list of other ones, but then a lot of them are really enterprise focused. Because large companies do. They have entire departments that do analysts who just look at metrics all day and just create reports. That's what they do. Business intelligence is the term that these big companies use. But us, the small guys, we don't really have something like this. So when you talk about behavior change, I think you're right that the smaller companies don't do a good job of this because they don't have a dedicated team or function or department or tooling to make it easy. What you were just describing is what all of us do. We open up ten browser tabs with Google Analytics and stripe and Chartmoggle and Mixpanel and whatever else you're using. It's all spread across all these different tools, and you open them all up, and now you got to sift through each one and pluck out the one or two numbers from each one that you actually care about. And then maybe if you want to actually analyze the data and make some decisions, then maybe you gotta, like, put them into some sort of page or report to synthesize it all in one place. Like that is hours and days of work just to get one report, just to get, like, today's report. Then what about next weeks? You know, this just eliminates that. The idea is like, just put them all in. Like, pipe them all into this, and then this is gonna collect them, snapshot them all the time, keep your history, and then you can. And then deliver it to you via email, get your numbers sent to you every morning. [00:13:38] Speaker A: Right, right. You don't necessarily have to log in and create that behavior once. So you've got a few of these elements that you've talked about, you've got a set and forget it element to it. [00:13:47] Speaker B: Yes. [00:13:47] Speaker A: You've got an existing traffic and existing demand element to it. [00:13:51] Speaker B: Right. [00:13:52] Speaker A: So a lot of stuff you talked about earlier. Yeah. [00:13:53] Speaker B: I mean, that piece remains to be seen, but, but compared to other ideas, this one has pretty interesting, I think, traffic opportunities. So that's what I'm working on first. Like, I'm not even working on the product yet. I'm just working on the end. Like, on that front. Like, we can get into it. Maybe another day is like, figuring out. So, like, I have a good list of keywords, like commercial and some informational and stuff, and I'm thinking about, like, programmatic SEO around, like, a content site structure. And that's my first project on this idea. Interesting. [00:14:29] Speaker A: So pretty strategic on the SEO side as a key element to even getting into this. I see the site looks nice and at the very top, it's email address, early access. [00:14:41] Speaker B: Yes. What you see there is what I worked on yesterday. That's the site. I did a rough concept in Figma. It doesn't look great. I spent an hour making that little graphic for what this thing could look like. And then I wrote the page. I spent a lot of time writing the copy. It has an email capture, and then on the back of the email capture, it goes to a survey to get some more information. That's what this is. This is just the very, very first steps of an idea. I don't know where this idea is going to go. I have a pretty clear vision on what I want this product to be, and, you know, it definitely. It's definitely also a scratch my own itch. Yeah, that's right where I feel more comfortable doing a product that is a scratch my own itch because I have a more opinionated, clear view of what this product should be. And. But, I mean, I don't know. I have the same feeling that I have going into every new product. I operate from the assumption that, like, nobody is going to want this, nobody's going to want to buy this. [00:15:53] Speaker A: Not like, unbridled optimism and then disappointment, but more like, hey, probably just going to scratch my own itch. [00:16:01] Speaker B: I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's, like, age or wisdom or grumpiness or what, but the more years of doing the product entrepreneurship thing, the more, the more I just assume that, like, nothing's gonna work. Just, it's not gonna work. I'm gonna try to make it work, but, like, prove me? Wrong world. Yeah. Please. [00:16:25] Speaker A: It is. It is like, you know, it's a different side of the same cube as. I only have so much to do with whether or not this works and luck and timing and all these other factors have a bigger say. So I'm gonna do it. It doesn't mean it's going to work. Hopefully all these things come together. [00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:16:44] Speaker A: All right, here's a question. I don't know if you have a good idea of this, but who's it for? [00:16:49] Speaker B: That is a good question. I don't have a clear enough answer for that yet. I want to get clearer on that as we go forward. So, yeah, right now I think it could be useful for folks like us, like SaaS product owners. It could be. I think there's an interesting play for agencies who generate reports for clients. Marketing agencies specifically do like performance reports of their campaigns. They deliver those to clients. That's an interesting angle. Maybe e commerce services consultants. I think also, I do think that there's a play for creators who, they track sales, but they're also tracking growth of their YouTube channels and their followers and their email lists and things like that. So the early access, but the original idea, which, by the way, happened like six years ago when I did sunrise KPI, if you want, we could talk about that. I know people ask about it, but all of that, the initial idea back then and again, now I think, again, it's a scratch my own itch. So I think it fits pretty well for SaaS companies because they have so many different metrics and KPI's to track. There's all the SaaS metrics of the stuff that you might use. Something like chart mogul or profit, well, to track. So you can pull out the two or three, like your MRR, your churn rate, whatever's important there. And then there's traffic. There is maybe metrics coming out of your own database, like user activations or users doing whatever. Maybe your help desk ticket metrics and then marketing stuff, email list leads, CRM, social channels. There's a lot of different numbers that matter. [00:18:50] Speaker A: So you're agnostic on the data source. [00:18:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's. [00:18:54] Speaker A: You get to put