Definitely For Profit

November 19, 2024

Ian and Aaron are back this week to discuss Aaron's adventures with the terminal, Ian's ideas for the future of Mostly Technical, a trip to Boise, and so much more. Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com. Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical? Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more. 00:00 Airing of the Grievances 09:14 Terminal TUI Thing 21:59 Trip to Boise 34:43 Try Hard Update 44:12 SQL Course 49:16 Let's Get Meta 01:14:00 Surgery Update 01:17:37 Markdown Meh 01:21:27 Where’s All The Good Software?! 01:25:55 Busy Monday
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Transcript

Aaron
00:00:00 – 00:00:02
Hello? We are back, baby.
Ian
00:00:02 – 00:00:03
So excited.
Aaron
00:00:04 – 00:00:12
Alright. Listen. I've got I've got first to issue congratulations to you. Good job keeping the show going, keeping it interesting. Great work.
Aaron
00:00:12 – 00:00:15
Love listening love listening to my own podcast when I'm out
Ian
00:00:15 – 00:00:16
and about.
Aaron
00:00:16 – 00:00:23
Super fun. That's great. We can review we can review the guests, but first, I I have an airing of the grievances
Ian
00:00:24 – 00:00:25
Oh. For you. Yeah.
Aaron
00:00:25 – 00:00:36
Very good. So I got a freaking bone to pick with you. So I'm, you know, I'm in Boise, which we'll talk about. I'm in Boise. I'm listening to you and Caleb talk for, like, seven hours about multiselects and stuff.
Aaron
00:00:36 – 00:00:36
Yeah.
Ian
00:00:36 – 00:00:37
Okay.
Aaron
00:00:37 – 00:00:47
And it's just somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the middle, Ian says Ian says, I'm making a budgeting app. Okay. Hang on. Back up.
Ian
00:00:47 – 00:00:47
You're gonna
Aaron
00:00:47 – 00:01:02
Back up. Rewind. Rewind. Just imagine in your head the rewind sound, and here comes a clip from an old, mostly technical, where Ian says, Aaron, why are you making why are you tracking finance? Why are you building a life OS?
Aaron
00:01:02 – 00:01:13
What are you you're wasting your time. And I'm I'm sitting in a hotel in Boise, and Ian's like Ian's like, yeah. You know, I'm building a budgeting app because they all suck. And I'm like, what? That's that's what they just said.
Aaron
00:01:14 – 00:01:16
Said, and you gave me crap for it.
Ian
00:01:16 – 00:01:16
You know what I am.
Aaron
00:01:16 – 00:01:24
Like an idiot, not on the podcast, not able to hold your feet to the fire, and you're talking about building a budgeting app. What the hell, man?
Ian
00:01:25 – 00:01:32
First of all Oh. You think that was an accident? It's not an accident. I dropped it when you're not here. Unbelievable.
Ian
00:01:33 – 00:01:38
Second of all, I mean, a LifeOS and a budgeting app are sort of two different things. But now they're doing the same thing.
Aaron
00:01:38 – 00:01:40
They're doing the exact same thing.
Ian
00:01:40 – 00:01:49
Third of all, I'm already off it. Forget the budgeting app. Budgeting app in the past. You know how I roll. I get these ideas, and then I'm like, it's gonna be too much time.
Ian
00:01:49 – 00:01:56
It's too much work. Somebody actually turned me on to, this copilot.money, which is like a Mac native kind of thing, which is
Aaron
00:01:56 – 00:01:57
Interesting.
Ian
00:01:57 – 00:02:06
Pretty good. Pretty good. It's not bad. None of them do what I really want, which is more like I care less about the dollars and cents.
Aaron
00:02:06 – 00:02:06
Right.
Ian
00:02:06 – 00:02:20
And more about the idea of, like, creating resistance to you spending unnecessarily. I just want when you spend stupid money with no, like, pushback. Right? And so that's where, like, the pure budget app is like, okay. Come in here when you have a chance and reconcile these things
Aaron
00:02:20 – 00:02:21
you start.
Ian
00:02:21 – 00:02:27
But it's, like, already in the past. Whereas, like, if you're, like, entering it as you do it, it's like, well, should I do it?
Aaron
00:02:27 – 00:02:29
You you wanna you wanna, like, hate your modifier.
Ian
00:02:29 – 00:02:38
Yeah. Pavlovian me a little bit. Like, I it's, like, more that side of it, which none of them do. But the reality is I don't know how many times I build it. So that's just
Aaron
00:02:38 – 00:02:53
You know? Here's here's I got a lot of problems with you people. Here's here's your problem, Ian. You have too much knowledge. You've been doing this for too long, and you know like, you don't just blindly rush into something and be like, this is gonna be easy.
Aaron
00:02:53 – 00:03:06
I'll just do this, which is what I do, which is great. Yeah. You have you have too much knowledge, and you look at it, and you're like, boy. This first eighty percent was easy. That second eighty percent is gonna be hard, and you just say, I'm not gonna do it.
Ian
00:03:06 – 00:03:14
That Laravel new stuff is so it's glorious. Right? You're like, oh, man. There's files. I bring the flux in.
Ian
00:03:14 – 00:03:22
Mhmm. Put stuff on the screen. It's great. But then, yeah, and then, yeah, it's always, like, within, like, two days, I'm like, nah. This is not this is not worth it.
Ian
00:03:22 – 00:03:27
Like, it's not gonna make enough money to be worth it. It's not worth my time. It's just it's just not.
Aaron
00:03:27 – 00:03:37
So to which works the problem. That's the problem. You gotta have a little more just blind, naive optimism and just say, I'm just gonna keep doing this.
Ian
00:03:37 – 00:04:07
I I have some ideas along those lines, that work, with HelpSpot itself. So I can maybe put some of that idea, turn the old thing into the new thing as Chris Rock would have said a long time ago and not as, like, the correct way. But I got some ideas I wanna talk about with the team about some help spot stuff we might do. Give us some of that juice, some of that adventure sort of aspect, but still keeping focused on the thing that actually makes money. Because whenever I focus on this thing that doesn't make money, I'd never make more money.
Ian
00:04:07 – 00:04:11
And it just takes in just eats into, like, family time and rest time. We
Aaron
00:04:11 – 00:04:12
don't like that.
Ian
00:04:12 – 00:04:27
I know. I I can't. I I it's like, this is an area where I do feel a big difference because and so apple always shows me pictures from like 2015. We might talk about this a little bit before, but like for some reason the algo is like 2015, '20 '15, always use pictures. Right.
Ian
00:04:27 – 00:04:40
And it's all like kids stuff, whatever. But like 2015 was like crazy year. Like I had all kinds of stuff going on. The kids were little, It was just chaos. And I'm like, but then I was also, like, working till late at night and doing all this stuff.
Ian
00:04:40 – 00:04:44
And I was like, I don't know where I got all the energy. It's crazy. Like, that's where you are. You're in that zone.
Aaron
00:04:44 – 00:04:45
That's right. About the
Ian
00:04:45 – 00:04:54
same age. Yep. Like, you still have the energy, but let me tell you, you gotta cherish it. It's only gonna last a little bit longer. And then, like, another five, six years, you're gonna be like, oh, man.
Ian
00:04:54 – 00:04:57
Like, I can't I can't I can't be working at 10:00 at night.
Aaron
00:04:57 – 00:05:04
See, that's why that's why I don't need that's why I don't need these no men in my life telling me don't do stuff. I'm like, no. I gotta do stuff.
Ian
00:05:04 – 00:05:04
Time to
Aaron
00:05:04 – 00:05:05
turn it out, baby.
Ian
00:05:05 – 00:05:11
But you gotta make the stuff work together in some way. That's the thing. That's the thing. Yes. Just go off on the side.
Ian
00:05:11 – 00:05:28
You know, again, like we talked about last time you were here, it's a little different for you if, like, if you make the LifeOS app and you stream it and you make videos from it and it inspires you, that's sort of that is you working. Right? That's not disconnected from what you're trying to do. So it depends a little bit. But for me, it's totally disconnected.
Ian
00:05:29 – 00:05:38
There's no overflow. There's no connection. There's just gonna be time spent. I'm probably not gonna finish it anyway, and then I'll have wasted two months on it, and that'll be annoying. And so yeah.
Ian
00:05:38 – 00:05:51
But playing with Flux was good. It did give me a couple days to play with Flux, which then got me inspired, for some more stuff I wanna do with HubSpot with Flux. So that's all good. And I totally as I was saying those words last week, I was like, Aaron's gonna kill me.
Aaron
00:05:51 – 00:05:55
I knew you were gonna be me, man. I was
Ian
00:05:55 – 00:06:03
like, there's no way I'm getting away with this one. I can try to bury this in a a three hour long podcast. But he's going to follow-up. Hour and a half about browser quirks.
Aaron
00:06:03 – 00:06:06
And then you say you're building a budgeting app, and I'm honing in.
Ian
00:06:06 – 00:06:08
There's no chance. Bad, though. I have to say they are
Aaron
00:06:08 – 00:06:10
all good. Like They're all bad.
Ian
00:06:10 – 00:06:19
See, I never used a budgeting app before, so I couldn't relate to you when you said that eight months ago whenever we talked about it. And trying them all, they all They're all bad. Pretty bad.
Aaron
00:06:19 – 00:06:20
Like They're all wrong.
Ian
00:06:20 – 00:06:27
Yeah. They're all wrong. I will agree with that. There's they're either too much or they're too little. Or they're too smart or they're too down.
Ian
00:06:27 – 00:06:29
Smart. Yeah.
Aaron
00:06:30 – 00:06:45
So And what Caleb said about, like, just the basics. I have a credit card and I have a bank account, and when I pay off my credit card, don't make eight entries that all look like, you know, I've made a ton of money and then lost a ton of money. It's like, no. No. The money was spent a long time ago.
Aaron
00:06:45 – 00:06:47
Yeah. It's it's very frustrating.
Ian
00:06:47 – 00:07:01
The, this Copilot money does have a thing it calls, like, an internal transfer, which I think is how it deals with that. So that was sort of interesting. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen it actually happen yet when the payment went through. So but, but it did a lot of stupid stuff too.
Ian
00:07:01 – 00:07:08
Like, it imported I just wanna start this month. Like, I don't wanna start importing a bunch of old stuff. And it miscategorized all the old stuff. So that's
Aaron
00:07:08 – 00:07:08
all useless.
Ian
00:07:08 – 00:07:16
So it, like, went through there and, like, deleted all the old stuff, but they didn't give me the option. Like, just give me the option. I don't wanna put the old stuff. Like, forget the old stuff. That's in the his ancient history.
Ian
00:07:16 – 00:07:20
I don't care about the old stuff. What am I gonna do about that? Nothing. Well, I think about that. Going forward.
Ian
00:07:22 – 00:07:37
So, yeah, they're all bad. I don't know. At least this one's a Mac native app, although it's been slow, which is annoying me, but apparently, some other Mint thing went out of business, like, earlier this year and, like Yep. So they had a huge, like, 10 x the customers after that Yep. Shut down.
Ian
00:07:37 – 00:07:42
And so I think it's a little bit crazy. But yeah. Alright. Well, fair point. Fair point.
Aaron
00:07:42 – 00:07:46
Yep. Thank you. Appreciate that. Just wanted to hear those grievances. Yeah.
Ian
00:07:46 – 00:07:48
I can't even fight you, though.
Aaron
00:07:49 – 00:07:58
Alright. Here's here's Oh, okay. Here's the other thing just quickly. I think side projects like that is great are great because you just took all that flex knowledge right back into HubSpot.
Ian
00:07:58 – 00:07:59
Yes.
Aaron
00:08:00 – 00:08:01
So that's something.
Ian
00:08:01 – 00:08:11
Pushing out and doing these things is useful. I think that for me, it's like if I can then pull myself back before it goes too far, it's like that's the good balance.
Aaron
00:08:11 – 00:08:13
I've yet to learn that part, but I agree.
Ian
00:08:14 – 00:08:17
You kinda do because then you just, you know, you just stop and it's like
Aaron
00:08:17 – 00:08:17
That's true.
Ian
00:08:17 – 00:08:21
But yeah. That's true. But yeah. I don't know. I don't know.
Ian
00:08:21 – 00:08:37
You gotta find the right thing. But side project for me has to be so it has to be perfect and there's no perfect side project. You know, that's the thing. It's like if it takes up too much time, it's not gonna work because, like, I gotta pay the bills, gotta support the thing that makes the money. But, you know, if it's too light, it's kinda pointless.
Ian
00:08:37 – 00:08:46
I wouldn't mind a really light one, I guess, that did something. It wasn't about making money. It was, like, just a thing that was Yeah. Interesting in some way. But I like, we've talked about I never have those kind of ideas.
Ian
00:08:46 – 00:08:51
So I don't have any, like, just it's a cool thing that exists and just to be.
Aaron
00:08:51 – 00:09:17
But, One of the one of the great quotes from the creator of SQLite when asked about, like, what you know, why did you write a database? He said, well, if I had known you weren't supposed to write your own database, I wouldn't have done it. And I'm like, yeah. That I totally feel that. Like, we can get to it later, but this this, this kinda, like, terminal two y thing that I'm building, It's like, if I had known you weren't supposed to build Tmux and PHP, I wouldn't have done it, but I I didn't know that.
Ian
00:09:17 – 00:09:17
So I
Aaron
00:09:17 – 00:09:25
just freaking did it. And that that's how I feel a little bit about some of these side projects. Like, I'm just what whatever. I'm just gonna try it. If it works, it works.
Aaron
00:09:25 – 00:09:26
I don't know. What are the rules?
Ian
00:09:26 – 00:09:29
So People are excited about your terminal stuff. I
Aaron
00:09:29 – 00:09:30
You are.
Ian
00:09:30 – 00:09:39
Even gone too deep on it because I I hate the terminal. Everybody's trying to go to the terminal. I don't like the terminal. I don't wanna be in the terminal. I wanted you to do stuff that requires me not ever being in the terminal.
Ian
00:09:39 – 00:09:44
That's what I'm doing. But I know. The people, they love the terminal. You got the little tabs going.
Aaron
00:09:44 – 00:09:45
Oh, crazy. The tabs.
