Aaron Francis

Ian and Aaron discuss Ian's trip to Disney World, Aaron's adventures with Reddit & Hacker News, building a new billing system, and so much more. Sponsored by: Bento https://bentonow.com/ Stream https://getstream.io/chat/?utm_source... Laravel Cloud https://cloud.laravel.com/ PHP Tek 2025 https://phptek.io/ Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical? Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more. Chapters: 00:00 Disney World 16:42 Follow Up on Last Week's Episode 21:44 Follow Up on Aaron's Newsletter 25:39 Bookmarking Situation 39:36 Reddit & Hacker News 52:09 Building a Billing System 01:17:20 Follow Up On Monarch

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Transcript

Aaron

00:00:00 – 00:00:02

Hello? Welcome back, sir. How was it?

Ian

00:00:02 – 00:00:04

Oh, it's good. Disney.

Aaron

00:00:04 – 00:00:06

Are you tired and broke now?

Ian

00:00:07 – 00:00:15

Yes. That's exactly right. That is the perfect way to put it. Wow. You really got your finger on the pulse this morning.

Ian

00:00:15 – 00:00:16

Tired and broke. That's the whole

Aaron

00:00:16 – 00:00:18

Disney thing, man. That's the promise.

Ian

00:00:19 – 00:00:25

Yeah. It really is. But, no. I love Disney. It's I've been trying to get back there for I couldn't believe how long it's been.

Ian

00:00:25 – 00:00:40

My daughter was, like, four or five last time we went, and now she's turning 12 next week's. Been a while. But, yeah, it was awesome. I think I've talked about something here before. We do this thing where when each kid turned 12, we give them a big trip with just one of us.

Ian

00:00:40 – 00:00:46

So this is the final one. She's the last one turned 12. So it's Kinda sad. And yeah. I know.

Ian

00:00:46 – 00:00:55

I was like, well but then then then the oldest one's kinda old, so I'm like, we can't even there's not, like, another number to pick unless we do, like, you know, the 22 year old trip or something, which I don't

Aaron

00:00:55 – 00:00:57

know. Man. Yeah.

Ian

00:00:57 – 00:01:13

So my daughter thought maybe the 13 year old trip would be good, then she would she would get that. And no the boys wouldn't, but, that would be unfair. So, yeah, it was cool. We did did Disney, had fun. When we go somewhere with one kid, it's just, like, it's magical.

Ian

00:01:13 – 00:01:29

Just no arguing about what to eat, where to go, and, like, just do what they wanna do. And yeah. So it's been really cool to do these and, definitely recommend even if it's not a huge trip. Just anytime you can take one of the kids to do something. And you're gonna you're gonna have that's a that's a lot when you have four.

Aaron

00:01:30 – 00:01:30

Challenge. Yeah.

Ian

00:01:30 – 00:01:38

It's challenging. But whenever you can grab one you know, like I said, we've always been years apart. But whenever you can grab one to do something, it's pretty great.

Aaron

00:01:39 – 00:01:46

Yeah. We can't even do the, everybody does something solo on their birthday thing. We don't have any solo birthdays. Not a single one.

Ian

00:01:46 – 00:01:54

Wow. Yeah. That's man, you might need to come up with something. What about, you know, those people I'm the one of these people. Those people who do the half half year birthdays or whatever.

Ian

00:01:54 – 00:02:01

You do the you know? You could do a move with the birthdays of one of each twin. Be like, get a special day, six months out.

Aaron

00:02:01 – 00:02:02

Yeah.

Ian

00:02:02 – 00:02:03

So I'll put Yeah.

Aaron

00:02:03 – 00:02:11

We'll see. I don't know. We'll have to we'll have to come up with something. Maybe we could do, like, I don't know, a trip. I don't know.

Ian

00:02:11 – 00:02:15

Would it be, like, Saturdays and Sunday? Just break it up, like, you get a separate little Yeah. Party for each one.

Aaron

00:02:16 – 00:02:25

Like, break it up mom and dad, but a full trip with just one parent is less fun, I think. Like, I think part of the fun would be both parents give you full attention.

Ian

00:02:25 – 00:02:30

Oh, that's impossible. You're not gonna be able to do that. We we just do the one parent. Yeah. One parent, one kid, off you go.

Ian

00:02:30 – 00:02:38

It is unfortunate because then the other parents sort of left out of it, but trying to do both both parents with one kid. Now you're just talking. Now you're crazy talk.

Aaron

00:02:38 – 00:02:42

Yeah. Seems a little gratuitous, doesn't it? Come on. Hey. You're never doing that.

Aaron

00:02:42 – 00:02:43

Much.

Ian

00:02:43 – 00:02:49

That's just never gonna happen. Like, the don't even pretend you're gonna do that. But, yeah, I know. It's definitely worth doing. Definitely awesome.

Ian

00:02:49 – 00:03:03

Especially, yeah, you with the twins. I mean, even, like, doing a breakfast or something with just one of them as they get a little bit bigger, you know, I think that could be cool. Get a little alone time instead of always treating them as a unit, which I'm sure is I presume is sort of the natural state. When you It is.

Aaron

00:03:03 – 00:03:06

Every Saturday, I take both big kids to breakfast.

Ian

00:03:06 – 00:03:13

Right. Exactly. Yeah. So we're you know, once in a while, break one out to do something special, but it's hard to reset the babies and stuff too. So

Aaron

00:03:13 – 00:03:14

Yeah. It is.

Ian

00:03:14 – 00:03:16

As they get bigger, it'll be a little bit easier.

Aaron

00:03:16 – 00:03:19

And I heard I heard everyone was at Disney. You saw everyone there.

Ian

00:03:19 – 00:03:35

Disney was yeah. Well, it was super busy because it's, like, spring break in parts of the country and Brutal. So that was it's definitely the busiest I've ever been it's ever been when I've been to Disney. And, and in our trip, we were supposed to do the the trips been planned for a long time. And my daughter got sick.

Ian

00:03:35 – 00:03:43

So we canceled the trip, but then she got better. So we put the trip back on, but I'd already canceled the trip. So now, like, all my prearranged stuff was all gone. I couldn't get back.

Aaron

00:03:43 – 00:03:44

Oh, no.

Ian

00:03:44 – 00:03:59

So it was super busy, but it ended up not being terrible because she all all of a sudden became roller coaster girl and wanted to roller coaster. So I wouldn't have even pre picked roller coaster stuff. I don't know. I so it was fine. We waited on some long lines, so it was cool.

Ian

00:03:59 – 00:04:12

We did some roller coasters. I don't do the very biggest ones because I'm not, like, really into the roller coasters. So she waited online. I waited sometimes with her. Sometimes she waited on her own, which was so big kiddish of her off on the roller coaster line by herself.

Ian

00:04:12 – 00:04:26

We did yeah. Yeah. I would say if you are going to Disney, you really enjoyed the slinky dog, seven dwarves, Great stuff. That's my level of roller coasters that kinda, like, modest, themed, smooth. Those were really fun.

Ian

00:04:26 – 00:04:33

But, yeah. It was great. Yeah. I saw, Will King. Saw, didn't see Caleb Porzio, but he

Aaron

00:04:33 – 00:04:36

Best ships in the night. You guys were at the same place.

Ian

00:04:36 – 00:04:43

We were at the same we did this huge thing. We're at the same place. It's, you know, likely to see somebody. Yes. We were right at the same place.

Ian

00:04:43 – 00:04:50

I posted a picture of myself at that place, and he's like, hey. I'm here. But I had posted the picture, you know, when we got back to the hotel. So it was too late. Did

Aaron

00:04:50 – 00:04:52

you just bump into Will King?

Ian

00:04:52 – 00:04:52

Or did

Aaron

00:04:52 – 00:04:53

you, like

Ian

00:04:53 – 00:05:05

just legit he walked by. I wouldn't have I I can't look at other people when I'm like I was like, I was totally in the zone. My daughter, I wasn't really paying attention, so I would've never seen him, but he saw me. I was like, Ian. I'm like, oh, shit.

Ian

00:05:05 – 00:05:07

And we never met in person. So that was

Aaron

00:05:07 – 00:05:07

really believable.

Ian

00:05:08 – 00:05:19

Really, good of him to be able to pick me out of the crowd so easily. So met his wife. They were very nice. Met one of their, children who was up on the shoulders, you know, little kids style.

Aaron

00:05:19 – 00:05:21

Classic dad.

Ian

00:05:21 – 00:05:23

Yeah. Yeah. Good dad stuff. Had a little You

Aaron

00:05:23 – 00:05:33

had a big dad badge going on too. I saw you had a floppy hat on, floppy sun hat. That's the most that's the most dad thing I can imagine. It's a big, fluffy hat.

Ian

00:05:33 – 00:05:42

Hat. And I was like, you know, it's like, first of all, I'm tall. Right? I'm putting on sunscreen in general. I've just have an innate hate of the sunscreen because it's just like Wait.

Aaron

00:05:42 – 00:05:44

Wait. Wait. Back up. Yeah. I'm tall.

Aaron

00:05:44 – 00:05:55

Yeah. Putting on sunscreen in general. Connect those connect those dots for me. It's hard to get your arms up to the great heights of your head, or what is it about being tall So that makes sunscreen difficult.

Ian

00:05:55 – 00:05:57

You have a lot of body surface. Right? So,

Aaron

00:05:57 – 00:06:01

like Mostly covered in clothes unless there's something about tall people I'm I'm still missing.

Ian

00:06:01 – 00:06:08

No. No. No. But you're you're you're you're talking about specific instance. I'm saying I have a deep rooted dislocation

Aaron

00:06:08 – 00:06:08

Okay.

Ian

00:06:09 – 00:06:12

From the years of, like, okay. I'm at the beach. Okay. Take off my shirt. Okay.

Ian

00:06:12 – 00:06:16

Sunscreen. Well, this is, like, a fifteen minute process as I try to get everywhere. Yes.

Aaron

00:06:16 – 00:06:18

My back goes on for miles. Yeah.

Ian

00:06:18 – 00:06:27

Right. Exactly. I see. Now it's a little better because now they have better spray ones than they used to, and they're not as oily and gross. So, like, it's definitely improved in recent years, but it's still annoying.

Aaron

00:06:28 – 00:06:32

Here's an idea. Sunscreen for tall people. We're we'll come back to it, but this is a great idea.

Ian

00:06:32 – 00:06:38

I love this idea. This is a great idea. A roller system where it's There you go. Just roll or you can lean up against it and, like, roll

Aaron

00:06:38 – 00:06:39

quick and get done

Ian

00:06:39 – 00:06:40

in a swipe.

Aaron

00:06:41 – 00:06:44

God. We should be charging for this kinda Yeah. I like it. Ideas. This is great.

Aaron

00:06:44 – 00:06:44

Someone's

Ian

00:06:44 – 00:06:46

gonna get rich off one of these ideas. So

Aaron

00:06:46 – 00:06:49

you're anti sunscreen because of the great surface area.

Ian

00:06:49 – 00:06:58

So I just have, like, the, little phobia or whatever you wanna call it. So and it's just annoying. You're going to a park. I'm not thinking about, like, the beach. I don't wanna, like, be, like, you know, all the sunscreen.

Ian

00:06:59 – 00:07:00

K. So we the first day, you're

Aaron

00:07:00 – 00:07:03

talking about compelling, but I'm I'm gonna keep I'm gonna go with it.

Ian

00:07:03 – 00:07:17

Keep going. To these things, which is like the mega mall thing. And and, yeah, I found I saw this hat, and I was like, this hat is perfect. It's, like, got the big brim, huge brim, and floppy Huge. Huge brim.

Ian

00:07:17 – 00:07:24

It just covers my whole head. Embarrassing the large brim. It it was totally embarrassing, this hat. Right? I was like, I'm there you go.

Ian

00:07:24 – 00:07:37

My sunscreen issue solved. They've got to do the tip of my nose, but I don't have to, like, do the whole neck and the rigmarole. And it was great. My daughter didn't even complain. She was so used to the, like, weird dad vibes I already have that she wasn't like You already jumped

Aaron

00:07:37 – 00:07:39

the shark into dad territory. It's fine.

Ian

00:07:40 – 00:07:48

She wasn't, like, overly embarrassed. She was more embarrassed by all kinds of other stuff I was doing. So, like, the hat wasn't even, like, on our radar. So, yeah, it was great. The hat was perfect.

Ian

00:07:48 – 00:07:56

I highly recommend Ron John Surf Shop. Twenty four bucks. Big floppy hat. If you're at Disney, definitely pick one of those up. Yeah.

Ian

00:07:56 – 00:08:02

So he, did he have a hat? I don't know if he had a hat. He had a kid. I don't think he I don't think Bill had a hat. But, yeah, the big floppy hat.

Ian

00:08:02 – 00:08:06

Saw Will. That was good. I don't know where we're going with the hat story, but

Aaron

00:08:07 – 00:08:09

Who who knows? Who knows, man? Yeah.

Ian

00:08:09 – 00:08:13

It it was great. Go to Disney. I have a couple tricks I wanted to share.

Aaron

00:08:14 – 00:08:15

I would love a trick.

Ian

00:08:15 – 00:08:30

Or considering going to Disney. I'd say I got two two tricks, that came they're about kind of the same thing. It evolved over time. So the first trick is you're going to Disney and well, okay. I have I have three tricks.

Ian

00:08:30 – 00:08:31

Oh, wow. I thought

Aaron

00:08:31 – 00:08:35

that was a given. Okay. So we're already stalling out at you're going to Disney.

Ian

00:08:35 – 00:08:37

Oh, yeah. This whole podcast just gives

Aaron

00:08:37 – 00:08:38

me Yeah. Yeah. Let's try it again.

Ian

00:08:38 – 00:09:00

Tips and tricks. This is this is just a money hack, but if you're going to Disney, the best day we had at Disney was, usually on Wednesdays, they have special hours at night at Magic Kingdom. So from, like, ten to midnight, it's only for people staying in the deluxe hotels. K. So you just have more of the place all to yourself.