it together yourself. [00:18:56] Speaker B: Yeah. All right, so another interesting thing about this, another thing I like about this is that there's a potential for other revenue besides just the SaaS. I think there could be services revenue here as well. [00:19:15] Speaker A: Okay. [00:19:17] Speaker B: Integrations are definitely going to be at the core of like, we're just going to have a growing list of integrations starting with the most popular ones, probably stripe, probably analytics, probably some of the popular email tools and stuff like that. I remember this from the last time I did sunrise KPI. I regularly got requests from like, oh, does it integrate with Shopify? Does it integrate with mailchimp? Hey, I use convertkit. Does it integrate with that? And then there would be requests for things that are like, I really use this tool but it's not super popular, only I like. So I think one level of revenue could be, hey, request your desired integration and we can make it a priority in the next 30 days for a fee if it's not already in our roadmap. [00:20:12] Speaker A: People who find value in the tool itself, it becomes more valuable the more you have. [00:20:18] Speaker B: It's great that it has these four integrations, but I really need this one or two other one. When are you going to get to that? Well, we probably won't get to it because you're the only one asking for it, but if you want to pay, then yeah, we'll get to it. So there's that option. And then the other thing could be services around, like me and my team will design and implement a custom dashboard for your customers, custom data sources integrated into your systems. You know, customize the reports that you and your stakeholders, your team get. That's it could be like a consulting thing as well. [00:20:55] Speaker A: Makes me think a lot about multi location type businesses. I think about my brother and his seven crunch gyms. My brother has seven crunch gyms, right. 200 or so employees. Doesn't go to the gyms. [00:21:08] Speaker B: Right. [00:21:08] Speaker A: That's not his business. His business is managing. So he meets with his management team every once in a while, goes to visit, of course, go hang out, sees how things are going. But that's not his daily activity. His daily activity is sitting in his apartment looking at spreadsheets, checking the numbers. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Yep. [00:21:22] Speaker A: But when you have seven locations, it gets clouded. You're not looking at one set of spreadsheets. You have to synthesize a lot to get a good feel of what's going on and what's going wrong and seeing how things change over time, not just on one location, but also as a whole, but also individually. So any type of a complex analysis synthesis problem from different data sources. Yeah, pretty interesting. [00:21:51] Speaker B: That's exactly it. Yeah. Like last time around, I did not, I didn't even think about offering like revenue like consulting services with this type of product. I didn't even treat it like a real product back then. I could talk about that because I got asked about it a lot. [00:22:10] Speaker A: Well, I think that's worth going into. This is a little bit how I had card hook checkout and then rally checkout, and I did some things right, did some things wrong, learned whatever else. So why don't you talk about that? You had a very similar product. So what happened? [00:22:25] Speaker B: A bunch of people listening to this probably remember, but if you're newer to the show, you don't know about this. This was back in 2018. I had a thing called Sunrise KPI. So this new one is sunrisedashboard.com dot. That was sunrisekpi.com dot. I ended up selling that business on micro acquire, which is called acquire now. The guy who bought it didn't do anything with it, didn't even build that thing. I don't know. It's redirecting to some weird domain out of my control, didn't do anything. So I sold it on micro acquire for like $10,000. Right. It was just a project that didn't really end up going anywhere because I didn't really push it anywhere at the time. In 2018, I spent that year learning to build apps and ruby on rails. That was the year that I transitioned to go from just being a designer into being a full stack developer. Sunrise KPI was the very first. It started as like a practice project. I was like, it'd be cool to kind of pull some metrics in, and this could be a good learning project. That's right. But as my first stab at a, let me see if I could actually build a product that I could actually take to market and sell with customers again. I still treated it as a practice run of that, because at the time I was running audience ops, I was already planning on working on what would later become process kit, my next SaaS. I was planning on getting to that. Sunrise was still just like a pregame, a learning thing. I put it out there and it actually got, I think looking back on it, it had some traction on social media, people passing it around. I think somebody submitted it to product hunt without me even realizing it. And then it actually did pretty well over there. And then I had a handful of, like, paying customers on it for a while. I got all these requests for other integrations on it. I added something like ten different integrations. I hacked on it for like a year or two. I used it myself to report my business, but it was just a little thing in my portfolio over there while I work on my main business at the time, which was audience ops. But fast forward to 2021. I believe that was when I was going all in on zipmessage and decided to sell off all of my businesses, and that was one of them. That was just a little project in my portfolio that didn't have many customers, and I sold it for ten k. Still thought about the idea since then, but I went on to work on several other ideas. Now it's six years later, I still think there's something to it. So I start with the same concept that I had back then, one of the lessons. And now I have some new ideas like I talked about, like the journaling, the AI, the forecasting. [00:25:26] Speaker A: Okay. [00:25:27] Speaker B: But the core, where it begins, the core is the same. It's a single dashboard for all your different apps to report into. [00:25:35] Speaker A: Yes. So conceptually very similar, maybe some feature differences, but how about approach? I mean, the first thing we heard you say was pretty deep on the SEO analysis. [00:25:45] Speaker B: Yeah. The approach