Ian
00:09:45 – 00:09:54
How much, innovation that whole I remember the name of the package because I never use it. But the package that Jess came up with is sort of unleashed. I assume this is all that
Aaron
00:09:54 – 00:10:14
It is. It's it's all it's all, that package is called Laravel prompts. It's all Laravel prompts plus Joe Tenenbaum has, like, a helper package that does a lot of, like, the some of the nasty formatting stuff for you. Yeah. And what's so interesting about this, like, realm is, it's all so archaic.
Aaron
00:10:14 – 00:10:33
And so we have these nice, like, Laravel prompts, and Joe has Chewy on top of that. But underneath, it's just all, like, text and escape codes and these, like, these completely inscrutable little strings of characters. And it's like, oh, yeah. That turns the, you know, that turns the text red and the background blue. It's like, why?
Aaron
00:10:33 – 00:10:38
That makes no sense to me. So that's been kinda wild, but it's super fun.
Ian
00:10:38 – 00:10:45
Well, of course, because it's it all hearkens back to when the Internet was, like, pure. Right? It's like email is still awesome even though it's terrible and everything about it's horrible,
Aaron
00:10:45 – 00:10:46
but it's
Ian
00:10:46 – 00:11:00
also awesome because there's no gatekeepers. There's no rules. There's just, like, the protocol raw and that's it. Whereas, like, obviously, if you're on Twitter or you have this thing or Facebook or all this stuff, even a regular website now. It's, like, you have to have a just Appify it all.
Ian
00:11:00 – 00:11:07
It's, like, all this stuff that's on top. It's complex, and you can't ever get down underneath it. Whereas, like, hey. The terminal. Yeah.
Ian
00:11:07 – 00:11:09
This is how it's literally worked for forty years or fifty years.
Aaron
00:11:09 – 00:11:10
That's crazy.
Ian
00:11:11 – 00:11:15
Nobody's And this is this? It's impossible to change, and this is just what it is. You just have to deal with it.
Aaron
00:11:15 – 00:11:37
This is one of those things where it's like, I don't know anything about it. So when people when people are like, oh, the terminal and the shell and the t t y, I'm like, are those different things? I don't know what any of those things are. What's the difference between a terminal and a shell? I have no idea.
Aaron
00:11:37 – 00:11:50
And at this point, I don't really care. Like Right. What am I gonna do with that knowledge? I don't know. But people, yeah, people are always talking about, like, somebody DM'd me and was like, well, Ghost TTY is gonna be open source soon.
Aaron
00:11:50 – 00:11:54
I'm like, my friend, I have no idea what you're even saying.
Ian
00:11:54 – 00:11:55
To me here.
Aaron
00:11:55 – 00:12:04
Yeah. And the other the other the other line is, why don't you just use Tmux? Tmux, you should you just invented Tmux. I'm like, man, I don't know.
Ian
00:12:05 – 00:12:05
Yeah. I don't know.
Aaron
00:12:05 – 00:12:12
Never never used it. Never looked into it. Never Googled what is Tmux. I just thought, hey. This is cool.
Aaron
00:12:12 – 00:12:19
I'm gonna do this. But, yeah, the this whole layer of, like, computers, like, man, no freaking clue. But,
Ian
00:12:19 – 00:12:33
like, it works. Yeah. Well, because you were coming you weren't like, boy, I want my terminal to act different. You were kind of coming at it from a whole you and then you weren't out there, like, researching alternative terminals and the whole thing. You come from a different angle of, like, this is people doing cool stuff.
Ian
00:12:33 – 00:12:40
At least my impression is, like, people are doing cool stuff on a terminal, and I wanna do cool stuff on the terminal. And you're coming at it from that angle.
Aaron
00:12:41 – 00:12:58
So And I think I think there's an interesting, like, there's an interesting, I think, philosophical concept here. But before we get to that, my my point of view was, like, I I feel like a normie. Like Right. There are people, you know, people that use them just like super power users. Right.
Aaron
00:12:58 – 00:13:05
Yeah. I'm I'm much more down in the PHP storm. Right? I'm just like a just a total normie. And so if you're telling me
Ian
00:13:06 – 00:13:07
doing stuff.
Aaron
00:13:07 – 00:13:12
If you're telling me to use Docker Compose or Tmux, I'm like, I don't really wanna do
Ian
00:13:12 – 00:13:12
that. Right.
Aaron
00:13:12 – 00:13:15
And that's okay. I'm I'm just not gonna do that.
Ian
00:13:15 – 00:13:17
And so that was that was where a
Aaron
00:13:17 – 00:13:28
lot of the, if there was any pushback at all, it was like, why is this better than Docker Compose? I was like, because you said Docker, and I don't wanna use Docker. That's why it's better. But I think here's here's something. I'm workshopping.
Aaron
00:13:29 – 00:13:48
I'll be curious your take on this. The philosophical takeaway is Mhmm. Because I was having this discussion on Twitter with somebody the other day, and it was, like, eight tweets deep of them trying to understand why solo, this thing I'm building solo, is better. And I was just like, I I don't I can't I can't answer. After eight tweets, I was like, I'm sorry.
Aaron
00:13:48 – 00:13:49
I have no answers that will satisfy
Ian
00:13:50 – 00:13:50
you.
Aaron
00:13:50 – 00:14:25
And the philosophical takeaway is that he couldn't get his head around, that a lot of people seem to like it. It was like, why is everybody so excited about this when Docker Compose exists? And my takeaway was, and I feel this towards React. If everyone is excited or, like, really likes something and I don't, perhaps it is me that is wrong. Perhaps the market is telling me or you something that is true, and we're too stubborn to believe it.
Aaron
00:14:25 – 00:14:50
And so that's kinda how I feel about, like, maybe potentially react. Like, if everyone in the whole world loves it, which I don't think they do. But if everyone loves it and I'm like, this makes no sense to me, there's a chance that I'm in the wrong here. And I think that applies a lot to, like I think back to, like, you know, side projects I've tried where it's like, I just gotta convince the whole world that this is better. It's like, oh, that's not gonna work.
Aaron
00:14:50 – 00:14:53
So maybe go with the market instead of against. Thoughts.
Ian
00:14:54 – 00:15:04
Yeah. I mean, I think that's usually a good angle on it. Right? That, like, if if the market I'm a big market guy. If the market is saying something's good, then that generally means it is good.
Ian
00:15:04 – 00:15:18
Not universally true, but generally true. But I think with software, it's even kinda different than that because it's like, there's just room for a lot of different things. So it doesn't there's Right? So, like, you're not even limited in that way. It's like some people like this, and if you don't like that, then you can go over here.
Ian
00:15:18 – 00:15:33
Or even you could just build a thing that already exists, and you could just do it because it's fun and a hobby. And it doesn't, like, really cost resources per se. As long as you're putting your time in and you're okay with that, like, it's not even really duplicating because you, it's still gonna be different in some way. Right? We've all used tools.
Ian
00:15:33 – 00:15:38
It's like, well, I use this other tool. It's just, I mean, like the budgeting apps, like they're all 95% the same,
Aaron
00:15:38 – 00:15:38
but Mhmm.
Ian
00:15:39 – 00:15:53
You know, whatever that 5% difference is, I'm still trying to find the one that fits that little 5% difference of what I would like it to be. Right? And so yeah. Yeah. But generally, yes, the market and also, well, people nowadays wanna get angry about things.
Ian
00:15:53 – 00:16:00
Right? Or whatever. They wanna be like, why people like your thing, but they don't like my thing, or they don't like the thing I like, and all that kind of stuff.
Aaron
00:16:00 – 00:16:17
So Yes. But the way the way that I'm internalizing this is the next time I'm trying to, build something, pitch something, market something, sell something, Just harness the energy of where everything is going, and don't try to swim upstream. Just like
Ian
00:16:17 – 00:16:18
That's always the best way.
Aaron
00:16:18 – 00:16:19
Do what the people
Ian
00:16:19 – 00:16:20
want. Right.
Aaron
00:16:20 – 00:16:36
And I think there's, of course, there's still room for, taste and nuance and, like, points of view, but it's gonna be a lot easier if you're kinda, like, in the in the zeitgeist moving with the culture instead of against it.
Ian
00:16:36 – 00:16:45
Totally agree. I mean, this has always been my whole philosophy. I've built the whole business on. It's like a the similar idea of, like, don't build things that don't basically already exist in some fashion. Mhmm.
Ian
00:16:45 – 00:17:15
It's like to teach people that it should exist is like a monumental effort versus like, oh, everybody's looking for this thing. I should just build another one of these things everybody's looking for. And then feed off the idea that, like, 5% of all these other ones will be wrong, and there'll be some sufficient percentage of the market that's looking for the way you do things that little bit different. That makes it click better that, for whatever reason satisfies some need that they have, that the other ones don't and boom, then that's how you can build your business. Like going against the stream is very difficult.
Ian
00:17:15 – 00:17:34
Which I mean, that's also though where the biggest wins are, right? Like when you go against the stream and you're right or you can convince people you're right, then that's when you have a mega huge home run because you now have this huge market you've created of everybody's gonna move off the old bad thing to your new good thing, and that's how you become a billionaire. But, obviously, it's also very
Aaron
00:17:34 – 00:17:42
But you can become a mini a mini millionaire by saying, this is Basecamp but better. It's like, oh, I know what Basecamp is. Yeah.
Ian
00:17:42 – 00:17:56
Yeah. Yeah. We'll just That's just a few people searching for project management software every day, and I'll just try to capture some of those versus reinvent the project management software paradigm and call it something different and try to make that work.
Aaron
00:17:56 – 00:17:58
Try to educate the entire market.
Ian
00:17:58 – 00:18:03
Right. Very difficult to do. So do that. Yeah. And, yeah.
Ian
00:18:03 – 00:18:05
So you've been streaming all this. Right? Like or
Aaron
00:18:05 – 00:18:15
a lot of I've been streaming a lot of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I started streaming it, and then went to Boise earlier this week, and so I haven't streamed the most recent updates.
Aaron
00:18:15 – 00:18:53
But, yeah, did did some streaming of it. Had Joe on for a joint stream, which was a lot of fun. And, yeah, it's, it's one of those so you talked about you mentioned, like, side projects that feed the business rather than side projects that, like, that don't and go nowhere. This is the way that the way that Steve and I talk about this is, like, do the vectors align? So, like, if the business is heading in a certain direction, we want all of, you know, we want all of most of what we do to, like, further us in pursuit of going that direction.
Aaron
00:18:54 – 00:19:11
Right. And so when we when we think about a project, it's like, well, do the vectors align on this? It's like, yeah. Like, these things all kinda go together and this one doesn't, so let's stop that one. Doing stuff like this, it's like three or four things pointing all the same way, thrusting us towards our goal, which is awesome.
Aaron
00:19:11 – 00:19:23
So Yeah. It's like you get to build some open source, which, you know, we're redoing AaronFrancis.com, and eventually, all open source projects will live there. And so we'll get, you know, all the docs traffic will come there.
Ian
00:19:23 – 00:19:23
Yep.
Aaron
00:19:23 – 00:19:54
So we'll get we'll get some traffic out of it, get some, you know, notoriety out of, like, having the package out there, but also get to stream it and then also get to make YouTube videos about it, you know, here and there. And so it's like, yeah. This this is one of those things that I think for an a a business that is shaped differently would be a massive waste of time. Right. And so that's the hard part when, when people look at stuff that I do, but also when I look at stuff that other people do, and I'm like, ah, what a stupid waste of time.
Aaron
00:19:54 – 00:20:07
I have to remind myself, wait a second. I don't know their business at all. This may make perfect sense for their business. I don't know what they're optimizing for. But this, for us, makes a ton of sense, and it happens to be a blast.
Aaron
00:20:08 – 00:20:25
And so I get all kinds of streams, tweets, docs, YouTube videos. I get all kinds of content out of it and stay in, like, the top of people's minds, which is very important. And I only wanna do that by doing cool stuff, not by talking all the time. And so that's the hard part. It's like, actually have to do stuff.
Ian
00:20:27 – 00:20:42
Yeah. I mean, that's obviously if you're creating value, essentially, Debbie angle. Yeah. It's really cool. And are people using solo, like, in anger yet?
Aaron
00:20:43 – 00:21:15
I don't know if they're doing it in anger yet. There have been a few very helpful issues that have been opened, but people seem to thoroughly enjoy it. It's it's most, it is most closely a response to n p x concurrently, which is just like Mhmm. A JavaScript process runner that just munges all the output together. And so I think people with the new composer dev that Taylor released recently, people like the idea of having everything together and want behind one command to start all the processes.
Ian
00:21:16 – 00:21:16
Right.
Aaron
00:21:16 – 00:21:23
And to the extent that there's discontent with concurrently, then that's where Solo steps in. It's like, hey. You can have all this in separate tabs.
Ian
00:21:23 – 00:21:24
Oh, you
Aaron
00:21:24 – 00:21:28
can have that. Seem to be really liking it. I've gotten some very helpful PRs already.
Ian
00:21:28 – 00:21:30
Nice. Wow.
Aaron
00:21:30 – 00:21:31
It's crazy.
Ian
00:21:31 – 00:21:33
The the open source empire grows.
Aaron
00:21:33 – 00:21:48
It grows. It grows in furtherance of the, we we joked this week in Boise that we're, we're the opposite of a not for profit. We are a definitely for profit. And so the open source empire grows to further the definitely for profit empire.
Ian
00:21:48 – 00:21:57
Yeah. Well, that's where a lot of people try to get to. You know? It's like, that's the dream of a lot of open source projects Mhmm. That you don't have the way to actually do it.
Ian
00:21:57 – 00:22:01
You know? Gotta have a back end. Well, maybe we should talk about Boise since we're right here.
Aaron
00:22:01 – 00:22:02
Let's talk about Boise.
Ian
00:22:02 – 00:22:04
If it's in. What so you went to Boise.
Aaron
00:22:04 – 00:22:05
Went to Boise.
Ian
00:22:05 – 00:22:06
How was that?
Aaron
00:22:06 – 00:22:28
That is why, that was why Caleb filled in because I, realized I realized on Sunday night, I think, that my flight to Boise was way earlier than I had anticipated. So thank you to Caleb for doing that. Yeah. Flew to flew to Boise on Monday, flew back on Wednesday. So we got, you know, Monday afternoon, all day Tuesday, and then Wednesday morning together.