Ian

00:09:00 – 00:09:21

And even when it's really busy, it's not that busy at night in this ten to twelve. So we had actually rented a car and gone out to this equine center in the morning on Wednesday and saw the best horse jumper equine people in the world, which was cool. Came back, went to the park, spent all day at the park. So it was like a 6AM to like 2AM day where we were like, did the whole thing, but it was really

Aaron

00:09:21 – 00:09:23

cool. Brutal. Just brutal.

Ian

00:09:23 – 00:09:32

So if you have the means, stay at the deluxe hotel. There are other perks with it too, but that was a really cool one I never taken advantage of before. I didn't know if they had it before, but just nice to have the park.

Aaron

00:09:32 – 00:09:38

So I thought this was gonna be a money saving hack, but this is a way to hack something else by spending money.

Ian

00:09:38 – 00:09:39

There's no money saving.

Aaron

00:09:39 – 00:09:41

There's no money saving on the table. Yeah.

Ian

00:09:41 – 00:10:11

There's only there's only spending money. A little bit of a money saving hack in this regard is that a little bit of a trick with the deluxe hotels, and this is where we stayed is there's a hotel group called the Swan Dolphin and Swan Reserve, which are actually the only hotels that are on property and that are considered deluxe, which are not run by Disney and they're run by Marriott. So it's so it's more of a real hotel, I would say. It's more of a business hotel kind of, but it still caters good to kids. You could use Marriott points there and things like that.

Ian

00:10:11 – 00:10:28

So if if you're like a Marriott person, you could save some money. It's also generally a little cheaper than the Disney properties anyway. So cost wise, it was still less expensive than the place we had been planning to stay, which was the Polynesian. So it is a little bit of money hack, but it still is expensive. But it has a

Aaron

00:10:28 – 00:10:30

lot of benefits. I don't buy it. What's hack number two?

Ian

00:10:30 – 00:10:40

Hack number two is alright. So you're at Disney magic kingdom. It's kind of the main park. Right? Like the other parks have their little things, but Magic Kingdom's the one, it's a castle.

Ian

00:10:41 – 00:10:55

It's got most of the biggest, best ride. But so one of the things now with Disney is like, you take, you could take the Ubers around and Ubers are great. Because like in the past you had to like, you know, take the bus system or if you're on certain resorts, you do the monorail, whatever, but it's a law indirect and it's,

Aaron

00:10:55 – 00:10:57

it's public transportation. I mean, yeah, right.

Ian

00:10:58 – 00:11:11

This is America. So, and that there is no they're not official Disney buses at the Swan And Dolphin. So they have some buses that take you, but the timing's all weird and whatever. So we were using the Ubers. And Uber's

Aaron

00:11:11 – 00:11:17

fine By the way, all of this sounds like a nightmare to me. All of this. Every every bit of this planning, this hacking

Ian

00:11:17 – 00:11:17

Yeah.

Aaron

00:11:18 – 00:11:25

Like, duh, you take a bus. Now you take an Uber. Now you run this hotel, and you sneak in at night. All of this sounds like a nightmare. So keep going.

Aaron

00:11:25 – 00:11:26

But this is awesome.

Ian

00:11:26 – 00:11:36

It is awesome when you're there, and it's not as bad. I have to say that it was almost better. It's bad worse in certain ways, but it is nice that we didn't really plan for it because we canceled the trip. We're like, we're not going. Yeah.

Ian

00:11:36 – 00:11:45

And then we're like, oh, shit. We're going tomorrow. Like, we just were like, we're gonna do it. So they actually kind of made it a freeing sort of trip because, like, nothing was planned. And we're just

Aaron

00:11:45 – 00:11:46

I see

Ian

00:11:46 – 00:12:00

vibe vibe traveling Disney where it's like today we're going here. Okay. Let's get an Uber and we're going there and like, that's it. So it was, it was actually kind of cool. But yeah, so the thing with Magic Kingdom is the other parks, the Uber could just drop you off right out front.

Ian

00:12:00 – 00:12:00

Correct.

Aaron

00:12:00 – 00:12:00

Yep.

Ian

00:12:00 – 00:12:06

Magic Kingdom, it can't. It has to drop you off, like, miles away, like on the other side of this lake. Sure. Of

Aaron

00:12:06 – 00:12:06

course. Yeah.

Ian

00:12:06 – 00:12:22

And then how do you even get there? You have to walk miles or you have to, like, take, this tram thing that whatever. It's a bit it's a big disaster. But if you're willing to take out your credit card, you could take a minivan, mini being like Minnie Mouse. Uh-uh.

Ian

00:12:22 – 00:12:41

And a minivan is a Lyft that's operated by Disney. And so it's, like, three times the price of what the Uber would have cost cost you or a regular Lyft, but it can drop you off right in front. So when you or I could pick you up right in front. So when it's two, 01:30 in the morning and you're trying to leave, you just want the minivan to come get you

Aaron

00:12:41 – 00:12:42

like that. $60 to have

Ian

00:12:42 – 00:12:43

It just paid

Aaron

00:12:43 – 00:12:44

$45 Yeah.

Ian

00:12:45 – 00:12:49

To take you back in a giant suburban for you and your 12 year old daughter to drive you back.

Aaron

00:12:49 – 00:12:58

It's just shocking to me that you were trying to ever convince me that going to Disney is awesome. Every part of this sounds like a sloth. That's great. Every part of it.

Ian

00:12:58 – 00:13:04

They have the the the minivans have car seats. It's perfect for you. It's a suburban that could fit your whole crew.

Aaron

00:13:04 – 00:13:06

Yeah. For $60, it better be.

Ian

00:13:06 – 00:13:12

No. You gotta I mean, Disney is not a place. It's not a cheap vacation. You're going there. You know, you're just spending a few bucks.

Ian

00:13:13 – 00:13:19

Okay. So now I have a modified version of that hack, which is for you if you Okay. You wanna be on a little more budget. Right? The Yeah.

Aaron

00:13:19 – 00:13:20

The greatest hack is to

Ian

00:13:20 – 00:13:21

stay home,

Aaron

00:13:21 – 00:13:22

but yeah. Okay. Keep keep going.

Ian

00:13:22 – 00:13:35

We we didn't find this out till the last night, of course, because this is how things always go with money. Right? You're spending the money all all the time, then you save some money on the last night. The last night we're leaving late again. And, the minivans were, like, we're trying to leave, like, after the fireworks.

Ian

00:13:36 – 00:13:45

Everybody wants their minivans. Right? So we couldn't get a mini van. So we're like, okay. We had to ask a guy, like, how do we get over to the thing so we can get a Uber to make a two mile walker?

Ian

00:13:45 – 00:13:51

So he tells us how to do that. But he's like, here's another thing you can do what I tell people. If you're up for it My friend,

Aaron

00:13:51 – 00:13:53

get into my van.

Ian

00:13:53 – 00:14:09

Go this other way. You could go to the you can walk from Magic Kingdom to the Contemporary Resort, which is the closest resort to Magic Kingdom. And it's like, maybe less than ten minute walk. And from there, you could just get an Uber. So that's what we did.

Ian

00:14:09 – 00:14:31

And then instead of $45, we paid $12 or whatever, and we paid the Uber ride. We walked to the continent, the, the, contemporary, got an Uber and it was great. So if you're going to Magic Kingdom, drop off, pick up at the contemporary, you pay regular cheap Uber prices. You make the little eight minute walk into Magic Kingdom and you're all set. So that is my hack.

Aaron

00:14:31 – 00:14:34

Well, that sounds great. I'm not doing any of that, but that sounds awesome.

Ian

00:14:34 – 00:14:35

You gotta do it.

Aaron

00:14:35 – 00:14:35

I'm not doing

Ian

00:14:35 – 00:14:44

it. The kids love it. Your little kids, not yet. The younger two or two young, like two or three years, you make the pilgrimage, you're gonna have a great time. It's so good.

Aaron

00:14:44 – 00:14:46

I don't know. I don't buy it.

Ian

00:14:46 – 00:14:55

Place where the little kids are, like, actually engaged and like everything. Let me tell you. You're not gonna find that. When you go to the beach, It's freaking miserable. Okay?

Ian

00:14:55 – 00:15:08

Because everybody's like a board and they're eating the sand and, like right. When you do those kind of trips, they're just not that much fun. A place where it's like, we're going to see the princess and we're going to do this and that. And the little rides that are all built for them and you could spin in the little teacup and all the stuff. It's great.

Ian

00:15:08 – 00:15:13

And pools, when you do wanna have a pool day or a fake beach, they got the fake beach. All this stuff.

Aaron

00:15:13 – 00:15:23

Yeah. It is tough because I'm not taking them skiing, at least not for a super long time. Skiing is monumentally expensive Oh, yeah. And a massive schlep. The beach is tough.

Aaron

00:15:23 – 00:15:40

The beach is tough because unless you get something, like, very expensive where the house is literally on the beach, you're again schlepping. And the schlep factor just goes up when you have, you know, multiple kids. And so you're you're schlepping everything. You got all their toys. You've got the sunscreen roller for the tall people.

Aaron

00:15:40 – 00:15:51

You're just you're schlepping. And Yep. So that just leaves that just leaves, like, I don't know if you've seen these wander houses. It's like Airbnb, but centrally managed and better. Oh.

Aaron

00:15:51 – 00:16:04

I think that could be something that's that's viable. They're, like, in these beautiful locations. They usually have a pool right off the living room. They usually have, like, you know, eight, ten bedrooms or something. And so we could do, like, a family trip there.

Ian

00:16:04 – 00:16:22

I just could tell you the thing is that the kids get bored very easily. And then you don't feel like you're on vacation when the kids are bored. Because either a, they're just on the screens, which makes it you're, like, get off your freaking screens and come on vacation for you to be, like, in your screens or not. Right? Or they're complaining because they're bored, and they're like, we're bored.

Ian

00:16:22 – 00:16:33

And or they're doing stupid stuff because they're bored, and they're fighting, whatever. So, like, to find activity for four little kids where they're all engaged, there's a very small number of those things out there. Disney's one of them.

Aaron

00:16:33 – 00:16:40

Yeah. Disney Disney may be one of them, but I will find the other one. That's for sure. Well, I'm glad you had fun.

Ian

00:16:40 – 00:16:40

Glad it was a

Aaron

00:16:40 – 00:16:41

good trip.

Ian

00:16:41 – 00:16:42

It was great.

Aaron

00:16:42 – 00:16:45

Did you listen did you listen to last week's episode yet?

Ian

00:16:45 – 00:16:49

No. I'm totally unprepared. I haven't listened. I know. You know, I thought it was two hours.

Ian

00:16:49 – 00:16:55

I was like, man, I'm gonna have to, like, make the the flight's not even two hours. So I was like, when am I gonna listen to it? So I haven't even

Aaron

00:16:55 – 00:16:59

standing in line for a single ride, you couldn't listen to the whole thing.

Ian

00:16:59 – 00:17:09

No. I was engaged with my child, so I couldn't come to listening. Yes. I I it was sort of my plan when she was on her own, but then she actually, I waited in line with her a lot, so I didn't actually have that.

Aaron

00:17:09 – 00:17:11

You missed a good one. You missed a good episode.

Ian

00:17:12 – 00:17:21

Oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna listen. Don't worry. But it sounded like I heard the reviews were good. Sounded like, Jordan dropped a lot of knowledge on the people.

Aaron

00:17:21 – 00:17:29

He came he came super prepared. I started off with let's talk bad about Ian, and Jordan said, we can't talk bad about Ian because he's not here. So, you know, he's a man of integrity.

Ian

00:17:30 – 00:17:30

Oh, man.

Aaron

00:17:31 – 00:17:31

I know.

Ian

00:17:32 – 00:17:32

Beer trap.

Aaron

00:17:32 – 00:17:39

I was like, there goes all my content. What else am I gonna talk about? That was the whole thing. Guess I'll put these Trello cards away.

Ian

00:17:40 – 00:17:48

Well, you know, he didn't, you know, he is a podcaster who has been out in the wilderness for a couple months now, so he probably had a lot of pent up things in

Aaron

00:17:48 – 00:17:48

his

Ian

00:17:49 – 00:17:58

his chest there. So, was there a big a big takeaway I should focus on from the podcast when I listen? Is there something that we could, riff on here?

Aaron

00:17:58 – 00:18:33

I think it was it was very we got a lot of, Jordan's story and insights into building his new AI assisted call service. And just super fun to hear, like, finding product market fit from somebody who's just, like, in the middle of it and on maybe on the other side in a good way of it. It reminded me a lot of old school, art of product with Ben Orenstein and Derek Reimer when Ben was building Tupelo and Derek was building SavvyCal. And every week was just like, oh, I think we got some new customers. Oh, I quoted instead of 200, I quoted 2,000, and they said, sure.

Aaron

00:18:33 – 00:18:36

And I was like, this is this is such good content.

Ian

00:18:37 – 00:18:37

Yeah.

Aaron

00:18:37 – 00:18:43

So it felt like a little bit of the glory days of the ride along podcasts. So it was great. Super fun.

Ian

00:18:43 – 00:19:04

One of the things I did listen to, I think it might have been before your guys' podcast was, Stratechery. I don't know if you follow Ben Thompson Stratechery, but one of my favorite sort of newsletters. And so he does it as a audio thing too. Mostly, I just read the newsletter. But he did a interview with, Sam Altman.

Ian

00:19:04 – 00:19:32

Mhmm. And this is sort of interesting or, like, with this AI stuff of, like, how much they're gonna get involved in certain types of things, like, how much they're gonna try to take over for themselves of, like, aging the AI apps. And, definitely sounds like he has some plans there. So that's gonna be kind of interesting thing. And all this all the apps that are built on top of AI, it's like, what's gonna be left for the that next layer up of, like

Aaron

00:19:32 – 00:19:34

I know. The big fish is gonna layer.