this time, I'm definitely more seasoned now as a SaaS product founder than I was six years ago. Yeah, the approach. Yeah. Like I said, I'm basically just starting with SEO and traffic and putting the pitch out there, which is this, like putting out the landing page. I'm not building anything just yet. And I'm thinking through business models, pricing and revenue and consulting revenue, like I was talking about. These are new things that I wasn't thinking about last time. I'm fully bootstrapped on this. I intend to be fully self funded and bootstrapped going forward in everything that I do. And look, this sunrise dashboard is not my new full time job, just to be totally clear. And this is. This is where having a podcast gets kind of difficult. [00:26:43] Speaker A: Okay. [00:26:43] Speaker B: Okay. Because it's true. I think it's true that people who like just the act of talking about businesses on a podcast makes them sound a lot bigger than they actually are. This is one thing that I have that I work on. I also run clarity flow. I've got a team working on that. I actually have other new ideas that I'm hacking on and incubating right now, and I don't know where those are going to go or when they're going to happen, but I'm playing with other ideas. This is one idea that it has moved a few steps along in the pipeline of an idea. It's gone from early concept in just a notion page to an actual landing page with a domain and an early access list. And now I'm really learning. And we'll see where it goes from here. I think I'm going to build it, but I'm working on some traffic stuff first. But I'm spent. I work on different things throughout the week. I do consulting, I do tailor made Ui, which is like my UI service for SaaS. Sometimes I build entire MVP's for SaaS founders. We have projects going on in clarity flow that I'm overseeing. I split my week, and so one or two days a week I hack on this. Other days I'm hacking on other stuff. [00:28:17] Speaker A: I'm curious. I feel you on the podcast thing. It does have an impact on how you talk about things when you want to talk about things. Same with me. Yeah, it does seem to have more weight or friction, whatever the hell you want to call it, when it's audio and it's a podcast. Cause if you went onto Twitter and were like, I'm going to do an experiment and do twelve startups in twelve months, right? Like, we've seen people do that. It doesn't feel very heavy. You're like, oh, okay, cool experimentation. And I often read a. I, you know, Peter Lovell's the best example of all this stuff. Every once in a while, he'll just post, here are all my projects that I've ever done and how much money they made. And it's. That list is very long, and if you look at that over a five or whatever year span, you're like, oh, homie was busy. He was launching something every month or two. And he's not the only person that's done it. I like that guy Mark who sells ship fast, and he's like, very clear. He's like, I did so many things that didn't work, and now this one worked, but it's, you know, I'm the same person. It's like I became a genius. I just think that you should try more stuff, and that's like a philosophy you bring up. [00:29:31] Speaker B: All right, you brought it up. So I'll talk a little bit about something else that I'm playing with right now. Okay. [00:29:39] Speaker A: Okay. [00:29:42] Speaker B: The idea of building in public and sharing the work is something that I've always felt is really important to me. I put out on Twitter the other day that I'm starting a private podcast. I haven't actually launched it yet, but I have recorded five episodes on this private podcast over the past seven or eight days. Five episodes. So this is like a almost daily, like, ten minute update on what I worked on yesterday, but more focused on, like, here's the project, here's why I worked on it, here's what went into it. Here's what I'm thinking about on what I'm working on next, like tomorrow, it's solo. [00:30:27] Speaker A: Just, you know, solo. [00:30:28] Speaker B: Yeah, solo private podcast. I'll talk more about this in the future. I think this could turn into something like a private podcasting community network platform. I actually have a domain for it and everything, and I'm kicking it around, but for so many reasons, that doesn't seem like a good business idea for me to work on next. And that's essentially why I'm putting sunrise dashboard out there first. But this is more of something that I'm hacking on. What I want to say here for now is that the idea of working on multiple things, I think there's a lot of people who don't understand that, and rightfully so, I understand why this is different or foreign to most people in our circles and why most people are turned off by the idea of people who do the small bets thing and work on multiple ideas. Right. [00:31:22] Speaker A: Okay. I think in the wider world, people think that's absolutely insane, but in our universe, at least, people are aware that there are people that do it. So I think they maybe there are. [00:31:31] Speaker B: People that do it, and there's a lot of people who focus on one great business and power to them. That's fantastic. Right? [00:31:37] Speaker A: Most people focus on one job. [00:31:38] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And also, like, the fact that we only record this podcast like, once a week and it's both of us, and sometimes we skip weeks and stuff. Like, it's hard to paint the full picture on what this actually looks like. [00:31:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like a check in. [00:31:55] Speaker B: It's a check in, and it's even less than a highlight reel. It's like you're seeing such a small sliver of what actually goes into doing a. What people like us do. So this private podcast is like, if I can record this on a daily ish basis, it gives you a real, actual slice of like a day in the life of working on these different projects. There's much more detail, but I'm working on keeping it short. I just think that there's something interesting there. And the other thing that I'm very interested in there as well is the connections between people, the network effects of, like, people who listen to this show. Something that has driven me kind of crazy is that I know that we have a few thousand people listening to this podcast. [00:32:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:43] Speaker B: But we. [00:32:44] Speaker A: Very hard to communicate with them, very. [00:32:45] Speaker