Aaron
00:22:28 – 00:22:38
Kelsey came in from Iowa. I've just learned that she does not live in Ohio. I told a whole bunch of friends that she lives in Ohio. She doesn't. It's Iowa.
Aaron
00:22:39 – 00:22:43
Very different. Yeah. I know. Bunch of o's. What am I supposed to do?
Aaron
00:22:43 – 00:22:45
It's all the same thing.
Ian
00:22:45 – 00:22:45
O's. It's
Aaron
00:22:46 – 00:22:55
all the same letters, same states. It doesn't matter. So she flew over or up or, I don't know, down. Who knows? Who knows?
Aaron
00:22:55 – 00:23:01
From Iowa to Idaho, which hysterically are different places as well. And it was great. We,
Ian
00:23:02 – 00:23:02
we
Aaron
00:23:02 – 00:23:11
spent so much time just, like, getting all of the plans and ideas onto paper and making them a little bit more,
Ian
00:23:13 – 00:23:17
like, a little bit more real. So we have all these ideas, like, we could do anything.
Aaron
00:23:17 – 00:23:34
It's like, yes. But what are we going to do and when? And how do we how do we, not kill ourselves in pursuit of launching another course? Because these last two have been just so rough, which has been, you know, fine. We have to get off the ground and make money.
Aaron
00:23:34 – 00:23:49
But now that we have, what do we do next? And so I'll give you, excuse me, I'll give you broad strokes, and then we can talk details. But broad strokes, I think we've come up with a good framework. You are familiar with a b testing. Yes?
Ian
00:23:49 – 00:23:50
I am.
Aaron
00:23:50 – 00:23:54
Are you familiar with multi armed bandit testing?
Ian
00:23:55 – 00:23:58
I mean, I've heard the term, but I couldn't necessarily tell you what the specifics are.
Aaron
00:23:58 – 00:24:08
This is why Ian is a professional because he knows I'm about to try to explain something, and he sets me up with a softball. He's like, ah, kind of. Why don't you explain it to the audience?
Ian
00:24:08 – 00:24:11
I wanna tell you about that ebook I wrote about it
Aaron
00:24:11 – 00:24:12
four years ago. Exactly. I'll just
Ian
00:24:12 – 00:24:14
pretend that doesn't exist.
Aaron
00:24:14 – 00:24:18
Just pretend for the sake and the edification of the audience. This is my guy. It's like a train
Ian
00:24:18 – 00:24:19
of questions. You guys do for
Aaron
00:24:19 – 00:24:21
Since you don't know, Ian, let me tell you.
Ian
00:24:21 – 00:24:22
Yes. Tell me.
Aaron
00:24:23 – 00:24:36
AB testing tests two things against each other. Great. Awesome. Multi armed bandit, or I guess Monte Carlo is another, way to say that is Mhmm. You have maybe 10 options, and you don't really know which one is best.
Aaron
00:24:36 – 00:25:00
And, insidiously, it may change over time which one is best. And so what you do is you embark upon this strategy called explore and exploit. So you have 10 options, and you run 10% of traffic to all 10. When one starts to win, you redirect more traffic to the one that is winning. However, you don't, redirect all traffic there.
Aaron
00:25:00 – 00:25:33
You continue to test the other nine such that if one of those other nine starts to win, you kind of, like, shift that traffic back. And so this is called explore exploit because you explore all 10 strategies, and when you find a winner, you start to exploit it, maybe eighty twenty, 90 10, but you're still exploring other stuff on the side. And so that's kind of our strategy for try hard studios is explore exploit. And what we're going to continue to exploit is database education. Like, we know we know that that works.
Aaron
00:25:33 – 00:25:47
We have found product market fit. I am able to do it. People enjoy paying for it. And so it's like, we can't just give that up. As much as I might wanna, like, you know, go become Casey Neistat or something, we can't just give that up.
Aaron
00:25:47 – 00:26:07
However, we can't over exploit because then you ride you ride your success over the top and you start to decline. Right. And so if you just do the exact same thing forever, you might make good money, like for a while, but then it's you end up maybe this is the innovate innovator's dilemma. I don't know. I haven't read it.
Aaron
00:26:07 – 00:26:30
But you end up, like, declining because you're not trying new things. And so where we've landed is, you know, the next six months a year, we're gonna produce maybe one or two more database courses. We're gonna do, we're gonna do screencasting.com revamp altogether, and those are exploitation, channels. We know that those things make money. We know that those things will work, so we're gonna do it.
Aaron
00:26:30 – 00:26:42
So that that's, like, you know, 60, to 70% of the time and the other 30% of the time we're going to explore. And we have lots of fun ideas on that, which we can talk about. What do you think?
Ian
00:26:42 – 00:26:48
I like it. So in the, like, business y, not that that's not business y, but, like
Aaron
00:26:48 – 00:26:52
It was a it was a little analytic. It was a little technical. Yeah.
Ian
00:26:52 – 00:27:16
Like like, the way I would also that this is also framed sometimes is, like, as the cash cow. Like, this is your cash cow, and the cash cow will eventually decline. But but along the way, before the decline, right, is, like, this huge this time period where you're gonna make a ton of money. And so you wanna maximize the cash cow, but then you also need there was there's a name for the other phase, but whatever. I don't remember.
Ian
00:27:16 – 00:27:25
It. But, yes, like, you wanna also then be innovating with some of your time and effort Mhmm. For the next cash cow to appear. So, yes, I like that. That's good.
Ian
00:27:25 – 00:27:28
So what are the other arms then?
Aaron
00:27:28 – 00:27:37
Mhmm. Yeah. So, there are there are three arms. Two of them are exploitative, database and screencasting. Those are just, like,
Ian
00:27:37 – 00:27:37
we
Aaron
00:27:37 – 00:27:55
gotta do those things. Whether you kinda want to or not, we gotta do it. Also, this this, like, mentality frees both of us up. Steve is very Steve is very, like, let's just do the thing that works because it makes money, and we should make money. And I'm like, oh,
Ian
00:27:55 – 00:27:57
man. That's a good idea. That's a great point, Steve.
Aaron
00:27:57 – 00:27:58
I love Steve for that.
Ian
00:27:58 – 00:28:06
I was gonna say, I don't I do feel like you've been wrangled slightly. Like, that's the word that comes to mind is that Aaron got a little bit wrangled on this, Yeah.
Aaron
00:28:06 – 00:28:08
My wings flipped.
Ian
00:28:08 – 00:28:09
Maybe just a little bit.
Aaron
00:28:10 – 00:28:23
No. So, one of one of the great things about Steve is Steve is like a competent executive. It's like, if if you if you had if you pick could pick someone to run your business, it would probably be Steve.
Ian
00:28:23 – 00:28:25
Right. If you could pick if you could pick
Aaron
00:28:25 – 00:28:31
someone to do crazy stuff and create a spectacle, it's me. And so, like, how do we, you know, how do we,
Ian
00:28:32 – 00:28:38
where do we find middle school? To be rich, you wanna be king. So this is the interesting combining of these
Aaron
00:28:38 – 00:28:39
two philosophies that we're
Ian
00:28:39 – 00:28:40
gonna have. Okay.
Aaron
00:28:40 – 00:28:55
And so it was it was a little bit of wrangling, and it was actually incredibly helpful to be in the same room. We, we got to use, an office in Boise that had a whiteboard.
Ian
00:28:55 – 00:28:56
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:28:56 – 00:29:16
And so it was me, Steven, Kelsey in this room for, like, three or four hours just whiteboarding. Nice. And that's after we spent, you know, an hour and a half in the coffee shop getting ready to go over to the office. And so a lot of the conversation was basically, like, trying to square that circle of, hey. I wanna do I, Aaron, wanna do just, like, all this interesting stuff.
Aaron
00:29:16 – 00:29:19
And Steve was like, that's fantastic. We need to make money. Like,
Ian
00:29:19 – 00:29:20
oh, wow.
Aaron
00:29:20 – 00:29:36
That's interesting. That's a really good point. I never thought of that. And so this is like, I do believe that, having an explore phase is actually important for the business. Mhmm.
Aaron
00:29:36 – 00:30:01
And I think, Steve also definitely agrees. I think we, we maybe reined in the scope of that just a little bit. Mhmm. And, putting putting on paper what is our exploit phase of the business, I think, lowered Steve's anxiety a lot. Because I think when he hears me talk because we he's like, Steve Steve and I talk for, like, an hour or two a day, like, almost every single day.
Aaron
00:30:01 – 00:30:06
When he hears me talk, it's just like, what if we did this? What if we did that? What if we did this? And he's like, yeah. We gotta
Ian
00:30:06 – 00:30:08
those are all great ideas, and he
Aaron
00:30:08 – 00:30:36
does that some too. But we gotta make money. And so, settling basically on 60 to 70% cash cow and 30 to 40% explore makes everybody feel super happy because I get to go out and try to find the next database education, stream of income, and we get to, like, hopefully continue to boost up our our baseline of monthly income. So, yeah, a little bit reined in, but not much.
Ian
00:30:36 – 00:30:48
Not much. Just a little well, I think it I like this in that, I think there's, like, a natural evolution. Like, in reality, there's probably only I don't know. How many database courses could you really do? Like, six, seven?
Ian
00:30:48 – 00:31:08
You know, it's, like, for your market that you, like yeah. Again, like, you get into Oracle and advanced Oracle and super advanced Oracle. Like, maybe, but that's not really your stick either, I would say. Right? So, like, if we stay with, like, the open source databases that web devs use on a regular basis, Like, you got one or two more of those that you can maybe get into, like, ClickHouse and some of those specialty ones a little bit.
Ian
00:31:08 – 00:31:34
But then that's that's pretty much it. Like, you're kinda at the end of that road unless you niche down into advanced this or that or whatever. So I think that and then, but the on the flip side, because once you have five of these or whatever, then it doesn't need you as much. It's like, let's make sure we sell these five. And maybe we need Aaron once in a while to like refresh something or add a module for the new version or whatever.
Ian
00:31:34 – 00:31:37
But like, you could have just business people doing business y stuff,
Aaron
00:31:37 – 00:31:37
correct,
Ian
00:31:37 – 00:31:50
selling these courses that now exist on platforms that don't really change that much. Exactly. Year over year. So it's like you might have to do this push you've been doing, not at the same pace, which is probably unrealistic, but
Aaron
00:31:50 – 00:31:50
Mhmm.
Ian
00:31:51 – 00:32:12
You know, over another year and a half or something like that. And then you'll be like, okay, now we've got the stable of Mhmm. You know, video courses that we can just sell and market and all that stuff, which then should free you up for more time for finding the next thing because you'll have this backlog of, or, you know, this, inventory Yeah. Of existing content. So Yes.
Aaron
00:32:12 – 00:32:25
That is that is the dream. I think, mentally, I view it this is this is a a a bad mental image, but I view it as, like, I plow through and leave a wake of destruction behind me, and then Steve and Kelsey come in and kinda shore
Ian
00:32:25 – 00:32:25
it up. I mean,
Aaron
00:32:25 – 00:32:49
it's not necessarily destruction, but that's kind of like that I do I do like that. Like, I just totally plow through a a course. And then Yeah. Right now, literally right now, Steve and Kelsey Kelsey's, you know, answering emails and, doing a little bit of outbound sales. Steve is doing outbound sales and, you know, handling inbound big requests.
Aaron
00:32:49 – 00:33:18
And it's like, that's great. That is just not what I am good at. And I think there are things that I am good at, but that that ain't it. And so I do like this structure because you're right. Once we get to, let's say, five database courses and our, you know, our custom platform is kinda, like, basically done, I've got I'm gonna have so much exploration time while still hopefully, making a bunch of money off of off of the back catalog.
Aaron
00:33:18 – 00:33:20
So that's kind of the dream.
Ian
00:33:20 – 00:33:39
And there's, like, to be super business y for a second, there will be synergies between database, courses. Right? Like, because once they're in there, people need two or three, and then they buy two or three and, you know, you have more stuff to sell them. All those kind of things you could imagine even other sorts of accessories or whatever that go along with it. Yeah.
Ian
00:33:40 – 00:33:52
I like that. And you might have to grind a little bit here along the way, but also you're kind of striking while the iron's hot. Like you have companies coming to you and sponsoring your development of these, which is insane. And that might not be something that lasts forever either. So No.
Ian
00:33:52 – 00:34:02
Now to my knowledge that, like, these VC backed sort of database companies are willing to throw some money at you, which is great, which, you know, who knows in a year if that's true. So Correct.
Aaron
00:34:03 – 00:34:03
You can
Ian
00:34:03 – 00:34:11
get a couple more of those. That just obviously super helps the profit margin if you can put a good chunk of change just in your pocket up front. So
Aaron
00:34:12 – 00:34:16
6 figures just for, like, releasing the thing. Right. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah.
Aaron
00:34:16 – 00:34:18
I like really impacts
Ian
00:34:19 – 00:34:21
the business proposition there quite a bit.
Aaron
00:34:21 – 00:34:22
Moves the needle.
Ian
00:34:23 – 00:34:29
Yeah. So that, like, derisks the entire thing. Yeah. So I'd like that.
Aaron
00:34:29 – 00:34:31
Yep. Okay. So
Ian
00:34:31 – 00:34:32
what's the necessarily.
Aaron
00:34:33 – 00:34:37
It's not the most fun, and I'm I'm okay with that now.
Ian
00:34:37 – 00:34:38
Yeah. That seems
Aaron
00:34:38 – 00:34:39
that seems reasonable.
Ian
00:34:39 – 00:34:41
I think that's a good balance. So like This
Aaron
00:34:41 – 00:34:55
is a good balance. So what are the explorations? I believe that was your question. Place? It's not because I I always tell my ideas, and you're like, I've got ideas too, but I'm not
Ian
00:34:55 – 00:34:56
gonna tell
Aaron
00:34:56 – 00:35:00
you. I'm just gonna tell all my other friends, but not on the podcast so we can keep the content.
Ian
00:35:01 – 00:35:01
Here. Only when Yeah.
Aaron
00:35:01 – 00:35:25
It's unbelievable. So the whole, move to the factory slash warehouse, create the physical product thing, that is going to be the first thing that we're cooking in the lab. And so that's the first that is the that's the third leg of the stool. So we have two exploit and one explored. The explorer leg is factory slash physical, product.