Ian

00:19:34 – 00:19:49

Yeah. The big fish is gonna take its chunk of the big chunks, but then how much is left for yeah. You're all you're in enough of a niche that they're not gonna build, you know, into the core product, what your Yeah. Your app does if you're niche down, you know, in the right spot. So

Aaron

00:19:50 – 00:20:02

He seems fine because he's, like, going after small, like, services business, which Yeah. A OpenAI doesn't wanna do. But they're, like, all the chat with your PDFs, those have gotta be, like, those days are limited.

Ian

00:20:02 – 00:20:10

Yeah. I don't know. I wonder how far I'm not so sure. I agree that, like, they're not gonna go after those kind of things. I do think I'm not I don't know about his product in particular necessarily.

Ian

00:20:10 – 00:20:30

I do think there is a point of, like, where if you're going after plumbers, Right? Like, it's hard to reach plumbers. So is OpenAI gonna even if OpenAI builds the product that actually does everything really does, let's just say. Right? Like, can they actually reach the plumbers is is a whole separate business question, and do they want to and all that stuff.

Ian

00:20:30 – 00:21:05

So there is that whole thing of, like, you can have, you know, be an inferior product even or an equal product or whatever and still be fine because you're gonna be willing to maybe do sales things that the big business you wanna do or whatever. So, and, obviously, in my even more than his space, my space is, you know, customer support and agents for customer support is sort of a very obvious, kind of thing. So, yeah, that's that was an interesting interesting listen for those of you who, have access. I think he made that one public and free, so you need to do that. Anyway, alright.

Ian

00:21:05 – 00:21:08

So the podcast was good. You guys helped held up my end of it. Thank you.

Aaron

00:21:08 – 00:21:11

We missed you. It was a good show. You have to go back and listen.

Ian

00:21:11 – 00:21:22

I was kind of a last minute thing, so it was all hectic there. Let's do, let's do speaking of money. Let's pay some bills here. Let's do it. With our friends at Laravel cloud.

Ian

00:21:22 – 00:21:44

Thank you for sponsoring the show. The best way to ship and scale Laravel applications and, to stream. Stream scalable APIs for chat, video, voice feeds, and moderation. Check those them out at getstream.io and, of course, Laravel Cloud at cloud.Laravel.com. So thank you to those guys for, once again, sponsoring the show.

Ian

00:21:44 – 00:21:46

Alright. Sorry. What have you been doing?

Aaron

00:21:47 – 00:21:48

I've been doing golfing.

Ian

00:21:48 – 00:21:51

Right? You probably been hanging out, resting, relaxing.

Aaron

00:21:51 – 00:22:01

Doing doing not a freaking thing. We can we we got a couple things we can talk about. Had had a project go on Hacker News and Reddit. We can talk about that.

Ian

00:22:01 – 00:22:03

Saw a little bit about that. Yeah.

Aaron

00:22:03 – 00:22:07

We can talk about how building billing is a nightmare.

Ian

00:22:07 – 00:22:10

I thought you had that one. That's a big that's a big topic right now.

Aaron

00:22:10 – 00:22:17

Just freaking nightmare. You put Aaron's newsletter on here, and I don't know I don't know if you if that's a you topic or a me topic. No. No. No.

Aaron

00:22:17 – 00:22:20

Those are the three on the table. What do you wanna weeks ago.

Ian

00:22:20 – 00:22:40

So I don't even know talk about? I do love your newsletter, and we can just touch that one very quickly. I'm really enjoying your newsletter. I think you've, like I don't know. Maybe you could tell us how you think it's doing, but from my end, I think it's, like, just a little delightful bit of, like, Internet fluffery and maybe some stuff to keep an eye on and, obviously, what's going on with you.

Ian

00:22:40 – 00:22:46

Mhmm. And I think that's great. So, yeah, that was that's all at the top of mind with that. I might have had something bigger.

Aaron

00:22:46 – 00:22:49

I'll I'll always take a little bit of praise. That's fine with me.

Ian

00:22:49 – 00:22:50

That's good stuff.

Aaron

00:22:50 – 00:23:01

I think it's going great. I haven't checked I haven't checked the numbers, which is just a great luxury, is that I just don't have to check the numbers. It's just so nice. Stuff happening. So freeing.

Ian

00:23:01 – 00:23:01

I love when stuff

Aaron

00:23:01 – 00:23:14

is happening. But, yeah, we're getting lots of good replies, and people forwarding it on and people unsolicited saying that I love this newsletter. How can I pay for it? I'm like, oh, this is great. You you don't have to.

Aaron

00:23:14 – 00:23:34

It's free. Yep. And it's super easy. Like, it's just it's very easy for me to do because I do spend so much time online. I just you know, at the end of if I've forgotten to give Kelsey a list of tweets at the end of the week, I literally just go to my bookmarks and see what I've bookmarked, and I go to my text messages with Steve and see what I sent him.

Aaron

00:23:34 – 00:23:52

And I grab a whole list and throw it in Slack, and she turns it into screenshots. And then I go into, we use lex.page, which is like a writing app. I go in there, and I dictate to my thoughts on it. And then she goes in and cleans up the dictation and turns it into, like, proper prose, and then we send it. And that's it.

Aaron

00:23:52 – 00:23:58

And it is awesome. It takes me, you know, fifteen minutes total. It's so great.

Ian

00:23:58 – 00:23:59

Yeah. Employees are the best. I love the

Aaron

00:24:00 – 00:24:01

Employees are the best.

Ian

00:24:01 – 00:24:18

It's so good. Like, this was this vacation is, like, probably the least I've worked on vacation almost ever. And, and probably the only other time I worked this little was when I went on my last 12 year old trip with my son. We went to Vail, and we were just, like, busy the whole time. And, yeah, it's great just, like, knowing that you have a team and Yep.

Ian

00:24:18 – 00:24:29

Stuff's happening and nothing's falling through the cracks because you're distracted for a week or whatever. So, yeah, it's a like, it's, like, what's always a thing back in the day of, like, people not wanting to have employees and doing it solo and stuff like that.

Aaron

00:24:29 – 00:24:30

Nah, man.

Ian

00:24:31 – 00:24:33

It's not really the way to get. I mean, obviously, it points you in the choice.

Aaron

00:24:33 – 00:24:42

Good employees. I'm sure bad employees are are awful. Well, get some get some good employees, and it just makes your life it just makes your life easier.

Ian

00:24:42 – 00:24:52

Yeah. It just makes the whole thing possible. It's very hard to do without some some level of help at some point, whether you have, like, multiple cofounders or you have employees or whatever it is.

Aaron

00:24:52 – 00:24:56

That's the other hack is get get a good cofounder. That's Yeah.

Ian

00:24:56 – 00:24:58

We we get a good cofounder. Here.

Aaron

00:24:58 – 00:25:04

I got a good cofounder, and then we got a we got a great employee. So things are going pretty nice on this side.

Ian

00:25:04 – 00:25:13

Yeah. Great cofounder is definitely the number one, hack if you can manage it and if, you know, when it works out. When it doesn't work out, it's a problem. But when it

Aaron

00:25:13 – 00:25:16

does work out there too. Yeah. I've been there too. It's not great.

Ian

00:25:17 – 00:25:17

Yeah. So

Aaron

00:25:17 – 00:25:29

I've been I've been all over the cofounder map. Yeah. Had one that just worked out super poorly. And then Colleen and I, we were great together, but the product just didn't work at all. And so we split up over that.

Aaron

00:25:29 – 00:25:34

And now, you know, Steve is just is just fantastic. So There

Ian

00:25:34 – 00:25:34

you go.

Aaron

00:25:34 – 00:25:37

It's just getting better. Get better. Get better, man.

Ian

00:25:37 – 00:25:38

Go in the proper direction, I'd say.

Aaron

00:25:38 – 00:25:39

For real.

Ian

00:25:39 – 00:25:53

So you have a I wanna talk about this later. I I just put this on a list too, but I'm reworking my whole computer organization system. So just a pin in this that I wanna hear about your bookmarking situation because that you I feel like people don't use bookmarks anymore, but you're using bookmarks still.

Aaron

00:25:53 – 00:26:11

So We we can we can do it now or we can come back to it, but this is this is the problem with, this is the problem with Twitter pontificators is they say, no one ever uses bookmarks. Meanwhile, I'm here using bookmarks literally every single day. And going back and looking at my bookmarks, which people say

Ian

00:26:11 – 00:26:12

your bookmarks.

Aaron

00:26:12 – 00:26:19

That never happens. No one's ever looked at a bookmark. And I'm like, why are you saying this? This is patently false. So sure.

Aaron

00:26:19 – 00:26:20

We can we can

Ian

00:26:20 – 00:26:23

Give me your bookmarking take here. This is interesting. Give me your

Aaron

00:26:23 – 00:26:24

bookmarking take.

Ian

00:26:24 – 00:26:25

I bookmark it.

Aaron

00:26:25 – 00:26:25

What are

Ian

00:26:25 – 00:26:28

you in the browser? Are you in a tool? What are you doing for people?

Aaron

00:26:28 – 00:26:46

So everything that I'm describing is Twitter bookmarks. So I every every, like, I don't know, passes some bar of interesting or or I wanna remember this later. I'm gonna use this for fodder or somewhere else. I bookmark. And then I go back and I just scroll my bookmarks and see, like, wait.

Aaron

00:26:46 – 00:27:02

What's interesting here? I do that maybe once a week. It's just go back into the bookmarks, scroll through, see if anything's interesting. I use it sometimes as a sort of read later. And so if there's anything in there that was a read later type thing, I will unbookmark it because it's like, oh, yeah.

Aaron

00:27:02 – 00:27:05

I read it. I don't need that's not, like, a permanent bookmark.

Ian

00:27:05 – 00:27:05

Right.

Aaron

00:27:05 – 00:27:29

So I keep all of those. And then in Chrome, I bookmark I bookmark way fewer things in Chrome, but I have it all in just one folder. And I just occasionally will go into this other bookmarks folder and start at the bottom, which is the newest, and just kinda look back and see, is there anything here that I was, you know, supposed to do or was saving for some reason? And if I see something that's like, oh, yeah. I remember why I bookmark that.

Aaron

00:27:29 – 00:27:39

I don't need it. I also kill that one. So Yeah. It's not very rigorous, but it's incredibly useful. And I don't know why people say bookmarks are pointless.

Ian

00:27:40 – 00:27:40

I just

Aaron

00:27:40 – 00:27:44

feel I sometimes I feel crazy on the Internet. But, yeah, I use bookmarks all the time. It's fantastic.

Ian

00:27:44 – 00:27:54

Little side note here. I hope for your sake Twitter hangs in there because if if you lose Twitter, you're gonna be in rough shape. We're gonna get you some kind of intervention stuff. You mean I know. Twitter bookmarks.

Ian

00:27:54 – 00:27:54

That's like

Aaron

00:27:54 – 00:27:55

Oh, yeah.

Ian

00:27:55 – 00:27:56

Like, you're deep on there. Yeah.

Aaron

00:27:56 – 00:28:00

I probably have I probably have low thousands of Twitter bookmarks.

Ian

00:28:00 – 00:28:04

Okay. Yeah. They're in there. But they're hard I think they're hard to search. I feel like a Twitter bookmark shouldn't

Aaron

00:28:05 – 00:28:05

impossible.

Ian

00:28:05 – 00:28:19

Yeah. You That's the thing with Twitter bookmark. Yeah. Where do you you can put the Twitter bookmark in a in whether like, Chrome, which is would still be kinda tricky or, like, a bookmarking tool where you could actually search it. Like, you can still book the mark the tweet, but I don't know if I'd use Twitter to bookmark.

Aaron

00:28:20 – 00:28:27

Yeah. It's on the mobile app, you're just not gonna do that. Right? If you're browsing Twitter and their client, you're not gonna pop it out to Safari and then

Ian

00:28:28 – 00:28:32

you can mark it on share sheet. Most of the apps have, like, the share sheet we can bookmark. So you are not always gonna

Aaron

00:28:33 – 00:28:33

do that.

Ian

00:28:33 – 00:28:35

Yeah. There's just no chance. Click. Yeah.

Aaron

00:28:35 – 00:28:36

Oh, it's, like, three.

Ian

00:28:36 – 00:28:37

So you have to,

Aaron

00:28:37 – 00:28:37

like one

Ian

00:28:37 – 00:28:38

extra click.

Aaron

00:28:38 – 00:28:43

You have to open it up in you have to open it up in Safari. Use the share sheet to get out to Safari. Right?

Ian

00:28:43 – 00:28:49

Do Do you know? I think the I think in Twitter, there's a way to open the share sheet. No. Maybe got they got rid of that. I think they're pretty sure they used to be.

Aaron

00:28:49 – 00:28:53

No. No. No. You're right. There's, like, there's a button to open the share sheet, but then what do you do?

Ian

00:28:53 – 00:28:59

Well, then you'd have your bookmarking app right there. If you wanted to bookmark it in in Chrome or something, I guess.

Aaron

00:28:59 – 00:29:01

Get some sort of iOS.

Ian

00:29:01 – 00:29:09

A million of them. Like, my mind is one I have that I use or, like, pin board or, like, whatever. Like, you know, you just have the app icon right there, and you click it, and it's, like, bookmarks.

Aaron

00:29:09 – 00:29:12

I thought you were saying pop out to Safari and bookmark it there.

Ian

00:29:12 – 00:29:17

No. I'm saying if you just wanted to bookmark Never gonna have that. Bookmarking tool that was Yeah.

Aaron

00:29:17 – 00:29:18

Audio bookmarks. I don't know.