B: Hard to reach them. Like, I'm talking to these people right now, but I don't have them on a list anywhere. They're not in a community with us anywhere. Actually, very few of them probably even follow us on Twitter. [00:32:58] Speaker A: And Twitter's a different thing right now. [00:33:01] Speaker B: Many of them probably don't even use Twitter. It just seems kind of crazy to me that podcasting is such a one directional medium. And then you think about all the adjacent podcasts. People who listen to us probably listen to the other five or six podcasts that I listen to every day. We vibe with the same kind of personalities and topics and interests. We should be in a group together. It should be easy to go find the other listeners and connect. And so that's something that is interesting to me, that I'm also starting to hack on, but more as, like, something that I just want to have exist and be a part of. I don't know where that's going to go, if anywhere. [00:33:43] Speaker A: But Brian's going to scratch all of his itches. All the itches, one after another. Hell, yeah. [00:33:47] Speaker B: Look, and then just to be clear. Cause there's going to be people on Twitter like, oh, why are you doing multiple things? Blah, blah, blah. That's something that I'm motivated to work on. I'm motivated to work on sunrise dashboard. I'm motivated to do the consulting stuff that I do with clients. To me, that's the best way to bootstrap and self fund. And there's a bunch of other ideas on the list that I'm not doing. But, um, this is what I'm working on next. I don't know how long each one is going to last. I don't know how many days per week I'm going to give each thing. But, um, I'm just kind of taking it more short, short term, focused. Like, this is something that I'm interested in hacking on right now. I'm going to see where it goes. And, um, I'm not all in on anything anymore. You know, it's not like it has to work by a certain date. Like, I'm good, so let's just. Let's just build stuff, right? I gotta stop analyzing and just build some shit. That's where I'm at. [00:34:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it does. What I. Not what I'm worried about, but what I guess is important to address is the ability to just shed some of the self consciousness around both starting and stopping. [00:35:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:07] Speaker A: Right. So it should be not very expensive emotionally to say I'm starting another thing. And just as importantly, if not more importantly, it should also not be very emotionally and, like, reputationally expensive to say, I did that for six weeks. I don't like it anymore. I'm not gonna do it. Anymore. Right. You put that. I don't care about the expense. I learned, I moved forward. I'm a little better for it. For all the good and the bad that came out of it. Forward. [00:35:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:39] Speaker A: And I think a lot of us, we come up with the criticism of an imaginary person, but most people either don't care or are not critical at all. They're just, they're just appreciative and admiring of someone who just did something new and tried it and moved on. [00:35:55] Speaker B: That really resonates, man. That's really good, because I do spend a lot of time thinking about like, you know, like putting, putting new ideas out there to the world, knowing that we have people listening to this podcast and following the story and people on Twitter. But at the same time, I hate working on stuff in a silo, especially being a solo. I don't have a team. I have a developer and a support person and stuff, but I don't have partners. I'm not in an office, so I'm solo. And that's why I like to built forth. That's why I like to put stuff out there in the world and show people what I'm working on so that I can get feedback and I want to see what other people are working on. Like, that's interesting and helpful to me. [00:36:41] Speaker A: Yeah. The other people are a crutch. You know, my ability to go to rock and have these ideas that I would normally be much more self conscious about in public rock is my crutch and builds up my confidence before I go public with something. [00:36:58] Speaker B: You call it a crutch. I mean, I see that as like an advantage. [00:37:01] Speaker A: It's both because what we're both talking about is ego. Because we have them and they don't allow us to operate freely. I know for sure my ego does not allow me to operate freely. I admire so much people who shitpost, people who shitpost on Twitter with absurd things next to their real name. I admire them so much because they have shed the ego and just say whatever the hell they want. And I'm not. I have not evolved to that point yet. So in the business context, shitposting is basically like not worrying about what other people think of you when you say something or bring up an idea or launch something new or say that didn't work at all. Aren't I stupid? Move on. [00:37:44] Speaker B: Yeah. I think the people that I'm envious of on Twitter and whatnot are the people who do share multiple products and ideas that they just put out there to the world with, without any care. Because what really bothers me is when people make judgments, especially publicly on Twitter and whatnot about, like, why are you deciding strategically to do this with your time? Like, what do you know about my time and my priorities and how I define success? [00:38:16] Speaker A: I can help it. [00:38:18] Speaker B: That kind of sentiment really, really bothers me. But, like. Like, why do I even think about that? Like, I shouldn't care about that. And the people who have the ability to. To block that out or have it not affect them, I think is. [00:38:34] Speaker A: I think. I think the money is a big element of that. What are you gonna tell Peter levels? Not what are you gonna tell him? What are you gonna tell him that he's gonna care about? He's gonna make his $300,000 this month. You can have whatever opinion you want. [00:38:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:53] Speaker A: And that does play a role in it. It does. We've talked about this before where I basically stopped listening to podcasts. Cause I found myself too envious of others success. And then magically, when Card Hook took off and it was doing millions in ARR, I had an easier time dealing with all of that stuff. [00:39:14] Speaker B: I've done the same with several podcasts that I actually enjoy. I like the