Aaron
00:35:25 – 00:35:46
And so, minor update for the super fans of the pod, we're gonna push the physical product start to the new year. So even though this would maybe make sense and that may that may narrow down some choices, it would maybe make sense to, like, ride the new year, new you wave. It's not it's not a calendar, so it doesn't matter. Yeah. Okay.
Aaron
00:35:46 – 00:36:06
So it doesn't matter. But the, the strategy here is going to be based so there are a lot of there are a lot of YouTube channels. It's very YouTube centric, this this exploration thing. It's very YouTube centric, perhaps very TikTok centric as well, which is not something I'm super familiar with. But
Ian
00:36:06 – 00:36:07
Okay.
Aaron
00:36:07 – 00:36:20
The strategy here is there are a lot of maker channels on YouTube where it's like, watch me, you know, build a house, build a table, build a retaining wall, all that kind of stuff. Build some robots, build some marble sculptures, like, love love all that stuff. Right?
Ian
00:36:20 – 00:36:20
Right.
Aaron
00:36:20 – 00:36:33
A lot of that. There's some content, and it does very well about, like, hey. I'm gonna start a furniture flipping business. I'm gonna start a three d printing business. I'm gonna start an X Carve CNC business.
Aaron
00:36:34 – 00:36:58
Let me reveal all my financials. Watch me do it. So we're gonna do somewhat of a combination of those two things. It's not strictly, like, you know, hobby hobbyist robotics or something like that, which are channels that I love to watch, but that's not, like, that's not my shtick. And it's not, it's not behind the scenes business on the course arm of the business.
Aaron
00:36:58 – 00:36:59
Okay.
Ian
00:36:59 – 00:36:59
But what
Aaron
00:36:59 – 00:37:08
it is gonna be is behind the scenes business on building and men like, manufacturing physical product and selling it and all the
Ian
00:37:08 – 00:37:08
things that go into
Aaron
00:37:08 – 00:37:18
it, looking at, you know, Shopify dashboards and talking about strategies and being totally open with revenue because it's gonna be very small, so I don't super care.
Ian
00:37:19 – 00:37:19
But I
Aaron
00:37:19 – 00:38:03
feel like that's gonna be a good hook for people, and that'll bring them into kind of the try hard empire. But it's not like we're trying to, like, trying to get some kind of overlap, some kind of vector alignment, and I think it's gonna be like the behind the scenes business that is the is the realm that we wanna step into. And the the, vehicle will just be manufacturing these physical products, but, really, it's like this is a it's kinda like a My First Million or Peter Levels or, you know, any of these people that share, you know, business stuff, but, on a on a much more personal and, like, ride along kinda like bootstrapper podcast style content.
Ian
00:38:03 – 00:38:06
Vloggy style or not? Okay. Vloggy,
Aaron
00:38:07 – 00:38:15
in terms of, like, production, but not vloggy in terms of, like, hey. Watch me get in my car. I'm heading to work. Watch me do that. It's gonna but it is gonna be like, hey.
Aaron
00:38:15 – 00:38:25
I'm in the factory. Here's what I'm working on today. And so they'll be produced, but it'll be a much lower, production effort than, like, one of our screen casts would be.
Ian
00:38:25 – 00:38:30
And now is this on the Aaron Francis channel? Or this is a new thing?
Aaron
00:38:30 – 00:38:33
This is a new thing. This is a new this is a new thing.
Ian
00:38:33 – 00:38:37
So good because I thought YouTube doesn't really like when you mix your message to some degree.
Aaron
00:38:37 – 00:38:50
Yeah. So we will have, we'll have one channel for this more, like, business indie maker lifestyle content. And we will retain the current channel for developer, content. Right.
Ian
00:38:51 – 00:38:54
Okay. All right. Yeah. People are going to people are going to yell at you. They're going to say this.
Aaron
00:38:54 – 00:38:55
That's fine.
Ian
00:38:55 – 00:38:56
This is out there.
Aaron
00:38:56 – 00:38:57
That's fine.
Ian
00:38:57 – 00:38:58
Too far too far away.
Aaron
00:38:59 – 00:39:04
That is okay. You know what? It's my freaking life, and I have to live it.
Ian
00:39:04 – 00:39:05
I mean, that is that is
Aaron
00:39:05 – 00:39:25
100% true. It is my life. But it's also true that, like, without without naming any names, I've seen educators and indie businesses write it over the top because they just keep doing the exact same thing. I think if there's any criticism to be made here, it's like, y'all aren't even close to the top. Keep going.
Ian
00:39:25 – 00:39:27
Well, that's like true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron
00:39:27 – 00:39:27
Yeah. We are.
Ian
00:39:27 – 00:39:29
Like, I I get that. That that makes that makes a lot
Aaron
00:39:29 – 00:39:47
of sense to me. And we are gonna keep going. We're spending, you know, 60 to 70% of our time on keeping going. It just so happens that a lot of the visible time it it may, from the outside, appear that I'm spending 80% of my time on exploration, which is the goal. Like, I want you to perceive that.
Ian
00:39:47 – 00:39:47
Right.
Aaron
00:39:47 – 00:40:00
I need to be somebody for this business to work. I think I need to be seen as somebody who does things and does interesting things. And so, like, the outward perspective will be a little bit skewed. But, yeah, this is wild. That's why it's an experiment.
Aaron
00:40:01 – 00:40:07
And that's why I feel good that, like, if it falls on its face, that's okay. It was 30% time. Like, who cares?
Ian
00:40:07 – 00:40:10
Sorry. So if I may push back, just ever slip.
Aaron
00:40:10 – 00:40:11
Oh, please.
Ian
00:40:11 – 00:40:17
The the audience loves this. So where does, like, the terminal stuff in it?
Aaron
00:40:17 – 00:40:48
Terminal stuff fits in in the it is in the exploration bucket, but it's not it's not like a wild hair, kinda like the the factory stuff is. Like, this terminal stuff is in furtherance of getting developer mind share, which is, like, core line of business. And so doing this, hopefully, keeps my standing in the developer mind so that we can, you know, give them education and other products.
Ian
00:40:48 – 00:40:52
And now you're also supposed to be building a brand new JavaScript library for their account EU.
Aaron
00:40:52 – 00:40:54
Whoopsie doopsie. Yep.
Ian
00:40:54 – 00:41:01
So how does that fit in? I mean, I get along the developer thing, but, like, time wise, how does that fit in?
Aaron
00:41:02 – 00:41:15
So time wise, right now, I'm not on the hook for I need to finish Postgres, which is always, you know, it's always there. So, but I'm not on the we're not starting production of a new database course anytime soon. That'll be
Ian
00:41:15 – 00:41:16
my next question. Okay.
Aaron
00:41:16 – 00:41:29
Yeah. That'll be maybe two months away, and the next ones that we do are gonna be very easy. So I'm gonna do, like, a a very low cost introduction to SQL course. We're talking, like, $39. And so yeah.
Aaron
00:41:29 – 00:41:29
It's
Ian
00:41:29 – 00:41:30
Hold on. Hold on.
Aaron
00:41:30 – 00:41:30
Woah. Woah.
Ian
00:41:30 – 00:41:31
Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Ian
00:41:31 – 00:41:31
Woah.
Aaron
00:41:31 – 00:41:33
Let me just finish. Let me just finish.
Ian
00:41:33 – 00:41:34
That. Okay. I'll take good. I love that.
Aaron
00:41:34 – 00:41:35
Thank goodness. Alright. You can talk.
Ian
00:41:35 – 00:41:39
It's one of my favorite things ever. I have to look it up, but you keep talking while I look up the thing.
Aaron
00:41:39 – 00:41:50
So the idea there is it'll be extremely easy for me to produce because it's introduction to sequel. So I don't need to go into the nuances of b trees and primary keys and leaf nodes and stuff. Nobody freaking cares.
Ian
00:41:51 – 00:41:53
Or anything specific at all to, like,
Aaron
00:41:53 – 00:42:15
the database. It will be very accessible at, you know, $39. And the it it will be extremely broad. And so this is one of those this is one of those courses that won't rely on Twitter launch hype, which is very valuable, but something we're trying to, like, not, like, tie our our entire business to.
Ian
00:42:15 – 00:42:16
Probably a good idea.
Aaron
00:42:16 – 00:42:18
So don't give me any blue sky in here. I'm gonna
Ian
00:42:18 – 00:42:19
I get prepared for that.
Aaron
00:42:19 – 00:42:23
No. We got we got other stuff. You're talking about. Nobody nobody cares about blue sky.
Ian
00:42:23 – 00:42:24
Everybody's sad.
Aaron
00:42:24 – 00:43:00
So we'll start production of that maybe in January, February. And so for now, the the, like, programming projects are fitting in more to the, exploit side. But, also, I don't have the factory yet, so I'm not even spending I haven't even started the physical product stuff yet. So it's kinda like we're still we're still in this, like, let's round out the year phase. And then when we get the factory in January, I anticipate being a little bit more, have clearer lines on what furthers the business versus what potentially remakes the business fundamentally.
Ian
00:43:01 – 00:43:05
Okay. I think that sounds reasonable. Satiated? I'm satiated for now. Okay.
Ian
00:43:05 – 00:43:21
For now. I'll be excited to watch you go through this process. I want more I want more Aaron to your blog content, though. See, I think you need I wanna see you get in the car. I want you to get in the car, and I want you to drive to the workshop, and I want you to then tell me what you're working on today and blah blah blah.
Ian
00:43:21 – 00:43:28
I wanna know what you have for breakfast. I want you to say goodbye to the kids and that their little faces blurred out. I want the whole thing. That's what I want. I know.
Ian
00:43:28 – 00:43:32
I know. I freaking know. I know. It's crazy. That way, I feel like you gotta go all the way.
Ian
00:43:32 – 00:43:35
You gotta, like, that's crazy what those things are. Right? Like I
Aaron
00:43:35 – 00:43:39
will take this into consideration because I'm not opposed to it. I'm not opposed to it.
Ian
00:43:39 – 00:43:45
I don't know. I just think that builds that relationship. It's like you feel like you know Casey Neistat because, like, you've been in his house. You've been in all
Aaron
00:43:45 – 00:43:46
of Casey Neistat. Yeah.
Ian
00:43:46 – 00:43:49
He's out in the street. People are saying hi. Like, the whole thing. Like
Aaron
00:43:49 – 00:43:55
Freaking yeah. Who was it that was just recently talking they saw Casey Neistat. And, like, I think it was John Rudolph Drexler.
Ian
00:43:55 – 00:43:55
Yeah.
Aaron
00:43:55 – 00:44:02
Saw him in New York City. It was like his his, now fiance said, hey. There's your guy. And he looked over, and it was Casey Neistat. He's like,
Ian
00:44:02 – 00:44:02
that's
Aaron
00:44:02 – 00:44:06
not my guy. But, yeah, that's his famous YouTuber, Casey Neistat.
Ian
00:44:07 – 00:44:07
Yeah.
Aaron
00:44:07 – 00:44:08
That's what yeah. That's the goal.
Ian
00:44:09 – 00:44:13
Alright. I like it. I like it. So pure sequel course.
Aaron
00:44:13 – 00:44:14
Tell tell me
Ian
00:44:14 – 00:44:14
why you
Aaron
00:44:14 – 00:44:16
love one of my ideas. This is great
Ian
00:44:16 – 00:44:35
for me. I can't find the book, of course, but, like, the very first book I got in, like, the nineties at some point on sequel, There was this guy. I can't remember his name because that would have made it easier. But he was sort of, like, the spokesman for cold fusion or he was involved in, like, evangelizing cold fusion. And he wrote cold fusion books.
Ian
00:44:35 – 00:44:47
And then he also wrote, like just T SQL or whatever, just sequel Mhmm. Book. And it was like super thin. It was just like Yep. Core syntax of sequel.
Ian
00:44:47 – 00:45:03
And that thing was the best sequel book I've ever used. It was perfect. It was like, had everything you needed and it just, like, got you into it to understand it, but without yeah. When you go into, like, an Oracle SQL book, and it's like, well, there's, like, all this special stuff and triggers and all this stuff
Aaron
00:45:03 – 00:45:08
that's, like, super confusing. Page size of the underlying records. Like, I don't freaking care.
Ian
00:45:08 – 00:45:17
No. It's just, like, how do you select and update and delete work? Great. And now I have the I can build something with justice Yep. Without knowing really anything else.
Ian
00:45:17 – 00:45:29
And then obviously, you hit problems because that's not really true. And then you dig down in as you go, but you thought that that big first jump Right. Like, oh, I have to learn this whole database platform. It's like, you know, just like here's the raw SQL. So I think that's cool.
Ian
00:45:29 – 00:45:36
I don't know if the modern developer will appreciate that. So I don't know if it's a good business idea, but I like the idea myself.
Aaron
00:45:37 – 00:45:42
I think I almost got an unmitigated stamp of your health for you. Yeah. Almost.
Ian
00:45:43 – 00:45:55
It's fine. Not gonna take you that much time. Right? So, like, and so I do think that's a cool, like, I I think it's gonna be good business wise too because I think it's always interesting to have a low cost of entry type of thing too.
Aaron
00:45:55 – 00:45:55
It's like, hey.
Ian
00:45:55 – 00:46:06
Here's our $39 thing. You could see how we do if you like us Yep. And all that stuff. And they're gonna need they're gonna want anybody who buys that will want the platform for one
Aaron
00:46:06 – 00:46:08
specific one. At some point. So Yep. Yeah.
Ian
00:46:08 – 00:46:20
I think it's, like, very low risk. And since people don't do stuff like that anymore, I do think it's cool because people don't do that. They're not like, here's JavaScript one zero one or whatever. They're always like, oh, it's React or it's Next. Js or whatever.
Ian
00:46:20 – 00:46:20
Right?
Aaron
00:46:20 – 00:46:21
Right.
Ian
00:46:21 – 00:46:23
It's always this complication around it.
Aaron
00:46:23 – 00:46:23
Yep.
Ian
00:46:23 – 00:46:25
So, yeah, I like it.
Aaron
00:46:26 – 00:47:18
And here's here's the other here's the other another great thing about this is I don't have to be the one that, like, writes the outline. Right? So, like, with with Postgres, I had to do many dozens of hours of research and outlining and experimenting just just to be able to reach point zero where I sit down and start recording, which that is a freaking slog. With this, the plan is have Kelsey go and research introduction to SQL courses, which are traditionally offered by universities. And so she's gonna go out and do all the research, find out, like, here, you know, between across 20 different university courses, here's the 90 overlap of what these people think introduction to SQL is.