Ian

00:29:18 – 00:29:29

Bookmarks, but also not on Twitter for one. Like, the My Mind one I use for this has actually, it's very visual, so it, like, embeds the tweet. Like, you can read the tweet right there

Aaron

00:29:29 – 00:29:29

on a

Ian

00:29:29 – 00:29:39

Twitter card and, like, but then you can also have other regular, you know, articles or whatever. But I do find I don't go back there enough, although I do use it. But

Aaron

00:29:39 – 00:29:46

Here's here's my problem with every every digital collection system like that is you end up managing the digital collection system.

Ian

00:29:47 – 00:29:47

Right.

Aaron

00:29:47 – 00:30:04

Like, every every second brain guy is like, well, just gotta, you know, spend my weekend rebuilding my second brain tagging system. And I'm like, why? This feels like such a waste of time. So I don't know. I I don't I don't like it.

Aaron

00:30:04 – 00:30:23

I don't like those at all, which is why I like the big pile of bookmarks. And I Well I somewhat ascribe to the notion of, like, if it's important, you'll it'll bubble back up. But somewhat don't because I do bookmark it because I do want to, like, have it later. But the whole, like I I don't know. I feel like this is very common over in Notion Land.

Aaron

00:30:24 – 00:30:29

Like, let's build out an entire, you know, digital brain. It has never worked for me.

Ian

00:30:29 – 00:30:31

Yeah. That's too much work for me.

Aaron

00:30:31 – 00:30:36

Like, I wanna remember everything. Right. I wanna forget most things. In fact,

Ian

00:30:36 – 00:30:46

this is where the, my mind is actually really cool because it's just like a regular bookmark. Okay. You bookmark it, but it goes to my mind and it uses the AI. So that is a good use of AI to like make tags for

Aaron

00:30:47 – 00:30:47

you. Yeah.

Ian

00:30:47 – 00:31:00

You can add your own tags, but you don't have to. And it has a good search. So like, so so it is that idea of, like, I'm just dumping stuff in there. And if I want to find everything I ever bookmarked about x, like, it's already tagged it. It goes straight up or whatever.

Ian

00:31:00 – 00:31:12

So you don't have to, like, do any of the organization where, like, yes. You are on building a whole scheme of, like, all my knowledge in a certain area and cross referencing it and all the stuff, and then you never even tell you that anyway. And what's the

Aaron

00:31:12 – 00:31:27

most Maybe the new wave of, you know, digital organization tools are better, but it used to be like, yeah. Ridiculously maintain a collection of backlinks and tags in your whole schema. Do you use folders or tags? I don't know. Think about it for four months.

Aaron

00:31:27 – 00:31:29

It's like, I I don't wanna die. Yeah.

Ian

00:31:29 – 00:31:34

I don't think people get with their photo collection too. I've never been into, like, a tag. I think I just want the AI to hurry up and, like, get

Aaron

00:31:34 – 00:31:37

Google Photos is the best solution to all of that.

Ian

00:31:37 – 00:31:54

Is the best, which Apple's not quite to Google Photos level. It's not much annoying. I'm hoping it gets there because that's just like, yeah, I'm not gonna tag every photo every like, every person and everything they did. But then sometimes I wanna see, like, hey, Tyler, when he we did this thing with an apple or whatever. And, like, give me all the Tyler apple photos.

Ian

00:31:55 – 00:31:55

And

Aaron

00:31:55 – 00:31:57

And you can do that.

Ian

00:31:57 – 00:32:02

Right. Yeah. It's crazy. Oh, yes. I'm with you on that.

Ian

00:32:02 – 00:32:13

But anyway, so yeah. Okay. So pretty simple bookmarking scheme. Mostly Twitter bookmarks with the occasional Chrome, for articles and things. I do miss that whole and I don't know if you saw this thing.

Ian

00:32:13 – 00:32:23

I don't you're not like a big Apple guy, I don't think, in terms of, like, the meta of what's going on. Not really. But Daring Fireball and if you followed Daring Fireball.

Aaron

00:32:23 – 00:32:25

I saw I saw that. They lost their way, that one?

Ian

00:32:25 – 00:32:39

Lost their way article. Yeah. I saw that. So what was really cool about that is, like, the articles, you know, I think on point and all that stuff. But there was, like, this whole thing with, like, other blogs, like, aggregating, like, all the commentary about that post and stuff, and it was, like, so old school Internet.

Ian

00:32:39 – 00:32:58

Yep. It was just like, well, here's, like, a post that's, like, aggregating these 40 other posts that are all talking about this one post, and you're kinda getting the vibe of everything that's going on. It's all happening in blogs, not just all on Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever. That's this was so good. Like, people wrote thoughtful commentary that was worth reading.

Ian

00:32:58 – 00:32:59

Aaron

00:32:59 – 00:33:05

We must return. We must. Return. I think we can. I think I think the vibe is shifting.

Ian

00:33:05 – 00:33:05

Could be.

Aaron

00:33:05 – 00:33:22

I think the vibe the vibe is souring a little bit on for for a good I think to a good end. The vibe is souring a little bit on all social networks, which I think is healthy. I think the vibe does need to sour because Maybe the they're all they're all broken. They're all broken, and they all suck.

Ian

00:33:22 – 00:33:32

The whole the model is, like, it's really good with certain things, but then it those that same system of, like, speed, which is basically the the the benefit is also a huge negative

Aaron

00:33:32 – 00:33:32

Yes.

Ian

00:33:33 – 00:33:50

Other angles. So, yeah, I know I was like, maybe the AI stuff is, like, everybody's gonna chat GPT to, like, research things, and maybe at some point you're going there to get your hey. Tell me what's going on today. Right? Or, like, maybe it's gonna reward things that are more written versus the short two sentence takes.

Ian

00:33:50 – 00:33:51

Right? Like

Aaron

00:33:51 – 00:34:17

I don't know. I think that's moot. I think what will be rewarded is, or rather the rewards will come from other humans. So I think at some point, the, the vibe shifts enough that more people want thoughtful long form takes from humans than want quick little hits from social media. I think that is possible.

Aaron

00:34:17 – 00:34:27

It will probably remain niche. I bet the mainstream is always gonna want, like, I don't know, short form. Yeah. Theo Vonn, whoever that is. Everyone always talks about Theo Vonn.

Aaron

00:34:27 – 00:34:55

No idea who this person is. I understand he must be a podcaster and or a comedian, but I always hear people on these podcasts be like, oh, did you see what Theo Von was saying? I'm like, guys, I how are we living in the same world? I have never heard any of this person's content and have no desire to, frankly. But I think the mainstream will probably always reward that, but I do think there is a, like, subculture that is returning to long form, thoughtful, slower paced

Ian

00:34:55 – 00:34:56

stuff. I can see.

Aaron

00:34:56 – 00:34:59

None of the systems reward that, and so it still

Ian

00:34:59 – 00:35:09

Right. Kinda catch on. Thing with, like you are definitely seeing that right with podcasts. Right? It's like podcasts are kind of the big thing, and even in politics and news and right?

Ian

00:35:09 – 00:35:10

It's like

Aaron

00:35:10 – 00:35:11

And the O'Vaughn knows.

Ian

00:35:11 – 00:35:18

Forms. Whoever yeah. Whoever thinks is huge. He's huge. Sit down and go four hour Lex interviews that are completely

Aaron

00:35:18 – 00:35:27

horrible. Like an hour and a half into Prime's interview. Love Prime to death. But the the yeah. It's just very, like This is terrible.

Aaron

00:35:27 – 00:35:27

Slow.

Ian

00:35:28 – 00:35:29

Terrible. Literally

Aaron

00:35:30 – 00:35:32

We'll say it's not my style. But, yeah.

Ian

00:35:32 – 00:35:45

Maybe the worst interviewer I've ever experienced at any form. It's so bad. Like, how is this guy huge? It's it's it's unwatchable, listenable, however you're consuming it. Anyway, so you have that, which is, like, long form.

Ian

00:35:45 – 00:35:50

So can that happen with the written word again? Yeah. I still think you need the aggregator, though. You know? That's the thing.

Ian

00:35:50 – 00:35:58

And nobody's gonna use RSS. Right? RSS is done. RSS is adorable, but it is internal thing for some other system. Great.

Ian

00:35:58 – 00:36:07

But, like, you're not gonna be like your aunt Sally got her RSS reader and is consuming the thing. Right? So that's where it's like the do the AI tool do it? Does something new do it? Does, like, whatever.

Ian

00:36:07 – 00:36:12

There's gotta be a way people discover it. So I don't know how we get

Aaron

00:36:12 – 00:36:12

to hear

Ian

00:36:12 – 00:36:13

about it.

Aaron

00:36:13 – 00:36:24

Here's, here's two threads we can tie together. I think curation is becoming increasingly important, and that is Yeah. That is one of the forces behind my newsletter is curating.

Ian

00:36:25 – 00:36:25

Mhmm.

Aaron

00:36:25 – 00:36:56

I think the it used to be that, I think curators were super important back in the day, like, 02/1978, because some content was really hard to find. Right? And so there were these people that, like, knew all the cool sub places to hang out, the little forums, and they would stumble across all cool stuff. And you'd subscribe to whatever her name was, Maria Popov or somebody, you know, that would do all the curation for you. And now I think curation is important because there's too much content.

Aaron

00:36:56 – 00:37:11

It's just everywhere. And in the same way, it's hard to find because it's being drowned out by a bunch of noise. So Yeah. If there's a trend that is monetizable here for the dear listener, I think curation curation is part of it. The human to human curation stuff is important.

Ian

00:37:11 – 00:37:20

Yeah. There are I mean, I definitely like some link newsletters I still follow and stuff beside you know, I'm doing yours now, but, I mean, like, they still track Eaton Shaw.

Aaron

00:37:21 – 00:37:23

Ah, just a name I haven't heard in a long time. Yeah.

Ian

00:37:23 – 00:37:27

He still does his and, like, there's a few other ones like that. They'll be Derek.

Aaron

00:37:27 – 00:37:28

Five full on Friday.

Ian

00:37:29 – 00:37:31

Okay. I'm not I don't know about that, but that's

Aaron

00:37:31 – 00:37:33

I don't subscribe to it, but I know it exists. It exists.

Ian

00:37:33 – 00:37:48

There's Yeah. So maybe, like, there's, like, newsletter podcast sort of, like, it gets pulled up that way somehow. But I do I do it was just awesome to see. I was like, oh, this was, like, people thought about things and carefully considered a reply to them, and it was great.

Aaron

00:37:48 – 00:38:07

Yeah. RIP. I do I will say I will say we're headed that direction. When Will King gets back from Disney, he's, he's gonna be redesigning the aaronfrancis.com site with more of an eye towards long form stuff like that. So we're we're trying we're trying to push that direction.

Aaron

00:38:07 – 00:38:17

And I still think I still think forums are in our future as, as try hard studios. I think forums will will play a part in many of our properties. So

Ian

00:38:17 – 00:38:21

But how do you just use Discord or use, actual forum tool?

Aaron

00:38:21 – 00:38:22

Actual online forum tool.

Ian

00:38:22 – 00:38:23

Okay.

Aaron

00:38:23 – 00:38:34

Yeah. I'm willing I'm willing just to swim upstream on that. Yeah. I think there are a lot of times where it's like, I wish the world were different, and it's not. And so I'm just gonna, you know, do the thing.

Ian

00:38:34 – 00:38:35

With it. Right.

Aaron

00:38:35 – 00:38:43

On this one, I'm like, you know what? I wish the world were different, and I'm okay with the adoption being lower because this is the way that I want it to be.

Ian

00:38:43 – 00:38:44

Yeah.

Aaron

00:38:44 – 00:38:54

And I don't want to use Discord. Yeah. You know? I want to have a place where people go on the Internet and have to, like, wait for a response. You know?

Aaron

00:38:55 – 00:39:02

Like like, I'm sorry. I was not checking the forum. Six hours later, I'll respond. That's okay. You know?

Aaron

00:39:02 – 00:39:12

That's what it used to be. On the paintball forums and the HTML goodie forums, it was like, well, I'll check tomorrow to see if they responded. And these threads would go on for three weeks. It was crazy.

Ian

00:39:12 – 00:39:23

And people could discover them too. Like, search engine indexes them and all this stuff. Of course, when it's hidden in Discord, like, it's just behind the wall, and, you know, you don't pull in new people, in that in that way. So No.

Aaron

00:39:23 – 00:39:35

And everybody that you're responding to in Discord is an anime avatar with a silly name, and you're like, what? Who are any of these people? I don't understand what's happening here. So that's all from the gamer corner.

Ian

00:39:36 – 00:39:43

I wanna touch on I think your Reddit stuff ties in perfectly with this, but maybe we should do, thank the sponsors here, and then we'll hit that.

Aaron

00:39:43 – 00:40:00

Let's do a little let's do a little thank the sponsors, and then we can we can get back to Reddit. So so don't go anywhere. This this episode is, once again, brought to you by Bento. Bento is marketing automation and email. It's a platform, and we use it at TryHard Studios.

Aaron

00:40:00 – 00:40:24

So thank you to Jesse and Bento for sponsoring the show. You can find them at bentonow.com. And the show's brought to you by PHP Tech twenty twenty five coming up soon. The conference for continuing education and community building for PHP developers. You can find them at phptech,tek,.io, and the conference is May in Chicago.

Aaron

00:40:24 – 00:40:30

So thank you to Bento and PHP Tech for sponsoring this week's episode. Reddit.

Ian

00:40:30 – 00:40:34

Reddit. So that ties right in. I think this all ties in perfectly. Reddit. So you were on Reddit.

Ian

00:40:34 – 00:40:38

You got a little I didn't check to see what was your, what was your up votes or whatever.

Aaron

00:40:39 – 00:40:54

Hacker news, I was on the front page for, like, twenty four hours. Reddit, I was in rPHP, and it got to, like, fifty, sixty, 70 votes, which I I don't have a sense of if that's good or not because I don't I don't spend a lot of time on Reddit, and I don't have a lot of hits on Reddit. So I don't really know.