people, but I had to just tune it out. Cause it's like, this is too much in my head right now. [00:39:21] Speaker A: Right. It's like, unhealthy in some way. So it really is in the interim, once you get to the other side and you've gone through 45678 ideas and felt stupid, but one of them all suddenly starts making fifty k a month, I hope. What I would love to see for both of us, for everybody, is to just loosen up a little bit around that ego and then be able to share more vulnerably, which becomes more helpful, which attracts more people, which makes it more likely to succeed. It's like this very strange virtual cycle. [00:39:53] Speaker B: Because the part of the sharing that I really love is the creative work of building things. And that's not just design. That's also marketing, that's also positioning. We're building startups. We're building businesses. There's a lot of creative and thoughtful and inspiring work that goes into that. We should be openly sharing and learning from each other. Like, the craft of building businesses without judging, like, why are you doing this or that? Or why are you not doing this or that? [00:40:25] Speaker A: Like, yes, it should not be connected. [00:40:29] Speaker B: So let's talk about the work and not talk about different people's motivations, because it's different for everyone. [00:40:34] Speaker A: Yeah. I also think you're talking about that the work can stand on its own, independent of the result. Just because the result wasn't amazing does not mean that the work wasn't worth doing and sharing. Yeah. [00:40:46] Speaker B: Anyway, that was a long time on me. What's up over there in Rosy Land? [00:40:51] Speaker A: Okay, so we are ready to launch our early access accounts next week. [00:40:59] Speaker B: I was telling you offline, I'm really impressed with the speed on this one for you. [00:41:04] Speaker A: I'm really impressed, too. And I can say that because I didn't do it. The engineering team, I just looked at the calendar. It has been 81 days since we made the decision to go forward with this product. I can see that. Because in April, I had about 25 or so conversations in one week about a different idea. And by the end of that week, I was like, that was a bad idea. I don't want to pursue that anymore. And then, you know, I had this other thing, Rosie, on the back burner. And then the following week, I was like, okay, we're doing this idea. So it's been 81 days. [00:41:36] Speaker B: 81 days. So where are you actually at on the product? Like, what's been built? What? [00:41:41] Speaker A: So, okay, so now I'm going to, like, boast and brag on behalf of my engineering team. It's been a very interesting experience because we trimmed down the team, so it was a thinner team. Right? Like one back end plus rock. So two back end, one front end, one DevOps, one QA. And then we also went from two product people to one because our chief product officer is our vp of product. Excuse me. Jessica's on maternity leave, so there's been a whole bunch of things that have been awesome. One of those is Jordan, our product manager, just stepped all the way up, so she basically ran the entire thing. And then rock and the team there, what they've told me is that the experience of building this product has been dramatically different from the checkout product. And the difference, you know, think about running on a treadmill at, you know, at a normal pace, ten pace, you know, and you're on incline of three really hard, and then take the incline to zero. You're doing the same running, you're coming to work, you're working the same number of hours, but everything's easier because you don't have an incline. For us, that incline was the complexity of the checkout, product, payments, vaults, integrations, refunds, like platforms. So all this complexity that made everything slower and also a bigger team, which makes things more complicated and slower. So we made the team smaller, made the product easier, less reliance, on integrations, all of a sudden the team's like, oh my God, we can run. Because this is us being freed into building just a relatively normal software products. [00:43:26] Speaker B: I have not really built anything with AI APIs at all yet. I'm curious and I think having not touched it myself, in my mind I'm like, AI complicates things. I want to build stuff with AI someday soon. But to me the unknown makes it seem like it's going to be more time consuming to build an AI product. It sounds like it's easier than expected or faster to build stuff than expected. [00:43:54] Speaker A: Yes, yes. What you're saying is true if you go about building the product, building more yourselves, right. [00:44:04] Speaker B: But if you leverage a lot of. [00:44:07] Speaker A: Yes, a lot of existing things that we, that have made our cost basis higher than we want it to be, but we can address that later. The most important thing is how do we get product market fit? And therefore our strategy was let's pay more but build less. Because what that ends up creating is you're really building, you're building an admin. And experienced offer people, with all the tooling these days, it's not that complex to build an app with login with accounts with an admin. You know, it's not that crazy complicated, so you can do it underneath it. This is where it gets interesting. It's easier to build an admin, but the capability that you're offering your users is Sci-Fi. So when I look at our app, as a non technical person, I have regularly over the last few weeks said, is that real? That feature, like, is that actually possible? Are we doing that right now? And the answer is like, yes, because it's actually not that complicated to bring that functionality up to the user. Here's an example. What we're launching next week is MVP. It's v one. So it's not the full scope and all the full features and the full everything. But we wanted to decide what's in scope and what's not for MVP. And I am very surprised at what's in scope. One of those things is you come in as a small business and you set up your Rosie account and then we just have a page where you can train it. I think the other day I tweeted something like, hey, it looks like what we're really doing is making are users no code prompt engineers. This is what I mean. So we have a training page in the admin and you can just upload PDF's and you know, not for MVP, but eventually you just upload YouTube, URL domains. So you can take if you wanted to as a business. Let's say you ran an H