Aaron
00:47:18 – 00:47:28
And so then I will take that, and, I mean, I'll have to put together some test data or something like that. But I don't have to research what a select statement is or what an insert statement is. So I can You're
Ian
00:47:28 – 00:47:28
good on that stuff.
Aaron
00:47:28 – 00:47:39
I can get all of the research from Kelsey, sit down, and start recording. And so I think it's going to be probably an order of magnitude easier than Postgres was.
Ian
00:47:39 – 00:47:43
Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes sense. I really like that. I think that's gonna be really good.
Ian
00:47:43 – 00:47:49
Yep. I like it. I like it. So when you try to do that, like, in by the spring or something like that?
Aaron
00:47:49 – 00:48:09
Or Yeah. So that'll be, our we kind of rough timeline. We wanna in 2025, rough timeline, we wanna do, well, that's not a timeline. In 2025, our rough goal is to have three more database courses with two of them, two of them being easy. And so, intro to SQL is one.
Aaron
00:48:09 – 00:48:15
We're still kinda waffling on the second, and then potentially MySQL is the not easy one that we would do in 2025.
Ian
00:48:15 – 00:48:20
Oh, really? I I would think you might put MySQL in the easy camp since you've done it before.
Aaron
00:48:21 – 00:48:26
Easy in terms of I know it all, and I've done it before. Hard in terms of it's another comprehensive
Ian
00:48:26 – 00:48:27
It's a big
Aaron
00:48:27 – 00:48:45
900 video. Yeah. One of those freaking things. So, that's much harder. But, yeah, not not hard in terms of, like, what ClickHouse would be, where I would have to, like, sit down for six months and play with it because it's fundamentally different than anything I've ever done.
Aaron
00:48:45 – 00:48:48
I may just have Jess teach that one. She's the wizard now. So Yeah.
Ian
00:48:48 – 00:48:49
That would
Aaron
00:48:49 – 00:48:50
be cool. The plan.
Ian
00:48:50 – 00:49:01
Yeah. Even for these complicated ones you don't know well, you could experiment with, like, intro, like, intro to ClickHouse. And it's, like, just the baseline. It's 20 videos. It's, like, get you started.
Ian
00:49:01 – 00:49:12
Yep. And then if there's demand, you do the advanced ClickHouse, which is Yep. More money and they'll be comprehensive. And if not, you can just, like you didn't waste three or four months, like, figuring every edge case out. It's like, okay.
Aaron
00:49:12 – 00:49:13
Correct.
Ian
00:49:13 – 00:49:14
Yeah. Yeah. I can move on. So
Aaron
00:49:15 – 00:49:15
Yeah.
Ian
00:49:15 – 00:49:18
Alright. I got a little side adventure for us here.
Aaron
00:49:18 – 00:49:19
I love a side adventure.
Ian
00:49:19 – 00:49:20
Side adventure. Give
Aaron
00:49:20 – 00:49:21
me a side quest. What do you got?
Ian
00:49:21 – 00:49:27
So thinking about we're gonna go meta. We're gonna go meta on the podcast. Okay?
Aaron
00:49:27 – 00:49:27
Mhmm.
Ian
00:49:27 – 00:49:29
So we have a new sponsor coming on
Aaron
00:49:30 – 00:49:30
Mhmm.
Ian
00:49:31 – 00:49:33
Next couple weeks. Mhmm.
Aaron
00:49:33 – 00:49:33
We have
Ian
00:49:33 – 00:49:43
a couple other people reach out about sponsorship, and that's great. Thank you all. We appreciate you for sponsoring the show. Okay? But I wanna kick this idea around you.
Ian
00:49:43 – 00:49:53
Mhmm. Because the sponsorship, you know, it's it's got its upsides. Right? Like, we we make some money. It supports the show, helps us feel like our time is well spent.
Aaron
00:49:53 – 00:49:54
Let me guess. Does it have some downsides?
Ian
00:49:55 – 00:49:58
Well, it has some downsides. Right? There's there's
Aaron
00:49:58 – 00:49:59
some downsides.
Ian
00:49:59 – 00:50:11
There's some downsides. You know, it's a lot of time, not that much money. So it's taking time away from other things. It's, you know, interrupts the show, which isn't, like, my favorite aspect of
Aaron
00:50:11 – 00:50:16
I was surprised to hear myself do an ad read in one of the episodes that I listened to. I was like,
Ian
00:50:16 – 00:50:17
oh, yeah. That was weird.
Aaron
00:50:17 – 00:50:19
How do I fast forward this guy?
Ian
00:50:19 – 00:50:31
Yeah. This guy's annoying me. So I thought we should kick around the idea of what if we did, like, a Patreon sort of thing? Oh, no. $8 a month.
Ian
00:50:32 – 00:50:35
No. Support the show. I hate it. Ian, I hate it. Oh, you don't like it.
Aaron
00:50:35 – 00:50:37
I hate it. Really. Alright. Give me the pitch. Give me the pitch.
Aaron
00:50:37 – 00:50:39
I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
Ian
00:50:39 – 00:50:47
Give me the pitch. Here's the pitch. I think that our show has a lot of people who are, like, really into the show. They like following along. Right?
Ian
00:50:47 – 00:50:58
They like supporting what we do directly and indirectly. Right? I think they're the type of people who are annoyed probably by ads to some degree. Speculative. Type of thing.
Ian
00:50:58 – 00:51:00
Speculative. But Although, having just said
Aaron
00:51:00 – 00:51:05
I was annoyed by my own ad, it has good evidence. But carry on. Carry on. Speculative.
Ian
00:51:06 – 00:51:36
I think there it could be interesting to have you know, because part of the premise is, like, we have this sort of tight knit circle, which you all out there are a part of. And it sort of formalizes that a little bit. Like the people who are inside, like, I think it would be easier to make time for certain types of things people have asked us for. Like, could we do business dad episodes that are, like, just not questions from the whole world, but questions from, like, the people inside the circle of trust Mhmm. Who are in with us here.
Ian
00:51:36 – 00:51:46
Could we do you know, whatever. We could do little special things for the inner circle. We could have swag for the inner circle maybe. We could do stuff like that. I don't know.
Ian
00:51:46 – 00:51:55
It just seems like a more direct it's like it's like how it's like SaaS. Right? It's like you we're providing something. You're paying us. If we stop providing it, you would stop paying us, and that's
Aaron
00:51:55 – 00:51:55
all fine.
Ian
00:51:55 – 00:52:06
But it's like these things are aligned. Like, you look forward to the show every week being out, and that supports the show and happening. It's direct. It's, yeah. I don't know.
Ian
00:52:06 – 00:52:07
I just think it's intriguing.
Aaron
00:52:07 – 00:52:15
It's intriguing. I don't love it. Okay. I think I I think I hate it.
Ian
00:52:15 – 00:52:15
Oh, man.
Aaron
00:52:15 – 00:52:16
But I
Ian
00:52:16 – 00:52:17
definitely not expected to do this
Aaron
00:52:17 – 00:52:18
show. Good.
Ian
00:52:18 – 00:52:20
Okay. What's your counter?
Aaron
00:52:21 – 00:52:25
My counters, we just charge more for sponsorships. We just charge more money.
Ian
00:52:26 – 00:52:41
Okay. Let's talk about that. That's kind of interesting before we get even go the time to go past that because the thing that's so kind of interesting is like, well, I guess depends what we want to do with the show. Right? Like, to me, like, to get a good number of sponsors, you really need the show to get a lot bigger.
Ian
00:52:41 – 00:52:48
You need more listeners. Right? All that stuff. Like, that has to be the emphasis. If we were trying not not that we're necessarily even trying to do this, but if we wanted to be like, okay.
Ian
00:52:48 – 00:52:55
We want the show to produce, like, a really significant percentage of our income. Let's say that was a goal, which is not our goal currently at all.
Aaron
00:52:55 – 00:52:55
Correct.
Ian
00:52:56 – 00:53:02
You have to just have more numbers. Right? We just need more viewers, more listeners. It's all there. Right.
Ian
00:53:02 – 00:53:03
Which it has been growing, and that's great.
Aaron
00:53:03 – 00:53:04
It has been growing.
Ian
00:53:04 – 00:53:16
But I still think, like, what we talk about is there's inherently a cap. Like, I don't think we're gonna have 200,000 people subscribe to the show. I think it's unlikely. Right? So so that's that's a ceiling.
Ian
00:53:16 – 00:53:33
And if you don't get up into pretty high numbers, it's just gonna be hard to have three sponsors an episode and to, like, make that a thing. And then again, if you have three sponsors an episode, you get into like, now we have three ad slots episode and right. It becomes its own thing that maybe we, we don't love. So, so yeah. So that's, that's, that would be my counter there.
Ian
00:53:33 – 00:53:47
It's not just like only because it's like hard, just tell somebody like, okay, dollars 10,000 to be an ad on a show with 5,000 listeners or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, that's not a reasonable amount of money. Right. So like, and maybe some somebody would pay it.
Ian
00:53:47 – 00:53:56
Right. But you're not gonna be able to count on. And then being a one off thing is sort of worse because it's like, if it was like, hey. We have we have all these sponsors. Now we just have a person who deals with sponsors and
Aaron
00:53:56 – 00:53:58
Admin over there. Is a lot.
Ian
00:53:58 – 00:54:06
Yeah. Right. But, like, now it's like a random thing. Like, I get a random email and, like, I go back and forth. And then they send me, like, we gotta do a w nine and you gotta sign our contract.
Ian
00:54:06 – 00:54:09
And, like, so, but they're doing only doing two ads. Right?
Aaron
00:54:09 – 00:54:09
So, like Right. Yeah.
Ian
00:54:09 – 00:54:26
So, you know, it is like again, the amount we are charging is enough now that it's not it's fine. Right? But at the same time, it's like, I think it is a little bit it's just a weird zone in there where it's, like, not enough to, like, have a person work on it who's not one of us, but it's also not, so much that it's a no brainer.
Aaron
00:54:27 – 00:54:47
I will I will seed a little bit of ground here because I have not done any of the actual work to, like, get the sponsors or get paid. And so, like, the fact that you just mentioned w nine is the some I've thought about a w nine in forever. And I think, oh, Ian and or Dave probably has to do some admin work here. So I will cede a little bit of ground there. Yeah.
Aaron
00:54:47 – 00:55:03
I will, however, disagree with your solution to the problem. So if your problem is, admin overhead for a little bit of money plus some sort of, like, you know, audience interruption sort of thing
Ian
00:55:03 – 00:55:03
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:55:04 – 00:55:15
Here's my here's my specific solution. But first, that's a tease. We call that a tease. Here's my broad philosophy. I would rather take money from companies
Ian
00:55:15 – 00:55:15
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:55:15 – 00:55:31
Than take money from, individuals Okay. In in this regard. I would rather take money from a company that has many millions of dollars Mhmm. Versus charging a friend to be in an inner circle kind of deal.
Ian
00:55:31 – 00:55:31
Okay.
Aaron
00:55:31 – 00:55:44
That makes me feel a little bit like, I don't I don't know about that. I this just makes me feel a little that's why I don't take GitHub sponsors because it's like, I don't wanna ask I don't wanna ask somebody, hey. Can you
Ian
00:55:44 – 00:55:45
can you give me $5?
Aaron
00:55:45 – 00:55:59
When I could potentially just turn around and ask a company, can you give me $10,000? And so I I feel bad just like, taking money from the every man. So that's that's philosophical. Right or wrong, who who can say it? Philosophical.
Aaron
00:55:59 – 00:56:10
Right. My specific solution is, I think we could do something that is, perhaps relatively novel, which is, you know, content. We love content.
Ian
00:56:11 – 00:56:11
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:56:11 – 00:56:41
And that is the Peter Levels style of selling things, which is where we just put up a just a big old list of upcoming episodes with, Stripe, you know, click to pay links. Mhmm. And people either buy them or they don't, but that is your only like, that's the only way that you get to sponsor the show, and it's open. And so, like, if you're were if you wanna negotiate, like, the I don't know. Those spots may go away.
Aaron
00:56:41 – 00:57:04
All all you can do is click buy now, pay, and then put in your under 1,000 characters or whatever, you know, equates to about a minute of speaking. Under 1,000 one minute of speaking ad read. That's it. And, like, maybe as the episodes get closer, the price goes down because it's like, hey. The slot is unfilled, and we're recording on on Monday.
Aaron
00:57:04 – 00:57:18
So you got a discount. But if you if you wait for it to go down, somebody may snipe you, or Stripe may come in and buy up the next 10 episodes. And, you know, it's like, so that that that's that is my specific solution to the general problem.
Ian
00:57:18 – 00:57:42
I think that I guess, I don't I mean, that would be great and easier to manage. I am a little bit dubious that the idea that that's a thing that companies actually do. I just think in everybody so far we've dealt with and in bootstrap, we had some sponsors too, back in the day. And there's it's just never that straightforward. There's always like, well, here's the thing we need.
Ian
00:57:42 – 00:58:00
And, like like, the we send us the re ad read so we can approve it. And, like, there's just stuff in there that I don't know that like, they have, like, this one coming up soon. It's like, they have a standard set of things you have to agree to, and, like, they're not gonna do it unless you agree to them. So which is fine. Right?
Ian
00:58:00 – 00:58:03
But it's just I think there is more one off than that. It's not gonna
Aaron
00:58:03 – 00:58:03
be easy to hit
Ian
00:58:03 – 00:58:04
this button.
Aaron
00:58:04 – 00:58:09
That's just an opening gambit. You don't have to agree to anything. You you don't have to do any freaking thing.
Ian
00:58:09 – 00:58:13
You don't have to do anything. But, like, if you want their money, you might have to
Aaron
00:58:13 – 00:58:22
do the thing. Is If the only if the only means of interaction for them was click a buy button or don't, they might they might become quite flexible on what's required.