Ian

00:40:55 – 00:40:58

So this is a law soccer news angle or a Reddit angle or both?

Aaron

00:40:58 – 00:41:25

Yeah. So they're directionally similar in that, what I was just talking about with, Discord and forums. Like, sometimes sometimes it doesn't really matter what, reality is if everyone's perception of reality is one thing, and you just have to go with that. And sometimes you can decide, you know what? I understand that everyone's perception of reality is one thing, and I disagree, and I'm gonna do something different.

Aaron

00:41:25 – 00:41:38

Yeah. And that's the situation I found myself in on Hacker News. So I extracted from from Solo, the terminal library for Laravel. I extracted the part that does all of the virtual screen handling. Mhmm.

Aaron

00:41:38 – 00:42:02

And so it's a lot of, like, really esoteric, complicated stuff that's, like, very, very low level. And it was just becoming, like, a thing unto itself, and it would have been easier to maintain that on its own instead of shipping a new version of solo every time I fix the screen bug. Right? So I thought, yeah, this makes sense. I doubt anyone will ever use it besides me.

Aaron

00:42:02 – 00:42:21

I'm okay with that. Yeah. And so I extracted it into a package called screen because it does all the screen handling, and it's in the solo organization on GitHub. So it's not like I'm, you know, making a new, you know, installable application, and I called it screen. So that's kind of, you know, setting the table.

Aaron

00:42:21 – 00:42:32

And so I extracted it, published it on GitHub, and then was like, hey. Why not? I I'm I'm marketing guy. Why not? Let's go let's go throw this around some places.

Aaron

00:42:32 – 00:42:42

So I went and put it on Reddit, and I put it on Hacker News. And Hacker News spent the next twenty four hours trying to convince me that I named the project incorrectly.

Ian

00:42:42 – 00:42:45

That seemed to be the main thought. I haven't had a chance to go through the whole No.

Aaron

00:42:45 – 00:42:46

That was it.

Ian

00:42:46 – 00:42:48

Red, but it seemed like that. That was

Aaron

00:42:48 – 00:42:52

the only thing. That was it. That was the only thing that they wanted to talk about

Ian

00:42:52 – 00:42:52

is Yeah.

Aaron

00:42:53 – 00:43:18

You need to change this name. You are doing a bad thing, and you need to change this name. So I got I managed to get I managed to get one, commenter to recant because it was very clear to me that they all were misunderstanding what the project was. Right? So they all thought, oh, you can install this binary and run it, and he's named it screen, and there's already a binary name

Ian

00:43:18 – 00:43:19

screen. Right. Yep. And

Aaron

00:43:19 – 00:43:26

I I had to, as gently as I could, explain to them, you don't understand anything that's happening here.

Ian

00:43:26 – 00:43:27

Right. Like You're wrong. I'm everything.

Aaron

00:43:27 – 00:43:38

Premise upon which you are building is false. And so I finally got through to one commenter, and I was like, hey. This is not. It has no binary. It's not installable.

Aaron

00:43:38 – 00:43:56

This is a PHP package that you must consume from inside of a PHP, application. There's no external entry point. Nothing. It is name spaced under solo, the organization, and the the library is called screen. Yeah.

Aaron

00:43:56 – 00:44:02

And he was like, oh, I'm sorry. I I I I didn't read that deeply. I'm still at work. You know? If you know, you know.

Aaron

00:44:02 – 00:44:13

And I was like, I don't know, so I don't know. But thank you. Like, I I appreciate you copying to the fact that you didn't actually click through and read anything. Everyone else was just like, hey, man. You're an idiot.

Ian

00:44:13 – 00:44:14

Right.

Aaron

00:44:14 – 00:44:15

You need to rename this right now.

Ian

00:44:15 – 00:44:16

Oh, god.

Aaron

00:44:16 – 00:44:24

And I just said, thanks for the feedback. I'm not gonna do that. Like, I don't have to listen to you. I why I I don't know that

Ian

00:44:24 – 00:44:28

you were replying to everybody. Like, you were you were in the streets. Yeah.

Aaron

00:44:28 – 00:44:36

Gotta reply. And here's the thing. Some people came and left criticism that this is not a terminal emulator, but rather a terminal renderer.

Ian

00:44:37 – 00:44:37

I saw that.

Aaron

00:44:37 – 00:44:51

I thought, you know what? That's an interesting point. And so I asked her, like, a clarifying question or two, and people responded. And I responded exactly the same way as I did to the screen comments, which was just like, nice. Thanks for that feedback.

Ian

00:44:51 – 00:44:52

Right.

Aaron

00:44:52 – 00:44:55

And I went and implemented that feedback. And so people are like

Ian

00:44:55 – 00:44:55

Good kind.

Aaron

00:44:56 – 00:45:12

People are in the comments moaning about, like, oh, why are you just, you know, doing these sarcastic replies to people that are giving you feedback? And I'm like, listen. Some people gave me feedback that I took, and my response was nice. Thanks for the feedback. Some people gave me feedback that I 100% ignored, and my response was nice.

Aaron

00:45:12 – 00:45:18

Thanks for the feedback. So you can read whatever you want into it. I'm gonna ignore. Oops. I will ignore.

Aaron

00:45:18 – 00:45:28

And I went and I changed the read me. And everywhere it said, emulator, I changed it to renderer because I thought, you know what? That was a pretty good point. This is way more accurate. And I I said in the comment thread, I said, I was wrong.

Aaron

00:45:29 – 00:45:39

This is a better name. Thanks for, you know, thanks for letting me know. And so I don't know. People are just on Hacker News, people are just cynical. And on Reddit, maybe on both, they just want you to fight.

Aaron

00:45:39 – 00:45:59

They just want you to come in and debate. And so on Reddit, they were like, you need to change this immediately because it will be confused with the, you know, thirty eight year old program called screen. And I said, thanks for that feedback. I'm gonna leave it as is for now. And I think it just, like, I think it just breaks people's minds that you can say, I'm not gonna participate in this conversation.

Ian

00:45:59 – 00:46:01

Right. It's like, I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna react.

Aaron

00:46:01 – 00:46:10

I don't owe you. I don't owe you my participation in this conversation. I can just say, thank you. I I'm not willing to talk about that right now. And people are like, oh, shoot.

Aaron

00:46:10 – 00:46:19

What do I do now? So that's kinda how it went down. I stood I stood my ground on one because I thought everyone was wrong, and I changed on another one because I thought I was wrong.

Ian

00:46:19 – 00:46:19

And I was

Aaron

00:46:19 – 00:46:21

like, yeah. You know, pretty good spot to be in.

Ian

00:46:21 – 00:46:24

Yeah. They should be happy with that. They got 50% of

Aaron

00:46:24 – 00:46:25

what they do. Percent.

Ian

00:46:25 – 00:46:40

And that seems reasonable. The other yeah. The the one you change feels like there is sort of a technical definition that is accurate or not accurate. And you're making that change to make it more accurate, and that makes sense. Or the name of the thing, like, yeah, whatever.

Ian

00:46:40 – 00:46:45

There's a million products all the same name. What the hell is this for? Like, this is yeah. Don't ever confuse these because

Aaron

00:46:45 – 00:46:59

I tried to explain. This is like Clerk, you know, the authentication company Right. Having a library called Clerk JS slash auth. Like, it's it's not just called auth. Like, the thing is it's called Clerk JS authentication or auth or whatever.

Aaron

00:46:59 – 00:47:08

Yeah. I was like, this is this is called solo screen. It is in a name space in an organization, and people just, like, couldn't could not get there.

Ian

00:47:08 – 00:47:16

How about clerk being called clerk, which make those sense? What do clerks have to be authenticating anything? Like, nothing at all. Like, literally nothing to do with anything. So, like Crazy.

Aaron

00:47:17 – 00:47:17

There's a

Ian

00:47:17 – 00:47:23

lot of other things called clerk. I'm sure there's other product called clerk. Yeah. And, you know, everybody manages. It's fine.

Ian

00:47:24 – 00:47:25

Oh, my goodness.

Aaron

00:47:25 – 00:47:37

People were pissed. And I think part of it is, like I don't know. I think part of part of it is kinda like a mob mentality, and they expect you to just acquiesce. And I just kept responding, thanks. Not gonna do that.

Aaron

00:47:37 – 00:47:48

And they just kept digging their heels in. And it was kinda it's you know, at some point, it's kinda sport, and you're like, you can you can keep asking me to do it, and I'll keep telling you, I appreciate that thought. I'm not going to do that.

Ian

00:47:48 – 00:48:05

So the interaction is, you know, what I would expect. But I'm curious your thoughts on like, have you released the courses on the on Reddit and Hacker News? Like, did you post about the courses when you released them? When we released useful anymore. Were they ever dubious on if they were ever useful?

Ian

00:48:05 – 00:48:16

Like, obviously, there's a couple. Oh, yeah. They got went big on Hacker News, and then that probably got them their first customers, and that launched them. But it was kinda dubious in general, the value of these things. And I feel like it's probably less than ever.

Ian

00:48:16 – 00:48:20

So I don't know. I was wondering if you launched an actual product on there and saw any juice.

Aaron

00:48:20 – 00:48:30

Yeah. I've launched I've launched a few things. I think the most the most recent one in that vein was when we did MySQL for developers. We put it on Hacker News.

Ian

00:48:30 – 00:48:31

Okay.

Aaron

00:48:31 – 00:48:40

And it it did great. Like, it was overwhelmingly positive, drove a huge amount of traffic. That's that's why you want it is because

Ian

00:48:40 – 00:48:40

Of course.

Aaron

00:48:40 – 00:48:57

You'll get you'll get 50 neck beards that are moaning in the comments, and then you'll get 30,000 page views. And you're like, this is kinda worth it. Yeah. But for MySQL for developers, it was overwhelmingly positive. % positive.

Ian

00:48:57 – 00:48:59

Definitely definitely worthwhile there.

Aaron

00:48:59 – 00:49:06

Still Definitely worthwhile. Juice. You just gotta kinda, like, walk backwards into hell, basically. Like, you know what you're getting into.

Ian

00:49:06 – 00:49:10

No. No. Get the skin thickened up and ready because it's gonna be a lot of stupid questions.

Aaron

00:49:10 – 00:49:19

Yep. Yep. Exactly. And a lot of people that didn't click through to read and a lot of people that are just responding to other comments Right. That, like, mischaracterized it in the first place.

Aaron

00:49:19 – 00:49:35

And Mhmm. So, yeah, it's it's, the comments are not usually very great. They usually get, like, sniped into one thing, and then they'll spiral off into an abyss forever. And this time, it was, like, the name of the project. Right.

Aaron

00:49:36 – 00:49:41

But it does still drive a huge amount of traffic. Reddit, I don't know if it drives traffic at all. I actually have no idea.

Ian

00:49:41 – 00:49:54

So it still seems like you being in there in the streets with the commenters is probably pretty important because I feel like you could need that interaction going because then the algo pushes it up, and then they get more eyes and then get the votes and blah

Aaron

00:49:54 – 00:50:14

blah blah. Exactly. Yep. So even even if it is a Sisyphean task to go in there and push the boulder uphill, it, like, it there's there's value that you don't see because, you know, once a story has 12 comments, it's likely gonna get 15 comments, and it's likely gonna get 20. And if it has 20 comments, people are gonna click in and click through.

Aaron

00:50:14 – 00:50:22

And so, like, it all just comes back to it looks like there's activity on this thread. I'm gonna pay attention to it, and then it kinda climbs its way up.

Ian

00:50:22 – 00:50:28

Do you do you follow Hacker News? I mean, I haven't gone to Hacker News to see what's there in fifteen years. I don't even know. Long

Aaron

00:50:29 – 00:50:38

No. I probably end up on Hacker News once a week or once every other week, and it's when I've, like, seen the same tweets four times. And I'm like, I gotta look at something else.

Ian

00:50:38 – 00:50:40

Been led there. Yeah.

Aaron

00:50:40 – 00:50:51

No. It's like I'm scrolling my timeline, and I'm seeing recycled content because I keep scrolling. It's like, alright. Where where else can I distract myself from the horrors of the modern world? I'll go to Hacker News.

Ian

00:50:51 – 00:50:54

Okay. So you are actively going there to see what's up occasionally.

Aaron

00:50:55 – 00:50:57

Every Okay. Once a week. Once every other week. Yeah.

Ian

00:50:57 – 00:50:59

And is it valuable? Should I be doing this?

Aaron

00:50:59 – 00:51:02

No. You shouldn't. Okay. Okay. It's it's fine.

Ian

00:51:02 – 00:51:03

Nothing going on there?

Aaron

00:51:03 – 00:51:04

No. It's fine.

Ian

00:51:05 – 00:51:11

Interesting. No. No. It is linking to at least written things as opposed to other tweets and randomness. So maybe I should be going there.

Ian

00:51:11 – 00:51:12

Maybe I should be.

Aaron

00:51:12 – 00:51:33

I mean, yeah, if you wanna discover yeah. If you wanna discover links or tech adjacent news, it's it's still it still has a good voting algorithm, I think, in terms of, like, getting stories up there. So yeah. And but there are also there are also plenty of, like, Hacker News aggregators that could send you top stories from the week or, you

Ian

00:51:33 – 00:51:34

know, so

Aaron

00:51:34 – 00:51:36

you don't have to wade into the comments.

Ian

00:51:36 – 00:51:41

Okay. Alright. So that was successful ish, I guess. I don't know if you got

Aaron

00:51:41 – 00:51:55

any success. Great success. Yeah. Something something that a chore that I had to do, which was extract this thing, turned into a library, turned into a hacker news post that sat at the on the top page for twenty four, thirty six hours. Great success.

Aaron

00:51:55 – 00:51:57

Massive success.