vac company, you could go to your favorite, I don't know, training PDF from a conference that you went to and just upload it to your Rosie account. And then all of a sudden that gets attached to your model and your account and it makes your voice agent much more proficient on your business. You could do it for faqs, you can do it for your policies, you can do whatever you want. So it's things like this that sounds complicated to do with an AI model, but we're actually doing very little. We're providing an admin and a way to upload, none of which is complicated. And then underneath an experience back in engineer, it's not going to have that hard of a time understanding, hey, this is what the OpenAI model wants in order to attach it to this thing, and then it gets linked to this row, which is this account, and it's like it's just building a normal software product. It is AI powered, but because you're not building the AI yourselves, you can build pretty amazing functionality all the way up to the user without diving that deep into the guts of AI. [00:47:14] Speaker B: I would also imagine that all the new tooling and APIs and services out there that we're able to leverage, they're all so new. So by their newness makes them easy to work with because there's all sorts of old APIs out there that are just a pain to work with because they were made decades ago. Right. [00:47:35] Speaker A: There's no legacy anything? [00:47:37] Speaker B: Yeah, nothing's legacy. This is all fresh. [00:47:40] Speaker A: Newness is an advantage when it comes to quality of the product because our competitors who launched a year ago, built their infrastructure on older stuff. And our product quality is actually higher because we built more recently. [00:47:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:47:56] Speaker A: And our approach to this has been, let's not save money, let's focus on quality because we think that is what matters more in the market right now, not cost. If you try a $59 a month voice AI product for your business and it hallucinates and it makes you sound like an idiot for your business, and then you go and you work with whatever we end up with in the beginning, 99, 249, something like that. But the quality is much, much better. You're much more likely to stay, you're much more likely to talk about it with your peers. [00:48:28] Speaker B: Right. 81 days going from idea to product, ready to put into the hands of customers like v one. But it sounds like it's pretty far along already? [00:48:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:41] Speaker B: Do you think that there's anything. I think just from my observations, you and Roc and the team there, you've been working together for multiple businesses and companies. So there's that. That plays to your advantage in terms of just getting better and better at the muscle of building and shipping. Do you think that there's something else to you talked about how it's a. A much more trimmed down team, like fewer cooks in the kitchen. Do you think that actually sped things up? [00:49:11] Speaker A: Yes. The way it sped things up for us is Jessica, our vp of product. What she was really good at, what she did amazingly well at card hook and the reason we've been working together ever since. Poor Jess. When she came into card hook, I put her through an unpleasant experience. She. We had. We had a vp of product. She was hired to work underneath him. We interviewed, we made her an offer and then she had a vacation planned. So she went to Japan on vacation that she had planned for like a year. Right after getting the offer in between, basically while she was in Japan in those two weeks, I fired the VPO product. So she came back with no boss and no mentor. And that was at the time we were probably somewhere around 100k MRR and growing 20, 30% a month and churn completely out of control and chaos and frustration. I mean, the reason we let go of the vp of product that we needed to is because the team wasn't getting along and it was not a happy situation, even though we were growing. She just wrestled all of that and put it into a place where things worked much better. And that's part of why everything took off, because the churn went from 15% a month to 3% a month and everything got fixed. So she played a really, really big role in the success there and she came over to rally with us. And now, you know, it's me and rock and Jess. As I talk about regularly in the checkout, product reliability trumps everything. You can't screw up, you can't have a down, you can't have a down 15 minutes. So she put together a rigid process that made sense for that context and that slows people down because you're making the trade off. We need reliability more than we need speed, and that's why it takes time and everything gets built with concrete. As we moved over to this, the very explicit agreement between Rock and Jess and I was, we're going to make it a little messy, but we're going to go towards speed and we're kind of not really going to have any process we're not. We had no, no, no kanban, no confluence, no tickets, no roadmap. We were like, yolo, do what rock says that week. Let's bang it out together and just keep in tight communication. And that you can do with a handful of engineers. [00:51:44] Speaker B: Yeah. I just strongly believe that fewer people working on the product just go faster and fewer processes. I definitely have processes with my team. On clarity flow. I have one developer right now. I'm down to one full time. She's every day, and I just give her a long queue of things that I designed, and I spec them out and kind of cue them up for her to go execute. And we're insanely efficient that way. [00:52:15] Speaker A: Yeah, the efficiency is there. [00:52:17] Speaker B: I could, like, literally this week, I did a few things on. On clarity flow, but, like, um, just stuff is, like, getting done, and then I'll check it later, and then we get back to it, and then it's like. [00:52:31] Speaker A: I think it's great. [00:52:32] Speaker B: I'm also great that rock is, like, just call, like, all right. Boom, boom, boom. Like, calling the shots. Like. [00:52:38] Speaker A: Like, rock has been the biggest driver of that speed. Rock is like, you know, push, push, push. And he's been. He has been more forceful with the team than they're used to. And so he and I need to kind of keep checking up on that. I don't want to say good cop, bad cop thing, but it feels like that a little bit of. But he's