Ian
00:58:22 – 00:58:39
They might. I gotta remember, you're dealing with marketing people here who are not like the developers. So the marketing people, I think, are they're under a different set of rules and constraints, but it's possible that that would work. Or if it's the right price, we might I mean, obviously, there's a lot of just devs with products we know that would probably
Aaron
00:58:39 – 00:58:39
be
Ian
00:58:39 – 00:58:43
willing to do that. Right? Okay. So that aside for a second, that's an interesting idea.
Aaron
00:58:44 – 00:58:45
It creates a spectacle,
Ian
00:58:45 – 00:58:46
which we love.
Aaron
00:58:46 – 00:58:47
It creates a spectacle.
Ian
00:58:47 – 00:58:48
Does it? Yeah. You go to
Aaron
00:58:48 – 00:58:55
mostlytechnical.com/sponsor. And as, like, a nonsponsoring person, you get to go and see, like,
Ian
00:58:55 – 00:59:01
oh, wow, these guys are selling ads for this much. And, oh, wow, look, these are not taken. Oh, they're not doing very well. Oh, these are taken. Oh, wow.
Ian
00:59:01 – 00:59:02
They're doing great. I tell
Aaron
00:59:02 – 00:59:04
my friends. It's like it's interesting.
Ian
00:59:04 – 00:59:10
I mean, if we're gonna make a spectacle, I would I think it would be more interesting if it was, like, an auction. Like It's great.
Aaron
00:59:10 – 00:59:10
I love it.
Ian
00:59:10 – 00:59:16
You know what I mean? Like write it. It starts as a dollar, and you Code it up. Bid up. Yeah.
Ian
00:59:16 – 00:59:17
Alright. So See?
Aaron
00:59:17 – 00:59:20
That's fun. Okay. He's hooked. Alright. What's your other idea?
Ian
00:59:20 – 00:59:36
Well, I'd be interesting for the for the audience, I'd be interested your feedback on if you would be annoyed by random people's ads. Like, could that now you're just probably gonna have random people winning ad potentially. Right? Oh, oh, for $50. We're on most tech on this week because nobody else fit it up.
Ian
00:59:36 – 00:59:43
And now it's like it's like Sal from Iowa who's like I I mean, Sal from Idaho.
Aaron
00:59:44 – 00:59:47
That's more entertaining. That's more honestly That's
Ian
00:59:47 – 00:59:48
probably more entertaining.
Aaron
00:59:48 – 00:59:57
That's true. Might be appealing to be like, who what random bum off the street are they reading an ad for this week? I might listen to that.
Ian
00:59:57 – 00:59:57
Okay.
Aaron
00:59:57 – 01:00:03
If you do if you do Squarespace for twelve weeks in a row, like, I'm tuning out. So maybe We all we all have
Ian
01:00:03 – 01:00:04
heard the Squarespace ad. Yeah. I
Aaron
01:00:04 – 01:00:05
don't know.
Ian
01:00:05 – 01:00:16
I don't know. Alright. So what's that's interesting. Let's put that aside for a second. What's up with your your your take on this, like, people paying you money and you feel bad about it Uh-huh.
Ian
01:00:16 – 01:00:33
Is intriguing to me. So first of all, it's an amount of money that's not really impactful to anybody. Right? It's not like if it's $7 or whatever, like that's not people are paying that Starbucks for coffee at this point. It's not, you know, it's not a hundred bucks a month to be on the inside.
Ian
01:00:34 – 01:00:46
It's $5 or $7. I mean, whatever it is. So why does, like, let's go deeper there. Why does that bother you? Like, what do you I mean, I think this is even different than GitHub because GitHub, you're really not offering them anything in the default state.
Ian
01:00:46 – 01:01:07
Like, I know the Kale has done it differently than that, but the default state is like, hey, give me money for the open source stuff I do. It's totally there's no commitment at all. I might never do anything again, and you're just gonna be paying me forever. Who knows? Whereas if it's like, hey, you're getting a certain series of benefits that the other listeners who don't support the show don't get, that you are getting value in return.
Ian
01:01:07 – 01:01:12
Right? So Okay. So why is that bad to charge for that value? I'm curious. Because it would be things we don't do now.
Ian
01:01:12 – 01:01:18
Right? Like, we don't do a special episodes generally, for example, or swag or whatever.
Aaron
01:01:19 – 01:01:36
So here's here are here are two thoughts. The first thought is, on some level and this this will lead to my second thought because I I recognize that this is not correct. On some level, it feels like I'm asking people to pay to be my friend.
Ian
01:01:36 – 01:01:37
Okay.
Aaron
01:01:37 – 01:01:38
Man, it's like
Ian
01:01:38 – 01:01:39
on the couch now.
Aaron
01:01:39 – 01:01:51
Right. I know. So on some level, it feels like, hey. If you want to be near to me and, like, have these, like, fun insider chats, just pay me $7. It's like
Ian
01:01:51 – 01:01:53
Should we do it on OnlyFans if we do it?
Aaron
01:01:53 – 01:02:02
Yeah. Exactly. It feels it just feels it okay. It feels a little it feels a little bit, it feels a little bit icky. Like Okay.
Aaron
01:02:03 – 01:02:20
Just paying to be in an inner circle has always felt Internet marketing scammer to me. Okay. Mhmm. The problem with that point of view is you said we offer them things that we don't currently offer. And so that moves into an exchange of value, which I'm much more comfortable with.
Aaron
01:02:20 – 01:02:42
Mhmm. But then are you and I are we now dancing for $500, 3 hundred dollars a month? Like, are we now, like, on the hook to be entertaining for this extra insider circle and getting way less than we got on sponsorships and doing way more work? You know what I mean?
Ian
01:02:42 – 01:02:45
Possibly. I think the thing is, like
Aaron
01:02:45 – 01:02:46
Hey, Doug.
Ian
01:02:47 – 01:03:16
So in terms of pure Gordon Gekko ruthless businessman. Right? K. I think that the upside is probably less capped on a Patreon type model than on the sponsorships. It is because I think we can get like a higher percentage of people potentially to join something like that versus the number of advertisers so that we could regularly acquire for the size show that it is, or probably could ever I mean, you don't need to be a huge show.
Ian
01:03:16 – 01:03:23
We do this all you listeners out there are very valuable market demographics. So Mhmm. It doesn't need to be a million listeners to be very valuable.
Aaron
01:03:24 – 01:03:25
And very smart.
Ian
01:03:25 – 01:03:29
Very gorgeous. Just we have the the most gorgeous audience. Nobody's ever seen it.
Aaron
01:03:29 – 01:03:33
Nobody's ever seen anything like it. Exactly.
Ian
01:03:35 – 01:03:42
So this kind of leads to my other question. So what do you think? So so that implies that not many people would join.
Aaron
01:03:42 – 01:03:43
It does.
Ian
01:03:43 – 01:03:45
Right? Because if it's, like, $300 a month. Right?
Aaron
01:03:45 – 01:03:46
Is what Right. Right. Right.
Ian
01:03:46 – 01:03:56
But, like, if we get 500 people to join, well, that's, like, $40,000 a year. So that's not life changing for us, but it's not nothing.
Aaron
01:03:56 – 01:04:05
It's not nothing. But what can we get from sponsorships? $40,000 a year. Easily. I mean, easily because I'm not doing any of the work, but easily.
Aaron
01:04:05 – 01:04:05
Let's
Ian
01:04:05 – 01:04:16
go. We're gonna live, go see what we've made. If if I can log in to zero, which is always a disaster. Let's see if we can log in to zero. We're gonna do it live on the air, see what we've done so far.
Ian
01:04:16 – 01:04:24
Now we haven't really pushed it, to be fair. Like, there's just a thing up there. Like, we haven't made a spectacle Mhmm. Or anything like that. Mhmm.
Ian
01:04:25 – 01:04:32
Is there any chance we're gonna be able to do this? Okay. Income state. Let's I'm getting real business here.
Aaron
01:04:32 – 01:04:36
Getting real business, dad, here on the podcast. Business. Out loud.
Ian
01:04:36 – 01:04:44
Let's say 2024. Mostly tech okay. Mostly technical so far this year has made Mhmm. $14,000 in sponsorship. K.
Ian
01:04:44 – 01:04:50
It doesn't count the one that's coming up shortly because they haven't paid us yet. So so could we get to 40?
Aaron
01:04:51 – 01:04:51
Yes.
Ian
01:04:51 – 01:04:52
Probably. Right?
Aaron
01:04:52 – 01:05:02
Way way more easily than asking individuals for a few coins here and there. So what's an individual pay? What's an individual pay? $7 a month? $9 a month?
Ian
01:05:02 – 01:05:04
$7. Let's say 7.
Aaron
01:05:04 – 01:05:08
7 dollars a month. Yeah. I wrote down 7. I don't know what to do next. Okay.
Aaron
01:05:08 – 01:05:25
So let's say 7. Let's say we want $40,000 divided by twelve months, which is 3,300 a month divided by $7. That's 475 people Yeah. Paying $7 a month. For what?
Aaron
01:05:25 – 01:05:36
That feels impossible. Really? That feels way, way, way harder than It could be. If we had 40 let's see. There are twelve months in a year.
Aaron
01:05:36 – 01:05:40
I know that much. Let's say, oh, no. I can do this. I can just jump straight to weeks. There are fifty
Ian
01:05:40 – 01:05:42
two weeks on a podcast, baby.
Aaron
01:05:42 – 01:05:56
Let's go. $40,000 divided by fifty two weeks. That's Mhmm. $770 per episode for a sponsor. That is that's way lower than what we're currently charging.
Aaron
01:05:56 – 01:05:57
Right?
Ian
01:05:57 – 01:05:59
That is a bit lower than we charge us.
Aaron
01:05:59 – 01:06:15
So if we just get one sponsor per episode at even lower than we're charging now Right. Then we hit our 40,000. 4 hundred and 70 5 people, that's so many people. I would imagine I would imagine 30 would sign up.
Ian
01:06:16 – 01:06:17
Well, it wouldn't be good.
Aaron
01:06:17 – 01:06:18
Of course. That's it.
Ian
01:06:19 – 01:06:29
30. That's intriguing. I think one of the problems, though see, so the thing with it's just like all subscription revenue businesses. Right? It's like the 30 grows, and it just gets bigger over time.
Ian
01:06:29 – 01:06:35
Right? And it just there's an organicness to that. Whereas, like, the sponsorship, that's that's not true. So, like No.
Aaron
01:06:35 – 01:06:36
No. No. No. No. No.
Aaron
01:06:36 – 01:06:47
No. No. You just applied a growth factor to one side, but not the other. So if the podcast Yes. We don't have this insider track, the podcast will hopefully still continue to grow.
Aaron
01:06:47 – 01:06:47
Sure.
Ian
01:06:47 – 01:06:48
The podcast
Aaron
01:06:48 – 01:06:51
listeners the sponsor dollars will go up.
Ian
01:06:51 – 01:07:01
True. I guess what what so what I was getting at wasn't the amount. Right. K. The what I'm getting at more is that, at least right now, we tend to get sponsorships from small companies.
Ian
01:07:02 – 01:07:11
K. And the small companies are doing two episodes Yep. Or one episode or four episodes or whatever it is. Right? And so there's not a regularity.
Ian
01:07:11 – 01:07:23
They're they're not like Squarespace who's like, okay. We want 20 episodes a year for three years. Like, here's a contract, and we're gonna okay. Great. So it's it's very hit or miss.
Ian
01:07:23 – 01:07:32
There's gonna be a lot of availability on this board if we were to build it right now because there's not again, it depends on how we do it. If it's cheap, I'm sure people would. Mhmm. But we're talking about, like, a thousand dollars a month. Right?
Ian
01:07:32 – 01:07:41
So if we're saying, a week so if we're saying a thousand dollars a week, I think there's actually a pretty limited number of companies that would wanna regularly do that in our circles now. Now maybe we can get into different circles.
Aaron
01:07:41 – 01:07:42
Right.
Ian
01:07:42 – 01:07:49
Mhmm. Again, we haven't pushed this at all. We don't ever talk about it in the show. Mhmm. It's like just literally people who randomly show up and are like, I wanna I wanna great.
Ian
01:07:50 – 01:07:56
So yeah. So I'm not opposed to this idea of building up sponsorship more, but I did wanna discuss this because I thought it was interesting because a lot of other podcasts do have memberships.
Aaron
01:07:57 – 01:08:17
They do. So let me let me pitch you a vision for what this slash sponsor page could be. It could be, it could pull in analytics from both transistor and YouTube. Mhmm. And it could have, like, some pretty charts and graphs over how we're, you know, how we're trending, who we're reaching, that sort of stuff.
Aaron
01:08:17 – 01:08:27
I don't know how you get that. But who we're reaching, episode numbers. We get to ride on this whole wave of, like, you know, open startup, whatever whatever, and do the that whole nonsense thing.
Ian
01:08:27 – 01:08:28
Right.
Aaron
01:08:28 – 01:08:44
But it's also it's also, like, it kinda turns it the price is still high, but it turns it into an impulse buy of, like, oh, yeah. I've got I got budget that I need to spend by the end of q four. I'm just gonna click one, two, three. I'm just gonna buy three of these episodes for, you know, whatever it is. Yeah.
Aaron
01:08:44 – 01:08:55
And there there goes my marketing budget. In that way, I I don't lose it. And I don't have to, like I, as the buyer, don't have to negotiate back and forth. And we can say, you know, hey. If you wanna buy more than 10 episodes, send us an email.
Aaron
01:08:55 – 01:08:56
Yeah. That's fine.
Ian
01:08:56 – 01:08:57
I don't care.
Aaron
01:08:57 – 01:09:06
That's interesting. But it it does seem like it could be a cool, like like, live dashboard, pure capitalism sort of thing, especially if you code it in some
Ian
01:09:06 – 01:09:10
sort of algorithm, which sounds fun, but also like a quagmire. So
Aaron
01:09:11 – 01:09:12
that's my vision for it. My We
Ian
01:09:12 – 01:09:19
have to build a whole platform. We have to build a a podcast sponsorship platform so that every podcast can do what you're talking about.
Aaron
01:09:19 – 01:09:30
Yes. Before we do anything, we must do everything. That is a great point. So here's a question. What is, like, before they were purchased, what did Syntax.fm do?
Aaron
01:09:30 – 01:09:35
Did they do you have any idea if they took, like, just regular old sponsors?
Ian
01:09:35 – 01:09:38
Yeah. Yeah. I'm either. I've never listened really honestly. Yeah.