Ian

00:51:57 – 00:52:01

Hopefully, some people found solo and got a few new users. Yeah.

Aaron

00:52:01 – 00:52:09

Yeah. It all it all comes together at in some way, shape, form. It's all it's all good, good eyeballs.

Ian

00:52:09 – 00:52:20

Alright. So tell me about this building building a building system. I built many building systems. We're on our third or fourth iteration of our back off what we call the back office building system. It's always a nightmare.

Ian

00:52:20 – 00:52:23

Give me your nightmare story. So you're moving off on the squeezy. Right? Is that the

Aaron

00:52:23 – 00:52:27

the deal? We're off the lemon squeeze. Well, we're not off, but this is what we're doing.

Ian

00:52:27 – 00:52:27

You're you're

Aaron

00:52:27 – 00:52:28

just getting off. Yeah.

Ian

00:52:28 – 00:52:38

Nothing it's always you're always like, I'll build the building system. Stripe's doing all the work. It's gonna take me a couple days, and it's always a month long project at the very minute. Easily. And Easily.

Ian

00:52:38 – 00:52:41

Often but the last time we did it, it was a year long project.

Aaron

00:52:41 – 00:52:41

Yes.

Ian

00:52:41 – 00:52:43

So it's always a huge thing. Yeah.

Aaron

00:52:43 – 00:52:54

Yes. So, yeah, we're trying to get off lemon squeezy for for numerous reasons, which are not relevant right now. We're moving to Stripe. First of all, Stripe has a thousand different products.

Ian

00:52:55 – 00:53:01

That's so bad. So many So confusing now. So bad. I hate everything about it.

Aaron

00:53:01 – 00:53:15

So, yes, they're trying to be all things to all people. That's great for them. Makes it very difficult to reason about. So we got we've gotten to the point where we're we're reasoning about Stripe's model correct Stripe's, like, data model correct. So, like, I've gotten my head around that.

Aaron

00:53:15 – 00:53:26

Yeah. Took a little detour to figure out, could we just use Shopify just for, like, fulfillment cart, checkout, all of that? No. Can't do that. Like, they want you to believe that you can.

Ian

00:53:27 – 00:53:27

You can't. You

Aaron

00:53:27 – 00:53:40

can't. It's just it's a nightmare. It's built it's built for physical products. It's built for you to be on Shopify.com. It is they claim you can build headless, but then it's like

Ian

00:53:40 – 00:53:42

You don't wanna get that.

Aaron

00:53:42 – 00:53:53

You you can't do that. You can't do that. I'm sorry. Yeah. So tried Shopify, tried SamCart, tried checkout page, tried, Bolt, you know, Jordan, old competitor.

Aaron

00:53:54 – 00:53:58

Tried all these things and, like, somehow every one of them was awful.

Ian

00:53:58 – 00:53:58

Right.

Aaron

00:53:58 – 00:54:08

And I'm not being like, I don't wanna build this. So it's not like, ah, well, they all suck. Guess I'll build my own and sell it, because I'm an indie hacker. No. Like, I don't wanna do this.

Aaron

00:54:08 – 00:54:17

It's just none of them worked for us. So now we're on to Stripe. And here here's the universe of the problem. We sell courses. Right?

Aaron

00:54:17 – 00:54:35

That's straightforward. We have even as it exists right now, we have a SQLite course, and we have a Rails course that also teaches SQLite. It would be nice to cross sell, upsell, bundle those courses. Right? So we've set all that up manually in lemon squeezy, and we've seen people do buy bundles.

Aaron

00:54:35 – 00:54:48

We need to be doing this more. Right? So with the upcoming launch of Screencasting.com, I think we're gonna launch with six or seven courses on there, which is a lot.

Ian

00:54:48 – 00:54:56

Wait. What do you mean? You mean, like, distinct courses? Distinct courses. So you're gonna buy the modules you want or buy them all in a bundle or something

Aaron

00:54:56 – 00:55:04

like that. Something like that. So we're gonna launch with how to screen cast, which is me. Yeah. We're gonna launch with a ScreenFlow editing course, which is also me.

Aaron

00:55:04 – 00:55:15

Every other course is not me. So Steve is gonna do Premiere. Our editor, Eric, is gonna do Final Cut Pro. We've got somebody doing DaVinci, somebody doing Camtasia, somebody doing OBS, and somebody doing Screen Studio.

Ian

00:55:15 – 00:55:18

Holy cow. Okay. Wow. This is, like, grown here.

Aaron

00:55:18 – 00:55:25

Okay. And I'm looking for somebody to do Descript. So, Oh, yeah. And CapCut. Honestly, I'm looking for somebody to do CapCut.

Aaron

00:55:25 – 00:55:44

So if you're good at Descript or CapCut for editing screencast specifically, reach out to me. So, right, we've got all these SKUs. We've got all these products, and we're trying to figure out what is the best way to maximize revenue. Obviously, you buy how to screen cast, you add on one of the editor courses as a part of a bundle. Right?

Aaron

00:55:44 – 00:55:50

Yep. It makes perfect sense. Yep. So we're trying to figure all of that out. How do we do alright.

Aaron

00:55:50 – 00:55:57

They've got this in their cart. What are the other products we should offer them at what discount? You know, how do we do coupons? How do we do Mhmm. Hey.

Aaron

00:55:57 – 00:56:14

You bought this before. Oh, it's just like Yep. And then and then how do we do how do we do, okay. You bought this bundle. Now how do we grant you access to the underlying digital assets that that bundle gives you permission to access.

Aaron

00:56:14 – 00:56:31

Then we also are gonna have digital downloads. So on Screencasting.com, you can buy a course, and then you can throw in, you know, the Final Cut Pro plugins or the Premiere plugins for screencasting, and you can download those. So now we have different types of assets. We've got courses. We've got digital downloads.

Ian

00:56:31 – 00:56:32

This is a huge project. Yeah.

Aaron

00:56:32 – 00:56:43

At some point, we're gonna have physical products that can be shipped. And so it's like, we have to build out basically, we're building out, like, a full on ecommerce thing.

Ian

00:56:43 – 00:56:44

Yeah. What happens when you change your pricing?

Aaron

00:56:45 – 00:56:45

Exactly.

Ian

00:56:45 – 00:56:49

People on old pricing and new pricing and all these types of things.

Aaron

00:56:49 – 00:56:55

Or or you wanna run you wanna run a Black Friday sale. How do you do that without opening PRs across four different projects?

Ian

00:56:55 – 00:57:00

And a sale that's different like, a sale is different than a coupon and, like, you

Aaron

00:57:00 – 00:57:03

know, all that stuff. Purchasing power parity.

Ian

00:57:03 – 00:57:06

Right. Oh, yeah. Don't do that. Then you don't do that. But yes.

Aaron

00:57:06 – 00:57:10

It's a disaster. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. And so we're

Ian

00:57:10 – 00:57:19

we're about have you thought about, like, I don't think this is gonna be a good solution, but just to throw it out there. Like, obviously, I didn't think you're totally right. Shopify is, like, not gonna work. But, like, a teachable isn't that, like, a thing? Wait.

Ian

00:57:19 – 00:57:24

What are these course selling platforms? Like, are they an option?

Aaron

00:57:24 – 00:57:37

They're not an option, unfortunately. Some of that is the, the learning platform and environment itself. We don't we don't just don't like it. We don't don't like the way that it looks. We don't like the control it doesn't give you.

Aaron

00:57:37 – 00:57:46

We don't like the video hosting. And then some of it is, some of it is we can't do some of this, like, some of this cross selling, upselling, bundling

Ian

00:57:46 – 00:57:46

Mhmm.

Aaron

00:57:47 – 00:57:48

That sort of thing. So, like They

Ian

00:57:48 – 00:57:50

also probably take a bigger cut as to why I didn't imagine.

Aaron

00:57:50 – 00:58:18

Everybody sits on top of Stripe and then adds their own, you know, fees. I want to be able when they are checking out, and this is where we're headed, when they're checking out and they've got, mastering Postgres in their cart, I need to be able to offer them high performance SQLite at a discount or offer them, you know, Rails plus SQLite. Yeah. Or Webex is one zero one or whatever at a discount. Those those products live on fully separate sites.

Aaron

00:58:18 – 00:58:20

Like fully separate domains. Like

Ian

00:58:20 – 00:58:22

Talked about that before. Yeah.

Aaron

00:58:22 – 00:58:42

Yeah. And so it's just it's just none of these platforms are gonna be set up the way that we need it to be set up. And I think I think this is, I think this is a a long term moat for us to be able to have control. Like, this is financial engineering. Like, this is Right.

Aaron

00:58:42 – 00:58:57

Business engineering. We're trying to figure out how do we increase our average order value given all the stuff that we have and the stuff that we can build that no one else can build. Right? Because you go on Teachable or whatever, and you're like, you can sell this course and Yeah.

Ian

00:58:58 – 00:58:58

You

Aaron

00:58:58 – 00:59:06

get, like, a coupon for another course, but, like, that's kinda where it stops. Yeah. So I think this is a good place to invest time, but it's just a lot of freaking time.

Ian

00:59:06 – 00:59:13

Yeah. I mean, add on sales. Are you just in regular retail? I mean, this is, like, the whole thing. Like, the add on increase in the the order averages.

Ian

00:59:14 – 00:59:17

There's huge industries around just attempting to do that.

Aaron

00:59:17 – 00:59:30

And I know. And one of the things that's frustrating about Shopify was, like, you go in there and you can buy, like, an upsell, plug in. And that plug in is, like, $99 a month. You know? And I'm like, what?

Aaron

00:59:30 – 00:59:41

Why? Why? I just wanna say buy this if you bought that. And so the place that we've gotten to is, basically, we're gonna keep the cart, the notion of the cart on our side. Mhmm.

Aaron

00:59:41 – 01:00:00

And then when they click, like, checkout, we're gonna redirect them or, I guess, just direct them through, like, an interstitial page before they exit the platform to go to Stripe.com. We're gonna direct them through an interstitial page that, like, has a cart suggestion service. You know? And Mhmm. It'll look what's in their cart.

Aaron

01:00:00 – 01:00:08

If we know who they are, look what they've bought before, and then match what's in their cart to this whole big collection in the database of

Ian

01:00:09 – 01:00:09

Yeah. Available offers that we can

Aaron

01:00:09 – 01:00:27

configure offers that we can configure through Laravel Nova. So they'll go through the cart service and it'll say, like, hey, they have item 123 in their cart. Let me check the suggestion service. Oh, 123 suggests 456. Let me see if they want to buy that And it'll show it, and they can say yes or no.

Aaron

01:00:27 – 01:00:48

And then when they click, like, you know, enter my details or whatever, it redirects them to a preconfigured Stripe checkout that has those items in the cart at those specific prices. And so they'll do all their order entry on buy.stripe.com, but it's not it's not Stripe checkout or, like, Stripe customer, custom portal, whatever it is. It's like because

Ian

01:00:48 – 01:00:55

you can't have the preset product sufficiently. Right? This is just a stand you're gonna send Stripe. Yeah.

Aaron

01:00:55 – 01:00:56

I'm sending them a card.

Ian

01:00:56 – 01:01:01

And the price, but they are just displaying that. Not products on the Stripe side. Yeah.

Aaron

01:01:02 – 01:01:17

Yeah. So I'm sending them, like, hey. Here are all of the price IDs that you need to show Mhmm. With their descriptions and then, you know, finish the checkout over there. So under the hood, what it actually is is it's a Stripe checkout link.

Aaron

01:01:17 – 01:01:33

And I'm configuring a for each cart, configuring an individual checkout link via API, and then I just direct them to the checkout link. And, you know, it it ends up looking like the customer portal, but it's not.

Ian

01:01:33 – 01:01:33

Right.

Aaron

01:01:33 – 01:01:37

Or or, you know, Stripe hosted checkout, but it's not. It's a payment link.

Ian

01:01:37 – 01:01:49

Yeah. Yeah. We weren't able to use the Stripe stuff either because, like, we have some weird old license stuff, and it's like, they keep making the product thing more complicated. But, yeah, it still doesn't actually do so much stuff that you would actually need

Aaron

01:01:49 – 01:01:49

it to

Ian

01:01:49 – 01:02:05

do to implement I know. Like, if you wanted to fully implement it on the Stripe side. So I'm like, I don't know if they're getting I'm sure people are using some of this somewhere, but it's, like, doesn't actually handle weird edge cases. But now it's way more complicated for the straightforward use case too. So

Aaron

01:02:05 – 01:02:13

I looked I looked at using, like, Stripe's elements and just just using Stripe purely as a credit card processor.

Ian

01:02:13 – 01:02:14

Right.

Aaron

01:02:14 – 01:02:35

And that was that was too low level. Like, it was, like, one step too far down. And so I'm I'm thinking I'm hoping this configuring of a checkout link or a payment link via API and then sending them on. I'm hoping that that strikes the right balance. But that does put us in the situation where we have to have products products and prices in Stripe's database.

Aaron

01:02:35 – 01:02:40

So now we're syncing our local database with their database to make sure we've got all the price IDs.

Ian

01:02:40 – 01:02:51

How do you get the different prices when you have, like, a discounted price? Is there a way you can tell it to just discount it for this cart, or you have to create another product, another discounted version of it? Okay.

Aaron

01:02:51 – 01:03:04

So we've got, you know, we've got Rails plus SQLite standard price. Rails plus SQLite, bundled price. Rails plus SQLite, Black Friday price. It's just it's awful. Crazy.

Aaron

01:03:04 – 01:03:06

Sucks. It's horrible.

Ian

01:03:06 – 01:03:09

Yeah. I don't know. That's gonna be a nightmare, man.

Aaron

01:03:09 – 01:03:25

Yeah. It is. Yeah. But I've got it to a point so many trade offs where we can do all the configuration in our dashboard in Nova. So we actually don't need to go to Stripe at all.