very, very motivated, and you don't want to stand in the way of that. You know, I've seen this. I've let him go. But I'm not surprised that about two weeks ago, as things went from build, build, build to we need to get this into the hands of users. Right around that time is when Rock and I and Jordan, the other product manager who's running things now in Jessica's absence of. We got together and said we need a little process now. Let's get a kanban. Let's keep it simple. But we need to start to get things more into a process and start the trade off. The seesaw was 100% towards speed, and now it's coming back a little bit because we got users, we got QA, we need accounts, we need billing, all these things that are like, oh, okay. Now we feel like we need to get a little. A little more rigid. [00:53:55] Speaker B: Yeah, that totally makes sense. So where are you at on the lead flow and the first customers getting on board? Do you know who the first customers are? [00:54:04] Speaker A: Yes. So what we've done over the last few weeks is get people into our CRM from them signing up on the site for early access and newsletter to partners, reaching out to myself, reaching out to investors, and then getting introduced to vertical SaaS has been a very interesting thing. Like a tiny seed company that I'm looking to work with is like gym desk. So it's management software for independent gyms. And a lot of them get phone calls that they don't want to deal with. So looking at that and trying to figure out how do we integrate, how do we partner, how do we incentivize? So that's been one area. Outbound starts either today or Monday. So we've worked with a consultant that helped us do all the modern things around Appbound, which is like twelve email addresses. Warm it up, all that stuff. [00:55:03] Speaker B: Rosie co. Hey, get Rosie. [00:55:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:55:06] Speaker B: Hello, Rosie. [00:55:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So Microsoft accounts, Gmail accounts, all the stuff that you're supposed to do and what else is there. And then advertising starts the second week in August. [00:55:23] Speaker B: I'll give you a funny thing about the colt. I've been doing cold outreach for going on almost a year now with clarity flow. And I do the same thing. I have multiple accounts. I created an AI avatar person as the person sending the emails. It's just a random name, like, I don't know, like Michael. Michael. Because I don't want to put like my personal name on a lot of these cold emails that are going to be marked as like spam or whatever. Yeah. And then I use like an AI, like, like avatar image on it to put on the email. So it's always weird when people. Because we get a bunch of replies every week. It's like, oh, hey, Michael, thanks for, thanks for replying. Like, all right, well, yeah, Brian here. I'm just hopping in and like, you know, love the reply or cat, the customer success person. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Michael's working on something else right now. But I mean, it's always kind of weird. [00:56:20] Speaker A: That is just part of the new reality. I mean, you start to see it on the timeline a lot these days around like, you know, agents, assistants, employee, AI employees. I think lattice came out with like, onboarding for AI employees or something. Okay. Okay. I don't know what that means. [00:56:34] Speaker B: Cultural fit for AI employees. [00:56:38] Speaker A: And you know what I'm hoping next week is that we get a combination of partners that we set up with accounts, actual early customers and some friends to kind of bang on it from a software peer point of view and say, this is weird. This onboarding thing was good. This was not good. And then we have. [00:56:59] Speaker B: I'm thinking, I really want to use yourself. I want to use Rosie someday on my products and put a phone number on my marketing site and have it go to Rosie like that. That's my goal for your product. [00:57:12] Speaker A: We have seen more of that than expected where it's like, I'm an insurance agent. I just want something to pick up the phone for me. So a lot of funny use cases. [00:57:22] Speaker B: Like, I actually see it as, like, the ability to unlock that. I'm doing a bunch of changes on how we sell clarity, flow in the next couple of weeks. [00:57:31] Speaker A: Like the phone channel. [00:57:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, I. At my current bootstrapped budget, I feel unable to offer a live person to man the phone lines and also, like, sales. Like, it would have to be me, which I could do, but I'm very distracted. So. Yeah. Like, the ability to even have a phone number is like, that's an unlock. That's valuable to me. [00:58:01] Speaker A: Yeah, we've heard some funny feature requests. Like, we want to have a phone number. We need to have a phone number out there. It improves our conversion and everything. But then when they call, can you flip it to text message? Because that's how they actually want to talk. So they want Rosie to be like, do you want to turn this conversation into a text message? If. Yes, I'll text you right now at the phone number that you called from. [00:58:22] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. [00:58:23] Speaker A: Yeah, they want their. They want. It's a younger demographic, customer base, and so they just want to actually talk on text, but they feel like they have to make this phone call because that's what they're supposed to do. [00:58:33] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [00:58:33] Speaker A: And they would just prefer, okay, just go write to text. If you think about it, it's the same model, it's the same everything. It's just instead of being turned into voice, it gets turned into SMS. So we talked about this as, like, a voice API or like a communication API. [00:58:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [00:58:51] Speaker A: So I think we'll have about two weeks of early access without being able to sign up on the site. [00:58:58] Speaker B: Right. [00:58:58] Speaker A: We'll talk to outbound, we'll do demos, we'll show the product, we'll create accounts, but you won't be able to do it on your own. And then in, like, two weeks, we'll flip open the self serve part of it with credit card required and ability to sign up on your own. [00:59:14] Speaker B: Got it. I saw your tweet about that, too. So you are even right at this early stage, you are going full speed ahead