Ian
01:09:38 – 01:09:39
I mean Who did they get bought by?
Aaron
01:09:40 – 01:09:41
Century.
Ian
01:09:42 – 01:09:46
Oh, actually acquired the show. Yeah. Well, so that's another little bit of a
Aaron
01:09:46 – 01:09:50
If you're listening if you're listening, we are up for acquisition for sure.
Ian
01:09:50 – 01:10:05
Always up. Everything's got a price. But that's kind of along the lines of what I was just gonna say, which is there is the whole other so we've I think our focus hasn't necessarily been on, like, maximum listens. Like, we don't do every we're not it's not a guest on every week, which is, like, the stuff you do.
Aaron
01:10:05 – 01:10:06
We don't
Ian
01:10:06 – 01:10:10
ask for reviews. Like right. We don't you should all go review, but we generally don't ask for review.
Aaron
01:10:10 – 01:10:11
Until now. Yeah.
Ian
01:10:13 – 01:10:19
Whatever. We we don't push it in that way. It's like, we did a show. You guys should listen. That's pretty much where Mhmm.
Ian
01:10:19 – 01:10:36
Which I think is fine for the amount of time we both have is fine. It's, like, where we're at too. Right? So but would we wanna be part of, like, a podcast network where, like, they do all the ad sales when we insert the ad sales? I don't know if we're big enough to even be in a podcast network, but that type of thing is out there.
Aaron
01:10:36 – 01:10:41
I I vote because I vote the slash sponsor spectacle before we did a podcast ad
Ian
01:10:41 – 01:10:42
Yeah. Network. Our own spectacle.
Aaron
01:10:42 – 01:10:50
You know, they're gonna take 50% or whatever of Sure. And this this is just interesting. And you know what? Here we go. Here it is.
Aaron
01:10:50 – 01:10:54
Give it to me. This is an Ian Livewire Flux side project that furthers
Ian
01:10:55 – 01:10:56
There you go. The empire.
Aaron
01:10:57 – 01:11:02
So it's like Interesting. That's a one plus one equals three, which is what we call synergy. So
Ian
01:11:02 – 01:11:06
How how many how many ads an episode? We start with just one.
Aaron
01:11:06 – 01:11:11
I think we start with just one until we've proven that we can, like, sell out the inventory.
Ian
01:11:11 – 01:11:11
K. Alright.
Aaron
01:11:11 – 01:11:12
You like it?
Ian
01:11:12 – 01:11:14
That's not terrible. I do like that.
Aaron
01:11:14 – 01:11:15
I like a spectacle.
Ian
01:11:16 – 01:11:17
I like a spectacle.
Aaron
01:11:17 – 01:11:18
Terrible, fuck
Ian
01:11:18 – 01:11:18
it, Anthony.
Aaron
01:11:18 – 01:11:29
Fan loves it. It's not terrible. I really do think so there there really, I think, is an angle of this where people would talk about it. Yeah. It is remarkable.
Aaron
01:11:29 – 01:11:37
Horrible. Remark on it to say, like, oh, wow. This is very transparent. You can just literally click buy right now.
Ian
01:11:38 – 01:11:38
Yeah.
Aaron
01:11:38 – 01:11:51
That's kinda wild. And so I do think there is something about that that not only furthers the odds of, like, us getting sponsors, but also opens up us getting more listeners. Like, who are these guys? Like, this is interesting. I've never heard of
Ian
01:11:51 – 01:11:52
this shit. They are.
Aaron
01:11:52 – 01:11:53
Yeah. Exactly. The nerve.
Ian
01:11:54 – 01:11:59
So I don't know. I like it. I like it. I like it. I might whip something up here.
Ian
01:11:59 – 01:11:59
I mean
Aaron
01:12:00 – 01:12:00
There we go.
Ian
01:12:00 – 01:12:01
Out of bed.
Aaron
01:12:01 – 01:12:03
We got him. Possible. And sinker.
Ian
01:12:03 – 01:12:11
It's possible. It's worth a shot. It's worth a shot. It's worth a shot. It could be for the new year kind of, start start January 1.
Ian
01:12:12 – 01:12:14
Yep. Open dates up from there or something like that.
Aaron
01:12:14 – 01:12:18
Yep. I can help you pull all the transistor stuff. I've done that before. Their API is great.
Ian
01:12:18 – 01:12:21
Oh, they have actually added the API. Mhmm. I can help you pull YouTube stats. I've done that
Aaron
01:12:21 – 01:12:34
as well. Their API is not as great because it's Google, but it's I've got it figured out. So if you wanna do some charts and graphs and yeah. And then, yeah, let's turn it into a SaaS platform. We'll get rich, Ian.
Aaron
01:12:34 – 01:12:35
Let's do that.
Ian
01:12:35 – 01:12:38
I love a SaaS that starts on a show. Nothing better than that.
Aaron
01:12:38 – 01:12:39
Me too. And you know who has
Ian
01:12:39 – 01:12:42
money? Podcasters. They do.
Aaron
01:12:43 – 01:12:44
Clearly.
Ian
01:12:45 – 01:12:51
Maybe Justin's gonna listen to this and just build this for us. Justin built. Just put it in there. Just integrate. Just make it happen.
Ian
01:12:51 – 01:12:55
It's all my whole other podcast empires in transistor. Just give me one more thing, though. Let's them.
Aaron
01:12:55 – 01:12:59
Yeah. That's interesting. That's interesting. And you know what? We should buy it
Ian
01:12:59 – 01:13:00
concept, though.
Aaron
01:13:00 – 01:13:02
We should we should build it and make them buy it from us.
Ian
01:13:02 – 01:13:09
Oh, there we go. Now we're talking. Gotta build a platform. We can't just build something and use it for ourselves.
Aaron
01:13:09 – 01:13:09
It's not No.
Ian
01:13:09 – 01:13:10
No. No. No. No. No.
Ian
01:13:10 – 01:13:11
A big undertaking.
Aaron
01:13:12 – 01:13:15
Yeah. Gotta be so big that we'll give up. That's what we
Ian
01:13:15 – 01:13:20
gotta do. Which I give up very easily. So I I'm already happy to give up on Yeah. You're already giving
Aaron
01:13:20 – 01:13:21
up on the idea. Yeah.
Ian
01:13:21 – 01:13:26
I'm already done with the idea. No. I think that I I like this idea. Alright. We will try this.
Ian
01:13:26 – 01:13:26
That's what we're gonna do.
Aaron
01:13:27 – 01:13:30
Dear listener, let us know what you think.
Ian
01:13:30 – 01:13:31
Yeah. We wanna hear about yes.
Aaron
01:13:31 – 01:13:33
Very curious. Will done anything about this.
Ian
01:13:33 – 01:13:39
I want the feedback. Yeah. Would you prefer to pay us $8 a month instead of ads? Would you prefer ads? Would you prefer none of it?
Ian
01:13:39 – 01:13:45
Will you what are your thoughts? Yeah. We've done it. We we really flushed this idea out. So there's a lot of info out there.
Aaron
01:13:45 – 01:13:52
You guys think Ian and I talk all the time. We do. It's just Monday mornings. We talk all the time on Monday mornings.
Ian
01:13:52 – 01:13:55
That's the the the entire extent of our conversation.
Aaron
01:13:57 – 01:13:57
Great.
Ian
01:13:57 – 01:14:01
Little back channel texting here there, but that's it. A little bit. Okay. I don't know. What do what do you want?
Ian
01:14:01 – 01:14:04
You didn't talk about your surgery. Give us at least two seconds of surgery.
Aaron
01:14:05 – 01:14:08
Where where are we at on on Sunday morning?
Ian
01:14:08 – 01:14:09
On the couch with the godfather?
Aaron
01:14:10 – 01:14:13
Hour fifteen. I I knew that I forgot something.
Ian
01:14:13 – 01:14:15
I forgot to watch the godfather. Godfather.
Aaron
01:14:15 – 01:14:29
I knew you were forgot to watch the godfather. So had the surgery on Monday, eight Monday afternoon, and came home. So Monday night, I first of all, laughing gas You're a big fan. Awesome. Big fan.
Aaron
01:14:30 – 01:14:31
Huge fan.
Ian
01:14:32 – 01:14:32
Nice.
Aaron
01:14:33 – 01:14:52
I'm glad it's not readily available because that stuff, I just felt like the king of the world. I was like I was, like, flying through outer space, but in scenes from Interstellar, I'm like Oh, yeah. Pushing on the bookshelf. I'm like Oh, you're not communicating communicating across time. I was like, this is awesome.
Aaron
01:14:52 – 01:15:05
I should do this every day and then realized, oh, that's probably called being addicted to drugs, so I shouldn't do that. But it was awesome. The laughing gas ruled. It did it did wear off, you know, five, ten minutes after, which is great. So I'm not, like, I'm not just I know.
Aaron
01:15:05 – 01:15:20
It's a bummer. I'm not just, like, in a stupor for the rest of the day. Yeah. And then had some, like, you know, whatever, Ibuprofen plus plus, like, whatever is right above Tylenol prescription only. So I I took that for maybe, like, a day or two and then just switched to regular Tylenol.
Aaron
01:15:20 – 01:15:34
Yeah. First night was a little bit rough. Just kinda hard to sleep. But then after that, it it honestly wasn't too bad. I just kinda had to, like, stay in bed and keep keep ice, applied so that yeah.
Aaron
01:15:34 – 01:15:42
Well, this is in detail. It's all good. It is. And it was fine. I, you know, had all these dreams of, like, I'm gonna I'm gonna relax.
Aaron
01:15:43 – 01:15:47
I'm just gonna, like, watch TV. And then I thought, oh, no.
Ian
01:15:47 – 01:15:49
I should I should work on a bunch of stuff.
Aaron
01:15:49 – 01:16:03
And so I think I spent I think I spent much of that time in bed working on, solo, the the two e, because it the that reached a level of, like, like, flow slash obsession that I haven't had in a long time
Ian
01:16:03 – 01:16:03
where
Aaron
01:16:03 – 01:16:19
it's like this freaking rules, and I'm inside the machine. I felt like I was in Tron, like, riding a bike around, like, flipping bits to turn things different colors. So I kinda I kinda burned all my time just working. Mhmm. But it was so fun.
Aaron
01:16:19 – 01:16:27
And so Yeah. Let's see. Monday night, I was in bed Tuesday, Wednesday, and then back at work on on Thursday. Nice. It was fine.
Ian
01:16:27 – 01:16:31
There we go. Yep. Alright. And you're not gonna have any more kids. You're good.
Aaron
01:16:32 – 01:16:38
Oh, god willing. You know, West Boss apparently had a kid four years after his surgery.
Ian
01:16:38 – 01:16:47
We got a few stories about that along with my, you know, people where it actually didn't fully work, which would definitely be a bit of a problem for goodness. A huge
Aaron
01:16:47 – 01:16:47
bit of
Ian
01:16:47 – 01:16:48
a problem.
Aaron
01:16:48 – 01:17:00
I'm I'm, like, I'm very aware that I need to, like, make sure that it took. You know? He's like, wait ten weeks, and then we'll make sure that it took. Right. This whole, like, four years later, it grows back thing.
Ian
01:17:00 – 01:17:05
How can it grow back? How do the tubes reconnect? It doesn't make any sense. I don't see how this even possible.
Aaron
01:17:05 – 01:17:10
It's called science. I don't that's all I know about it. But, yeah, that was terrifying. Oh.
Ian
01:17:11 – 01:17:11
So I
Aaron
01:17:11 – 01:17:23
don't know how you prevent that, but Yeah. I'm definitely going to make sure that it worked because our neighbor didn't make sure that it worked, and they had another kid. Like, yeah, the surgery, and then, like, a year later, they had a you know, they were pregnant.
Ian
01:17:23 – 01:17:26
It was like they didn't even do the surgery or something. It's like Yeah.
Aaron
01:17:26 – 01:17:27
It didn't go so bad.
Ian
01:17:28 – 01:17:28
Just like Put
Aaron
01:17:28 – 01:17:29
them under and woke
Ian
01:17:29 – 01:17:29
them back up.
Aaron
01:17:29 – 01:17:32
It was like, yes. Yeah. It'll be $5,000. Thanks for coming
Ian
01:17:32 – 01:17:37
in. Yeah. Oh, man. Alright. I don't know.
Ian
01:17:37 – 01:17:41
We got a couple other things. Should we do Let's see. Do we should we do lightning round here?
Aaron
01:17:43 – 01:17:50
Yeah. Tell us, you you've you've you've been you've been in and out on markdown. You're just no no no. What's the deal with markdown?
Ian
01:17:50 – 01:17:56
No. I just wanna get your number. I'm I'm markdown math. I've always been marked down math. I mean, it's fine.
Ian
01:17:56 – 01:17:59
Like, I like it for headings. I like it for bolding. That's pretty much it.
Aaron
01:17:59 – 01:18:00
Like, I don't remember
Ian
01:18:00 – 01:18:07
the order of a link. I still to this day, I'm like, is it the parentheses? Is it the brackets? How do you do a link? I don't remember.
Ian
01:18:07 – 01:18:08
Like, with
Aaron
01:18:08 – 01:18:09
a I'll tell you how you remember.
Ian
01:18:09 – 01:18:09
This is
Aaron
01:18:09 – 01:18:27
the only way that this is the only way that I remember. In regular writing, parenthetical expressions are, like, describing, like, by the way, this is kinda what that means. When you're writing markdown, that's exactly what the the parentheses are. It's like, by the way, this is this is where this this links to. That's it.
Aaron
01:18:27 – 01:18:31
Right. So just remember that a parenthesis means, by the way, here's here's where this goes.
Ian
01:18:31 – 01:18:32
Here's what this is.
Aaron
01:18:32 – 01:18:33
Yeah. Exactly.
Ian
01:18:34 – 01:18:36
You know, it didn't you can't go in the world.
Aaron
01:18:36 – 01:18:38
No. You didn't. I got it. It's not for normies.
Ian
01:18:39 – 01:18:44
We have markdown and help spot. Okay? You could choose markdown instead of a WYSIWYG. Guess what? Nobody uses the WYSIWYG.
Aaron
01:18:44 – 01:18:45
Nobody cares.