Aaron

01:03:25 – 01:03:48

We can just go into Nova and say, hey, this product, let's add a new price this much. It's active. And then only one price shows on the home page, like, one Stripe price. But then what you can do is you can say, if this person has, you know, this item in their cart, offer them this price, which could be a discounted price versus the standard one for that product.

Ian

01:03:48 – 01:03:53

Yeah. Your reporting is gonna be super fun. There's gonna be some crazy way to get the reports that make sense.

Aaron

01:03:53 – 01:04:02

And then and then we gotta share revenue. We gotta share revenue. So it's like, okay. Well, you know, how much do we owe, the guy's name Steven? Steven Markham.

Aaron

01:04:02 – 01:04:10

How much do we owe him? Well, let's go back and build an accounting system now. It's like everything everything turns

Ian

01:04:10 – 01:04:11

into goes.

Aaron

01:04:11 – 01:04:18

An in house accounting system. Death of the software universe is you bring accounting in house.

Ian

01:04:18 – 01:04:33

You kind of end up having to. That's like, yeah. We have this whole huge crazy thing, and it's like this whole accounting system. It's nuts. It's like we're a tiny company with a few employees and, like, single digit, low single digit millions of revenue, and, like, we still have to have our own accounting system Yep.

Ian

01:04:33 – 01:04:48

To, like, sell the software. It's crazy. I do if I ever have another product product, I would everybody has a skull, but it really would be nice to be, like, base camp style or whatever. It's like this is it we don't even have an annual. I think they actually do have annual now, but, like, it's just one price.

Ian

01:04:48 – 01:04:55

It's just it's $99 a month or whatever it is. Right? And, like, that's it. No other options. Nothing.

Ian

01:04:55 – 01:05:00

You pay me $99 a month. That's all there is. But not the best model for some for many reasons. But

Aaron

01:05:00 – 01:05:28

I think if you go check any of those bare metrics open startups and you, like, go look at their, you know, pick a metric MRR, and then you go down to the table where it shows the Stripe plans, everyone has just, like, a hundred Stripe plans. Right. It's just like they're all these old, like, pricing experiments Change something new. Things for special deals, and it's just I don't I don't know if there's a way around it. I think it's just a messy problem.

Ian

01:05:28 – 01:05:37

Yeah. It probably is just a messy problem. So it seems like it should it seems like somebody's gonna find the way to be like, everybody wants flexibility in this. Mhmm. Even forgetting edge cases.

Ian

01:05:37 – 01:05:45

Yeah. Just simple things. Like, we wanna try two different prices. Like, it's incredibly complicated. It's not easy at all to try and do different prices for the same product.

Ian

01:05:45 – 01:05:49

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It might just be a problem that's not solvable.

Aaron

01:05:49 – 01:06:05

That's what I think. I don't know if there's a clean abstraction for it. Like, it's modeling it's modeling real world. And so you can't just, like, reinvent it. It's like, no, I I need to offer this customer a different price.

Ian

01:06:05 – 01:06:06

Right.

Aaron

01:06:06 – 01:06:11

Because we're going to close the deal that has other things that are important. Right? And so you're like, oh, sure.

Ian

01:06:11 – 01:06:11

I'll go

Aaron

01:06:11 – 01:06:13

in and make a new strike price. It's like, okay.

Ian

01:06:14 – 01:06:16

Yeah. That's the only thing to do. Yeah.

Aaron

01:06:16 – 01:06:16

Yep.

Ian

01:06:17 – 01:06:19

Oh, boy. So how far along are you on this sucker?

Aaron

01:06:20 – 01:06:29

I'm pretty far. I've gotten I've gotten to the point where I think the data model is correct, and that's the part that took me the better part of, like, three or four days.

Ian

01:06:29 – 01:06:29

Right.

Aaron

01:06:30 – 01:06:59

But I think I've gotten to the point where the data model is correct. I think one, one thing that I finally like, the place where we landed, I think I did at least one thing smart, and that is to break out the, the purchasing of the product from the fulfillment of the product. And so Okay. You, like, you pay for you pay for the products, and then we have a separate service that goes and looks at all the checkouts and says, okay. This person paid for this, this, and this.

Aaron

01:06:59 – 01:07:03

Let me create access records for them to those courses.

Ian

01:07:03 – 01:07:03

Okay.

Aaron

01:07:03 – 01:07:14

And so that allows us to kinda, like, disassociate the checkout from the access. And so Kelsey can go in and offer access to somebody without having to create a corresponding checkout.

Ian

01:07:14 – 01:07:16

Do a free thing for somebody or something

Aaron

01:07:16 – 01:07:30

or whatever. Not every not every Stripe product is linked one to one to a video course. Some have you know, a Stripe product may have two video courses if it's a button. Right. It may have two video courses and five digital downloads.

Aaron

01:07:30 – 01:07:35

And so, like, those things just need to be separated. And so they are.

Ian

01:07:36 – 01:07:37

Yeah. I like that.

Aaron

01:07:37 – 01:07:37

Yeah. That's

Ian

01:07:37 – 01:07:39

really good. That's a good habit.

Aaron

01:07:39 – 01:07:39

I think

Ian

01:07:39 – 01:07:42

I think it's gonna make you a very significant amount of revenue for sure.

Aaron

01:07:42 – 01:07:42

I think

Ian

01:07:42 – 01:07:54

it is. It's just a known thing to do. I don't think you're on any weird territory here. And, like, you have people with their credit card out and they wanna buy thing x and thing y makes total sense with thing x. And Yep.

Ian

01:07:54 – 01:08:00

If you give them 25% off of it, they're very likely to to purchase it. And, that's all profit to you. So

Aaron

01:08:01 – 01:08:15

Steve Steve is always talking about what works in other industries that we can just, like, totally steal. Yep. And, like, if you go to ecomm, you're there's no way you're reaching the cart without a upsell, downsell, and cross sell. No way. You're never checking out without a hey.

Aaron

01:08:15 – 01:08:18

Nope. 999. Don't you wanna add this?

Ian

01:08:18 – 01:08:27

Oh, that's all I mean, even the I started in physical retail when I first got out of college, and, like, that's all the same thing. It's, like, by the checkout, right, is all the same g bars.

Aaron

01:08:27 – 01:08:28

Impulse alley. Yes.

Ian

01:08:29 – 01:08:45

And then, oh, you're buying a printer. You should get a product protection plan with that printer because it's gonna break, which is always I was always like, this is so weird. I'm selling this thing, but I'm and I'm telling you it's gonna break, so you should buy this other thing for me. But whatever. And so, yeah, it's all the add on sales is where, like, so much of the profit is.

Ian

01:08:45 – 01:08:54

And, yeah. Or you have big end caps near the near the checkout and all that stuff. Yeah. Definitely on very solid ground for this is the thing that works. That's good.

Ian

01:08:54 – 01:09:00

And, yeah. I think that's gonna be really cool to hear about. I did not realize screencasting was going this direction.

Aaron

01:09:01 – 01:09:01

Going big,

Ian

01:09:02 – 01:09:24

Yeah. But I was I was this makes so much more sense to me because you've been talking about a little bit on here with in this regard to, like, having the different editing. Yeah. Sweets, I'm like I mean, I just figured you're just gonna bundle them all or whatever, but it is like, well, I know most most people are not gonna need two of the three or three of the four or whatever because, like, whatever. You're gonna pick the one you already know how to use a little probably, and you're just gonna get better at it.

Ian

01:09:25 – 01:09:33

And maybe some people learn the other ones. Right? But I think it's gonna be mostly you pick one and you kinda do it. So this makes total sense. And you just pick the one you want to have, or Mhmm.

Ian

01:09:33 – 01:09:37

You can buy the all in one that gives you everything, which would be very profitable for you. And I'm sure

Aaron

01:09:37 – 01:09:38

be amazing.

Ian

01:09:38 – 01:09:44

Reasonable number of people will probably do that because I always end up doing that. I'm, like, well, I'll just find everything in this way.

Aaron

01:09:44 – 01:10:03

And I hope I hope it, I hope it makes team plans compelling because we can say, like, hey. Get your Dev Ed or DevRel folks, the team plan, and they'll watch how to screen cast, which is, like, the philosophical. And then they could just watch whatever editor they prefer. Because even on a team of three people, you might have three different editors. Like Right.

Aaron

01:10:03 – 01:10:04

People using different software. So How

Ian

01:10:04 – 01:10:09

are you doing? Now are you doing all these price points for a team version too? It's all duplicated.

Aaron

01:10:10 – 01:10:12

Yep. That's pretty wild. Yep.

Ian

01:10:12 – 01:10:17

Wait. How are you doing with variable number? Are you gonna do per seat? Are you just doing team plan as a bigger price and not just it?

Aaron

01:10:18 – 01:10:29

Yeah. Just, tiers, basically. So we're not gonna do, like, team of three, four, five, where it's just, like, a team of five, team of 10, team of 20. Right. So that that's the plan how to do that.

Aaron

01:10:30 – 01:10:46

But, yeah, I'm hoping this is this is turned into a bigger a bigger swing, which I'm I'm very happy with because I think of the TryHard Studios empire, I think screencasting is one of the main tent poles or legs of the stool, you know, whatever metaphor

Ian

01:10:46 – 01:10:48

it wants. Should be. Yeah. Definitely the broadest.

Aaron

01:10:48 – 01:10:57

Yes. I agree. And I think more way more defensible from AI than database education. So feels Probably so. Feels good there.

Ian

01:10:57 – 01:10:57

Yep.

Aaron

01:10:57 – 01:11:26

So, yeah, it's it's kinda ballooned in a good way into a much a much bigger release. And so we found just a lot of very good guest instructors, which is which is nice. And and I think paid them a, you know, a reasonable to handsome sum to just do the thing and give it to us, which is kinda Lyricast style. I think there's Right. Historically, we've done revenue share, which totally works and but it's just like a administrative nightmare.

Aaron

01:11:26 – 01:11:30

I just would rather complicated. Yeah. I'd rather just pay them and take the risk ourselves.

Ian

01:11:30 – 01:11:32

Definitely the way to go, I think.

Aaron

01:11:32 – 01:11:46

So, yeah, we I don't know how many we will launch with. We'll definitely launch with, the main course, my editing course, and then Steve, Final Cut Pro and Premiere. We'll definitely launch with those. We might get DaVinci in under the wire. Mhmm.

Aaron

01:11:46 – 01:12:01

But then, CapCut, OBS, and Screen Studio may come after launch, which I'm it's actually great. It's another thing to talk about. You know? So, and then I just pitched somebody on doing Descripts the other day. We'll see if they say yes.

Aaron

01:12:01 – 01:12:09

And then cap cut is the one we gotta Camtasia is what I meant earlier. Cap cut's the one we still gotta find. So Yeah.

Ian

01:12:09 – 01:12:36

Wonder if, like, this broadens a bit into, like because it feels, definitely, the editing stuff would all be applicable, I assume, but, like, into, like, making TikTok videos and Instagram reels. Like right? Like, it's a similar ballpark of, like and then even broader audience, like, well, people who wanna how do you get good at making TikTok videos, right, that that work and stuff like that? And it's, you know, it's not the same as screencasting, but it's similar.

Aaron

01:12:36 – 01:12:47

I know. I'm I'm open to that. I would have to lean on someone else to do that, which is Right. Like, I can't set a tone or direction or vision for that because I just I haven't done that. Yeah.

Aaron

01:12:47 – 01:13:31

But I know a lot of people have. So I think I think one like, a half step out from what we're doing is motion graphics, animation, like, that kind of stuff that, you know, Dev Ed, DevRel, technical screencasters, that they could still use that stuff, and it's way less of a step than going all the way to TikTok. So that's one thought, and I think Steve, you know, Steve has used Adobe After Effects for fifteen years or whatever, and so he he has the chops to teach it. So we could do stuff like that. We will continue to add on more digital assets like plug ins and stuff for all the different editors, which I think will be, a good source of, like, add on revenue.

Ian

01:13:31 – 01:13:35

Like, you're talking about building your own plug ins or recommending other

Aaron

01:13:35 – 01:13:45

plugins like this? Steve builds a plugin that's like Okay. The Screencasting.com Facecam plugin. Click this button, and all of the all of the settings are set

Ian

01:13:45 – 01:13:46

correctly. Set up. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

01:13:46 – 01:13:53

Yeah. So these these better editors, ScreenFlow doesn't allow such a thing. These better editors have all these ways to, like, extend them.

Ian

01:13:54 – 01:14:00

I can even see. And some of these I know that there are just third party plugins that are also super popular where our course might even make sense

Aaron

01:14:00 – 01:14:00

Ian

01:14:00 – 01:14:08

get a plugin. Totally. Like, it's like this is a course about the plugin to Totally. Final Cut Pro that everybody uses for thing x or whatever.

Aaron

01:14:09 – 01:14:09

Yeah.

Ian

01:14:10 – 01:14:10

Interesting.

Aaron

01:14:11 – 01:14:27

Yeah. And then then we can also do stuff. And this is all exciting because Steve is, like, a long time expert in it, and he wants to do it. And so Yeah. That feels awesome because he wants to do, like, you know, a free lighting course on how to set up your your, like, desk for

Ian

01:14:27 – 01:14:29

That's a good free one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

01:14:29 – 01:14:45

Yeah. So stuff like that is is gonna be, help expand that empire. There's just so much content we can do there. And the the secret power, this is again back to, like, what do people do in other industries? I keep having to tell Steve, like, hey.

Aaron

01:14:45 – 01:14:55

I know that you think everyone knows this stuff, but literally no one has any. In this corner, no one has any idea how to do any of this. No. And he's like Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

01:14:55 – 01:15:01

I don't know, man. I was doing this fifteen years ago, and I'm like, yeah. But we weren't. Like, we don't know anything. So Yep.