on the self serve checkout. Or sign up flow or whatever that is. [00:59:25] Speaker A: Yes, it's going to be an absolute mess. We had all hands this week and my most important message to the team was, do not be disappointed by what's about to happen. We are not going to have a problem on acquisition. We are going to have a problem on retention. So don't get discouraged that when we get 100 signups in the first month, 80 of them immediately churn and tell us that we're awful. Like, this is now the journey that we're on. We're going to be told that we're awful for a few months and the only thing to do is just improve it, improve it, improve it. Keep the acquisition going and then watch retention change. And that will be the actual inflection point, not the, oh, now we figured out how to acquire customers. That is not going to be the hardest part. The hardest part is going to be keeping them interesting. [01:00:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that is super interesting. There's stuff in that vein that I'm flipping the script on clarity flow in the next couple of weeks and I'm trying to figure out, like, how to, how to deal with the blowback of, like, changing the way that people buy and the way that people onboard and the impact on our customer success person and on me and what that's going to look like. [01:00:38] Speaker A: But yeah, we are, we are unprepared for it and I would rather have the mess and fix as opposed to prepare, prepare, prepare and then. And then turn it on. [01:00:51] Speaker B: Right. [01:00:52] Speaker A: So we're going to spend, you know, call it ten, twenty k a month on like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook reels, short form video. And it's going to drive a lot more traffic than we are used to on anything. And it will definitely be a mess. It's definitely going to be a mess. [01:01:08] Speaker B: Interesting. That'll be excited to hear about the sign up flow. So what are you working toward having, like, person signs up? You're saying credit card upfront and do they buy upfront or is there a trial or. [01:01:24] Speaker A: No, our first guess at it or basically our first experiment is you can come in and create an account. We, we do need an account authentication. So you got to go to your email and authenticate because for a variety of reasons, mostly related to cost. So if you come in and start using, as soon as you use the product, you're costing us. [01:01:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:44] Speaker A: Like real money, not like AI credits. [01:01:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:46] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. So we want people to be able to go into an account creation and then configure. So we want you to get the experience of the app and the admin and the power of it and what you can do to impact it and your different options and how well it works by ingesting your website and taking into your account your hours of operation. We just want to impress people all. [01:02:11] Speaker B: Before the credit cardinal. [01:02:12] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. And then when it's like, are you ready to test Rosie? Like, you need a phone number to test it. So that's actually our power is providing or not providing the phone number for your agent. [01:02:25] Speaker B: Interesting. So you can. So you can't even, like, hear it as like a test run until you put in a credit card. [01:02:33] Speaker A: That's right. We want to do two things at the same time. Impress the person by configuring your agent and also increasing the demand for actually experiencing it and when you want to experience it. If we have impressed you enough and you have now enough desire to hear it and test it for yourself, that's when you need to put in a credit card. You don't need to pay anything, but that's when you need crossover into credit card land. Once you do that, then you have x number of minutes to experiment with. We're willing to eat that cost if. [01:03:02] Speaker B: You have a lot of stuff like that currently in the trial for clarity flow, there's a lot of features that, like, you can't unlock these features until you put in your credit card, but you won't be charged until the end of your trial. We have a lot of those, yes. [01:03:19] Speaker A: When we analyze the onboarding experience, we have one dead obvious point where. Oh, that's where it crosses over into the majority of the value, which is. Let me hear how this thing sounds. Yep. So we'll need to. We have done much more instrumentation on this than we ever did with the checkout because we didn't really care about onboarding in the checkout because we had pre sold them before they even got into the account, and then we just helped them get onboarded. Now there's a lot more instrumentation around where people are dropping off first, not because there's no way. It's very unlikely that our first experiment, our first guess is perfect, right. We should definitely move the credit card. What happens if it's all the way at the front? What if it happens? If it's a seven day? What if it's you prepay? What if it's on the other side of your first ten minutes with your agent? So I told Roc to build everything in a flexible way because we will definitely be experimenting. Don't be surprised by me saying, I would like the credit card to move on the other side of ten minutes, and then we need to. We're just going to measure. And this is funny, you know, on the sunrise side, it's like, we're going to have to journal. We're going to have to. [01:04:28] Speaker B: I was just going to say, like, yes. I wonder if there's a dashboard where you can track where these activations are happening. [01:04:34] Speaker A: Yes, but I don't want to have to remember it and I want to look at the results over time. [01:04:39] Speaker B: Yeah, somebody should build that. [01:04:43] Speaker A: Cool. [01:04:44] Speaker B: So, yeah, good stuff. Good, good week. We'll get back at it. [01:04:50] Speaker A: Great week. I hope it's nice out for everybody to get out. It's Friday. My kids are coming home tomorrow, so wifey and I are heading out to the beach this afternoon. [01:04:57] Speaker B: There's a bunch of rain around here this weekend, which means I'll probably just code on stuff. [01:05:02] Speaker A: Hey, code on whatever you want. That's what I think. [01:05:05] Speaker B: There you go. [01:05:05] Speaker A: Hell yeah. [01:05:06] Speaker B: All right, later, folks. See ya.