Ian
01:18:45 – 01:18:53
Everybody uses a WYSIWYG. Yep. So it's just like it's not like you could depend on it. It's not like it's everywhere. It's not like it's there's a nice editor baked into the browser or whatever.
Ian
01:18:53 – 01:19:06
The only good market editor I've ever used my whole life is in the bare notes app, which is very good. That's right. But all the rest of them are terrible. And so it's like there's no good WYSIWYG sort of preview experience. You know, it's fine.
Ian
01:19:06 – 01:19:11
It's fine. But there's always weird fudge case stuff. It just it's fine. It's not great.
Aaron
01:19:11 – 01:19:42
It's fine. The only, I I like as as a kind of a nerd, I like the authoring experience of markdown. I do like that. In a way, it is very tailwindy to me in that I can be writing the code and know basically what it's gonna look like, you know, when it comes out the other side, which is really nice. However, it is extremely limited, and, you know, I use markdown on AaronFrancis.com, but I run it through my own rendering pipeline because I need a bunch of other stuff.
Ian
01:19:42 – 01:19:42
Yeah. Exactly.
Aaron
01:19:42 – 01:19:50
It's like, here, let me hook into this and walk the AST so that I can add stuff. It's like, nope. This is insane. What what are we doing? This is so stupid.
Ian
01:19:50 – 01:19:54
Or you can put HTML in there, but then now I have this gobs of HTML in there,
Aaron
01:19:54 – 01:19:54
which is
Ian
01:19:54 – 01:19:55
all weird. Like It's
Aaron
01:19:55 – 01:19:56
all weird.
Ian
01:19:56 – 01:19:58
Defeats the purpose of this whole thing.
Aaron
01:19:58 – 01:20:08
Yep. I agree. I think, the dream is that markdown will satisfy your text editing needs, in an in an application. And everybody eventually says, like,
Ian
01:20:09 – 01:20:10
we gotta bail out from markdown.
Aaron
01:20:10 – 01:20:25
We need we just need more information in this document that markdown cannot handle without doing goofy stuff. Like, GitHub has invented its own flavored markdown. It's like, oh, now I gotta learn this new, not HTML, not markdown, this new thing. So
Ian
01:20:25 – 01:20:34
Right. That's not gonna be compiled. Half the reason to do this is so, like, I can move this file somewhere else someday, but now you can't because it's in this custom markdown flavor, which won't even work and whatever.
Aaron
01:20:35 – 01:21:02
I do like, Obsidian has a good, interface as well. And if there's a if there's a place for normies to use markdown, in my opinion, it's it's to hide it behind a WYSIWYG style editor. So you all you get is, like, a, you know, a tip tap style toolbar that's, like, h one through six, bold, italic, link, whatever. But under the hood, it uses markdown as, like, the storage mechanism. Yeah.
Aaron
01:21:03 – 01:21:06
But even that, I'm like, I don't know.
Ian
01:21:06 – 01:21:10
I need an app. I've never read a good one of those. Yeah. The bare ones are one good one.
Aaron
01:21:10 – 01:21:12
WYSIWYG is awful too.
Ian
01:21:12 – 01:21:17
No. Yeah. You can't write a WYSIWYG. You would have thought somebody by now, though. It's been thirty years or whatever.
Ian
01:21:17 – 01:21:24
It's been, like, somebody should have written a decent web browser based markdown editor, but there are none. They're all terrible. So
Aaron
01:21:24 – 01:21:39
Well well, if if I'm judging by the, conversation on Twitter, it's easy to do everything with AI now. I could do that in four seconds if I wanted to. Here's the question. Where's all the good software? If it's so easy to make now, where is it?
Ian
01:21:39 – 01:21:46
Alright. Let's go down this path very quickly. AI. I feel like it's got its uses. I think they're very specific uses.
Ian
01:21:46 – 01:21:55
It's very cool, And it's an interesting helper to professionals like that we're seeing in co I think it's great. Like, write these tests for me. I don't wanna write the test. It does a decent job. Tweak to tweak.
Ian
01:21:55 – 01:21:57
Okay. Whatever. Refactor something. Great. Great.
Ian
01:21:57 – 01:22:11
Great. But I just think I I don't know if we're gonna get to where, like, everybody thinks it's going to be where it's, like, ubiquitous, does everything. Like, at least not this version of AI that's just this big pattern matcher, basically. Like Yeah. I don't know.
Ian
01:22:11 – 01:22:24
I just don't think it's gonna like, yeah, it'll it'll infiltrate into into stuff and it'll smooth over edges places, which will be incredibly valuable and unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in value. I'm not doubting that. Mhmm. But it's not gonna be like, oh, yeah. Write this app and it just does the whole thing.
Ian
01:22:24 – 01:22:33
It's all perfect. And that's just even software, which has been highly specialized for. You know, if you get into other fields where it's not Right. Specialized, it's gonna be even less capable. So
Aaron
01:22:34 – 01:22:45
Yes. Fully agree. I am not I am not an AI doomer, but I fully I fully agree. I just don't think I mean, there's just so much of, like, building a product that is taste and
Ian
01:22:45 – 01:22:45
Yeah.
Aaron
01:22:45 – 01:22:59
To say nothing of, like, the underlying infrastructure, which itself includes taste. Like, the underlying code, I think, needs to be tasteful in my opinion. Mhmm. A lot of people agree with that. But the product, even the facade, like, the top level of the product, you have to have a little bit of taste.
Aaron
01:22:59 – 01:23:18
And so if you tell an AI, like, hey. Do this. It's gonna do it, but it might it might not be a good product. And I think that's where a lot of people are are too optimistic where I can say, hey. Create me an app, and it's gonna be this great usable app that covers all the edge cases and fundamentally understands how a human would interact with this thing.
Aaron
01:23:18 – 01:23:41
I think it's just gonna miss that. What it is great for is when you're trying to figure out what the hell ANSI codes are, and there's been fifty years of writing about these ANSI escape sequences and how terminals work. And so you can just go ask the GPT, like, what what does this mean? And it can pull, like it can it's basically my research assistant, and it can pull it all in. And I can say, great.
Aaron
01:23:41 – 01:23:45
Can you write me a regex that, captures this for me?
Ian
01:23:45 – 01:23:46
Boom.
Aaron
01:23:46 – 01:23:58
Done. It's great. But then I still have to, like, do all the logic and reasoning and come back and say, oh, actually, can you adjust the regex for, to include the seven and eight instead of just a through z? It's like, sure. Yeah.
Aaron
01:23:58 – 01:24:08
I can do that. But I had to know that that was necessary. So I think it's incredibly valuable, but, no, Alexa, make me an app. I not we're not there yet.
Ian
01:24:08 – 01:24:19
Yeah. Yeah. And even in the business use it's like even with HelpSpot, like, customer service is, like, the most straightforward use case. And it's not like I mean, we get people asking about it because HelpSpot has a sprinkling AI. It doesn't do, like, the auto responding stuff.
Ian
01:24:19 – 01:24:36
But it's not like, oh, every customer is out our door and being like, you don't have AI. This is we we have to have it or we're leaving. It's like I don't know. And so also because it's the kind of thing where, like, in software, you also have an advantage of, like, it does something slightly wrong. You will eventually find it and fix the wrong thing as the human.
Ian
01:24:36 – 01:24:46
Yes. And then it's done and it's fixed and it works. Yeah. Like, the customer service, just as one example, goes on forever. And if two percent of the time, it just answers wrong, that's kinda bad.
Aaron
01:24:46 – 01:24:47
That's kind of bad.
Ian
01:24:47 – 01:24:55
And, you know, so even though a human answers wrong sometimes too, the AI is not I think there's just something different about that aspect of it.
Aaron
01:24:55 – 01:25:16
Here's here's what it is, and here's the reason I like AI as a helper for coding is the the problem, in my opinion, with these language models is they're not deterministic. So you could ask it the same thing 10 times and get 11 different answers. Frustrating. However, if the answer that it gives you is code, code is deterministic. And so you take that code and you put it in your application.
Aaron
01:25:16 – 01:25:18
It either works or it doesn't.
Ian
01:25:18 – 01:25:18
Right.
Aaron
01:25:18 – 01:25:31
But it's not gonna work. You know, it's not gonna mutate over time. And that's the part where I feel a little wonky about is like, hey. Let me just feed something to the AI and then turn around and feed it back to the user. It's like
Ian
01:25:31 – 01:25:33
Hope that goes well.
Aaron
01:25:33 – 01:25:43
Rather I would rather have the AI help me create a deterministic system that I can then trust and count on and test and that sort of thing.
Ian
01:25:43 – 01:25:50
Yeah. Yeah. Or even, like, for writing, it's the say that same thing I got. It's producing writing, and I can decide if it's good or not good. And I can tweak it, and then it's done.
Ian
01:25:50 – 01:25:55
It's set. I ship that to the world and whatever I'm writing or whatever. So alright. I like it. Alright.
Ian
01:25:55 – 01:25:59
So you have a busy Monday. That's why we're actually recording this on Friday because you're gonna be so busy Monday.
Aaron
01:25:59 – 01:26:00
Super excited. Know if you
Ian
01:26:00 – 01:26:02
have that on the list. What's what's busy Monday?
Aaron
01:26:03 – 01:26:17
We are producing our first guest course, and an instructor is coming here to Dallas to record in the studio next week. Woah. Yeah. So we're doing a, a SQLite on Rails course. Oh.
Aaron
01:26:17 – 01:26:30
And it's gonna be very it's not necessarily, like, just SQLite and how to use it in Rails. Basically, it's gonna be, like, how to build an application quickly using SQLite and Rails.
Ian
01:26:31 – 01:26:31
Okay.
Aaron
01:26:31 – 01:26:51
And so, yeah, a guy named Stephen Marheim is gonna come here next week, stay in a hotel in Dallas. He's gonna come to the studio every day, and we're gonna we're gonna create a freaking course. And so it's very it's very exciting. This is like, this is this is a little bit of an experiment. We're gonna see if it works.
Aaron
01:26:52 – 01:27:22
And so he is, he's, I think, the perfect person to test with because not only does he know SQLite super well and rails, he's got he's got great standing in the community. He's very conscientious, very thoughtful. And so, in terms of, like, the vibe, I think the vibe is right. It's just gonna be interesting to see how we, like, I'll be sitting out there in the other room probably just, like, quietly working while he's in here recording, and it's gonna be fun. So, yeah, he'll be here all all next week.
Ian
01:27:22 – 01:27:27
So he's already done the prep work. Like, he has what he wants to do in his video, and all that stuff is is ready. Yeah.
Aaron
01:27:27 – 01:27:54
So we've been working together just a little bit. Like, he put together an outline, and then he and I, you know, had a two hour call and just, like, talked through it and kinda, like, changed the framing a little bit. And so now it feels like he's ready to go. And so, he's given a few talks recently on, SQLite on Rails, and so he's like his mind has been working on that, and now it's just coalescing into these into these videos next week. So it's,
Ian
01:27:54 – 01:28:06
This is another good timing thing too because I feel like Rails is really like you know, Laravel's adopted SQLite, but Rails is, like, really like it is the future. We talk about it constantly. DHA just talking about it constantly.
Aaron
01:28:06 – 01:28:07
If you don't use it.
Ian
01:28:07 – 01:28:21
Right. Like, it is like we've changed the framework heavily to be, like, sequel like focus. Like, it's really onboarded fully. So, yeah, it seems like that'll be good timing if you guys get that out here in the next month or whatever, six weeks, or however long it's gonna take to edit. But,
Aaron
01:28:22 – 01:28:30
it it's it'll be out in the new year, so we're gonna Okay. We're gonna take it a little bit slow. Okay. But, yeah, I think I think the conversation is is moving that direction.
Ian
01:28:31 – 01:28:35
Nice. Yeah. So you're gonna use your studio Uh-huh. Your spot. Nice.
Aaron
01:28:35 – 01:28:50
Yep. We thought about pushing it off to the new year, but, you know, if we get the warehouse on January 1, it's gonna take four weeks to get all this crap moved over, set up, and new background, invent a new background from scratch. Like Right. Let's just do it here.
Ian
01:28:50 – 01:29:00
Just do it there. I totally the way to go. Then it's just in the can and, like, whenever you use it and get it out. But, like, yeah. And you don't want that pressure of, like, the new places where you can be like, I'm getting started on whatever you're focusing on that and not, like, always
Aaron
01:29:00 – 01:29:01
Exactly.
Ian
01:29:01 – 01:29:02
Deadline person gonna come
Aaron
01:29:02 – 01:29:03
in. Exactly.
Ian
01:29:04 – 01:29:09
They're trying to do stuff fast and quick. So Yep. Because we wanna see you building sets. We want video. I know.
Ian
01:29:09 – 01:29:13
I know. I know. That's what I want. Coming. Alright.
Aaron
01:29:13 – 01:29:13
It's coming.
Ian
01:29:13 – 01:29:17
Forward to it. Alright. I think I was going. Let's leave
Aaron
01:29:17 – 01:29:29
it there. The thing that I want people to do is tell us what they think about the slash sponsorship or slash sponsor idea. That's what I really want. If you take one thing away from this, tell us your opinion on that, please.
Ian
01:29:29 – 01:29:48
Yeah. If you're a business owner or marketer, would you use that? And then, obviously, just as a listener of the show, would you wanna pay to be due for whatever bonus stuff we might do? That kind of thing. So, yeah, any feedback on that whole conversation would be really cool.
Ian
01:29:48 – 01:29:51
I love putting these things at the end of the episode. That's how we know here we are.
Aaron
01:29:51 – 01:29:52
Those are the real ones.
Ian
01:29:52 – 01:29:57
That's right. The real ones. Alright. Thanks, everybody. If you got this far, you know where to follow us.
Ian
01:29:57 – 01:30:04
But, hey, follow us on mostlytechnical.com at mostly tech pod. We're also mostly technical on, blue sky.
Aaron
01:30:04 – 01:30:05
You've never heard of it.
Ian
01:30:05 – 01:30:15
Most technical dot com And, mostly technical podcast at Gmail dot com. And we will be back next week. Talk to you later.
Aaron
01:30:15 – 01:30:16
See you.
Me

Thanks for reading! My name is Aaron and I write, make videos, and generally try really hard.

If you ever have any questions or want to chat, I'm always on Twitter.

You can find me on YouTube on my personal channel or the Try Hard Studios channel.

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