Aaron

01:15:02 – 01:15:03

I think it'll be good.

Ian

01:15:03 – 01:15:13

Yep. For sure. Yeah. I mean, look at your database courses covering select statements and, like, indexes. Like, you know, this is stuff that, ostensibly, most developers know.

Ian

01:15:13 – 01:15:18

If you would if I was to guess, right, if you were to not think about it more deeply, like, oh, yeah. Everybody knows that. Right? But, actually And

Aaron

01:15:18 – 01:15:35

you and I fall prey to that. All the courses we've done are intermediate, and I've gotta, like, go down the chain. I gotta go down to intro, and I'm like, but everyone knows this. And then I log on to Twitter for two seconds, and I realize nobody knows the first thing about databases, which is not bad. That's great.

Aaron

01:15:35 – 01:15:35

That's opportunity.

Ian

01:15:35 – 01:15:37

That's fantastic. Yeah. We love that.

Aaron

01:15:38 – 01:15:51

So, yeah, it's always challenging, like, to realize, wait. I am fundamentally viewing the market through a distorted lens, and I need to, like, step back and figure out how to not do that, which, you know, we'll get there.

Ian

01:15:51 – 01:16:04

Yeah. Yeah. And you can have a distorted view of your customers like that. I mean, we even we've been finding that. And, like, this is one of the things I'm actually changing about the help spot marketing is, like, there's just an assumption about, like, people understanding what help the software even is or, like, why you'd want it.

Ian

01:16:04 – 01:16:20

Right? So it's, like, going down farther into, like, people who just use the email, which has always been kind of our bread and butter anyway. Like, you're coming from Outlook, and you just have shared Outlook with 10 people, and it's a disaster. So just, like, really talking to those people and forgetting about, like, you know what a help does. If you already know what a help desk is, you might find us.

Ian

01:16:20 – 01:16:25

You might not. Whatever. Right. Like, you already know what a help desk is. So you're looking at all the help desk apps, and you'll figure it out.

Ian

01:16:25 – 01:16:39

Right? But, but the people are just stuck in Outlook, shared Outlook, or whatever. They need to we have to talk to them a little differently and assume they don't necessarily know why they even want a better solution or those type of things. Right? So but it's hard.

Ian

01:16:39 – 01:16:42

Yeah. When you're the one with the knowledge, you're like, oh, yeah. This is

Aaron

01:16:42 – 01:16:43

Obviously, everyone knows this.

Ian

01:16:43 – 01:16:45

Obvious. Yeah. But Why

Aaron

01:16:45 – 01:16:47

would I say what a help desk is? I've been doing this for twenty years.

Ian

01:16:47 – 01:16:48

You're like, oh,

Aaron

01:16:48 – 01:16:49

there we go.

Ian

01:16:49 – 01:16:54

That's benefits. Yeah. Yeah. So so that's pretty interesting. It's kind of, yeah.

Ian

01:16:54 – 01:17:14

You know, even after a long time, you're always trying to retweak and figure out, like, where your market's at and who who your market is, or did they change or Mhmm. All that kind of stuff. But, alright, man. I'm gonna save my rework for next week, then I'll see if it's, I'll see if it actually sticks because I've I'm two days into a rework of my whole

Aaron

01:17:14 – 01:17:15

Let's see what settles.

Ian

01:17:15 – 01:17:20

Digital empire. But, yeah, we'll see if it we'll see if it sticks. So far, I'm like, I'm

Aaron

01:17:20 – 01:17:25

Let's let's just do just do a five second answer callback. Are you still using monarch money

Ian

01:17:25 – 01:17:26

or whatever it was called?

Aaron

01:17:27 – 01:17:28

Wow. It stuck. Okay.

Ian

01:17:28 – 01:17:39

Monarch stuck. So we're liking it really good. I wish it did, like, a couple things. I have also this other tool. It's, like, kind of was, like, a hacker news hot in this thing.

Ian

01:17:39 – 01:17:41

Kubeta or something. I forget

Aaron

01:17:41 – 01:17:41

what it is. Yeah.

Ian

01:17:41 – 01:17:53

But it's, like, the My First Millions guys were pushing it, I think, or whatever. And it's like a financial manager thing. It's like a little higher level. It has some cool stuff. Like, you can upload documents and things into it.

Ian

01:17:53 – 01:18:05

So it's like, oh, like, investments, angel investments I've done in a few things. Like, I have the documents for it, and I can upload them in there. So, like, if I drop dead, Jamie could actually have the documents for insurance documents or whatever.

Aaron

01:18:05 – 01:18:05

Yeah.

Ian

01:18:05 – 01:18:10

So that's pretty cool, but it doesn't really do the budgeting and stuff. So it's really more of, like, a higher level

Aaron

01:18:11 – 01:18:12

management kind of stuff.

Ian

01:18:12 – 01:18:27

Kind of manager. So I wish the Monarch thing had a few of those little touches where, like, you could just put in maybe some other financial stuff, and then it could just kinda be everything. But besides that, which none of them have that. So it's not even, like, they're different. None of these budgeting tools have that.

Ian

01:18:27 – 01:18:35

But, yeah. No. I really like it. So if you're thinking about I know you were gonna build your own at one point, but if you don't have time to build your own No. Check out the Monarch.

Ian

01:18:35 – 01:18:36

It's good. The mobile app's pretty

Aaron

01:18:37 – 01:18:45

good. You know what? I've actually this is dark. You know what I've actually thought about doing? Using QuickBooks for my personal household.

Ian

01:18:45 – 01:18:50

QuickBooks are personal. I mean, it does a lot of the stuff. Right? Like, presumably, it covers everything you need.

Aaron

01:18:50 – 01:18:54

Have an LLC, single member, disregarded LLC where I have some, like With

Ian

01:18:54 – 01:18:55

the write offs?

Aaron

01:18:55 – 01:19:13

Yeah. So I have some write offs. You know, our our vast, mostly technical riches flow into that single member LLC. And so there are still things that I want to, like, keep separate. And I would also like to know, you know, how much we're spending on, you know, like, individual projects at the house.

Aaron

01:19:13 – 01:19:23

Right? So how much is the remodel costing? And I feel like Mhmm. I feel like QuickBooks is better at proper accounting stuff than any of these, like, you know, budgeting. And I, again, I don't wanna budget.

Aaron

01:19:23 – 01:19:33

I just wanna keep track. Like, I don't want something saying, hey. You only have $8 left in your coffee budget. I just wanna be able to look at the coffee and be like, boy, we're spending a lot on coffee. Let's not do that.

Aaron

01:19:33 – 01:19:34

You know what I mean?

Ian

01:19:34 – 01:19:44

Yep. So that is why I like the Monarch because I didn't want that as I think we discussed either. It's like, oh, yeah. Oh, we're gonna overflow your $8 in the next month, so you have 8 more dollars to spend. It's like, I don't care about any Right?

Aaron

01:19:44 – 01:19:45

This is not

Ian

01:19:45 – 01:19:50

how We have this alternate budget view, which is, like, I think they call it flexible budgets or something.

Aaron

01:19:51 – 01:19:51

Nah. Now we're

Ian

01:19:51 – 01:20:03

talking to suck up, like, a budget at all. It's basically no budget, but you can say I only want at least certain line items where I am. It's a budget. It's like a regular budget line item, but just for this line item. Yeah.

Ian

01:20:03 – 01:20:18

And then they're kind of grouped into things that are flexible and you have, like, a overall budget for the flexible zone. And then you just have, like, your fixed stuff, like your mortgage or whatever. So, you know, it's still a little wonky. It's not exactly Yeah. Perfect, but overall, it's it's really good.

Ian

01:20:18 – 01:20:25

I'm liking it. It's like the couple line items we really want, you know, online food ordering or whatever. It's like, oh, I'm trying to stay actually in a budget for

Aaron

01:20:25 – 01:20:26

that one.

Ian

01:20:26 – 01:20:35

Right? So, okay. That has a line item with a budget we're holding that. But then there's a separate group. I think it's more of like the, whatever they have some name for it, but it's like, we don't have a budget exactly.

Ian

01:20:35 – 01:20:39

But it's like, we wanna know how much we spend on vacations or whatever. Like I wanna know how much like

Aaron

01:20:39 – 01:20:40

40 or something.

Ian

01:20:40 – 01:20:47

Yeah. And you could everything is categorized, so you could always see, like, okay. What do we spend on gas or whatever? And you could see what that was. So yeah.

Ian

01:20:47 – 01:21:10

So it gets you all the tracking, and then you can optionally do the budgeting. And then if you do, you can use this flexible budgeting, which is less of the, like, yeah, we're micromanaging every transaction, how much in each each month you're trying to micro analyze it, and more into, like, picking the couple things you actually are trying to reduce your spending on and focusing on those, as well as having some bigger groups of, like, yeah, like, education expenses

Aaron

01:21:10 – 01:21:11

is one

Ian

01:21:11 – 01:21:22

big one for us or, like, yeah, vacation expense or whatever. So you can have the bigger categories like that and keep an eye on those. Yeah. I do really like it. It's been good so far.

Ian

01:21:22 – 01:21:29

It seems to have been no issues with it. Yeah. It's stuck so far. So we go in every once in a while. Haven't gone in since my trip, so that's gonna be the one.

Ian

01:21:29 – 01:21:31

So there's, like, 8,000,000 minivans

Aaron

01:21:32 – 01:21:40

of Uber. Fall off the wagon. It's over. We just get a new tool next month so we don't have to look at that.

Ian

01:21:40 – 01:21:55

Then there's I mean, I used literally like just a little quick other financial side tangent is so we've been going to Costco. Costco is now in our loop, even though it's, like, about forty five minutes away, it's a little annoying, but whatever. We're going there, like, once a month. And Costco only takes Visa. Right?

Ian

01:21:55 – 01:22:02

Like, literally only takes Visa. So I don't really have a Visa. It's only like my debit card. It's the only Visa I have. Yeah.

Ian

01:22:02 – 01:22:09

And I don't like to use them. So okay. I got this new Chase card, and I'm like a big Chase customer. Got all the business accounts there. I have a personal account.

Ian

01:22:09 – 01:22:14

I have all okay. Got a Chase card. Got the nice reserve one. So I can use the lounges. I'm paying the extra fee.

Ian

01:22:14 – 01:22:23

Great. So this card shows up. It's my Visa for Costco. Okay. And I'm gonna bring it on this trip, and I'm gonna use it because if you spend $4 in the first three months, you get bonus points.

Ian

01:22:23 – 01:22:28

Great. So I'm gonna spend a couple grand on this trip. I'm sure. So fine. It's not working anywhere.

Ian

01:22:28 – 01:22:33

It, like, works one out of every three tries. Right? Because I'm like, it's new car and I'm outside my home zone.

Aaron

01:22:33 – 01:22:33

Right.

Ian

01:22:33 – 01:22:40

I call them. Doesn't fix it. I email my, like, business contact person. I'm like, listen. I said, I'm not having a good experience here.

Ian

01:22:40 – 01:22:46

Like, can we fix this? She says she fixed it. It still doesn't work. It's like still only working one out of every three times. So I had to abandon that card.

Ian

01:22:46 – 01:22:59

So now I'm using my regular Amex, but I'm also doing Uber, which is hooked to a business credit card. And so I basically used like four or five different credit cards as trips somewhere on the business account. No. It's like back those things out. It's just a it's just It's

Aaron

01:22:59 – 01:23:00

a nightmare.

Ian

01:23:00 – 01:23:04

It's a nightmare. The complex financial modern world is annoying.

Aaron

01:23:04 – 01:23:06

It it is a it's a disaster. I

Ian

01:23:06 – 01:23:06

hate it.

Aaron

01:23:06 – 01:23:11

That's why that's why I actively shy away from doing my responsibilities there.

Ian

01:23:11 – 01:23:16

I do love points, though. I love points. Jamie time. Trip and choose the points. It's it's Who

Aaron

01:23:16 – 01:23:18

has the time?

Ian

01:23:18 – 01:23:21

I know. But the points are oh, man. When you go first class for free

Aaron

01:23:22 – 01:23:22

That I

Ian

01:23:22 – 01:23:23

would like.

Aaron

01:23:23 – 01:23:25

That I would like. Hopefully, at some point

Ian

01:23:25 – 01:23:26

It's so good.

Aaron

01:23:26 – 01:23:35

Hopefully, at some point, Steve and I start spending a lot of money on, like, ads or something that turns into more money for us, and then we're just flying everywhere for free.

Ian

01:23:35 – 01:23:48

Yeah. Ads, actually, you have to I think it's Amex one of the Amex cards, and and Chase too. Chase definitely, actually, gives you, like, three x points for ad for online ads, for, like, Google Ads or whatever.

Aaron

01:23:48 – 01:23:49

That's what I'm talking about.

Ian

01:23:49 – 01:24:03

So, yeah, if you get into that stuff, you wanna actually spend the time to figure out what card you're gonna use because it actually has a huge difference. So you definitely wanna do that. Yeah. I don't do a lot of ads. We are gonna be doing a little more ads, so I'm going to be careful and select the right card there.

Ian

01:24:03 – 01:24:09

But yeah. Then you have the I have a whole bunch of card stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We'll swap out.

Aaron

01:24:09 – 01:24:10

Points for another time. Yeah.

Ian

01:24:10 – 01:24:12

Points is a whole another time.

Aaron

01:24:12 – 01:24:13

Points is another thing.

Ian

01:24:13 – 01:24:13

Sounds great.

Aaron

01:24:13 – 01:24:14

Read us out.

Ian

01:24:14 – 01:24:27

Visit us at mostlytechnical.com. Everything's there. If you wanna advertise with us, just like you heard these wonderful ads today, check that out. Most of technical.com is the page for that. Thanks to the sponsors, and we will see you all next week.

Aaron

01:24:27 – 01:24:28

Later.

Mob Mentality

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