Aaron Francis

Ian and Aaron check in the results of Aaron's course launch, talk about the new developer position that Ian just posted, dive into the benefits of scheming time, and so much more. Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com. Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical? Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.

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Transcript

Ian

00:00:00 – 00:00:04

Hello? Hello, hat guy. Hat guy. Hi.

Aaron

00:00:04 – 00:00:07

This is so new. I've never seen this in my life.

Ian

00:00:07 – 00:00:17

So look at how cool this hat is, but it's got a fatal flaw. First of all, I like to wear hats backwards in general, but this is cool. Potentially forward hat. Uh-huh.

Aaron

00:00:17 – 00:00:18

Very cool.

Ian

00:00:18 – 00:00:21

K. K. But see, it's got see this? What is this?

Aaron

00:00:22 – 00:00:23

It's bad shape. Yeah.

Ian

00:00:23 – 00:00:24

What? That's a

Aaron

00:00:24 – 00:00:26

that's a hipster doofus shape.

Ian

00:00:26 – 00:00:31

Whose weirdo head fits in here to fill this pie? Nobody has a head.

Aaron

00:00:31 – 00:00:34

Head, but that's like a that's a very hipster shape.

Ian

00:00:34 – 00:00:41

Yeah. I don't like it. Little horns or something there to, like, make that work. I got this hat for free. Chrome

Aaron

00:00:41 – 00:00:43

is that the chrome offline dinosaur?

Ian

00:00:44 – 00:00:47

This guy who works on the Internet. It's a shit up

Aaron

00:00:47 – 00:00:50

here, man. That is amazing. He's gonna be on

Ian

00:00:50 – 00:00:56

no sleep. It doesn't matter. He's still sharp as attack. So Where did

Aaron

00:00:56 – 00:00:56

you get it?

Ian

00:00:57 – 00:01:06

Google emailed me, and they're like, yo. You've got, like, $40 in Google Play Store credits or something. I don't have an Android. I don't have anything to do. I know Google stuff.

Ian

00:01:06 – 00:01:18

What am I gonna do with this $40? Right? So I go on their site thing in the little store and they got this hat. I'm like, I'll buy a hat for $38 or crazy how this hat is. But I like these little things.

Ian

00:01:18 – 00:01:24

So, anyway, it's going backwards. I like it back backwards, it fits nice. It's got a pretty nice backwards look.

Aaron

00:01:24 – 00:01:26

It's got a good backwards look, and it has

Ian

00:01:26 – 00:01:28

the the blue the pop of color on the

Aaron

00:01:28 – 00:01:30

the adjuster there with the strap. It's very cool.

Ian

00:01:30 – 00:01:34

Color. See that? I don't like how this is going backwards. Oh, man. I don't like that.

Ian

00:01:34 – 00:01:42

Oh, man. I fucked it up. I don't like this either. I have to go no hat. I might have to put my Taylor Swift hat on.

Ian

00:01:42 – 00:01:46

I get my Taylor Swift hat over here. See, how's the last time you sold me the hat?

Aaron

00:01:46 – 00:01:53

The good the good news is is this I feel like this is mostly an audio, experience, so I don't think it There

Ian

00:01:53 – 00:01:54

we go.

Aaron

00:01:54 – 00:01:58

Okay. That's, yeah, that's gonna distract me. Can't handle the secret.

Ian

00:01:58 – 00:02:00

Go out to a dinosaur. It's

Aaron

00:02:00 – 00:02:00

gonna. Yeah.

Ian

00:02:02 – 00:02:04

Alright. No. There we

Aaron

00:02:04 – 00:02:06

go. Alright. There we go.

Ian

00:02:06 – 00:02:11

No. So big week. Big week. Boy. Big

Aaron

00:02:11 – 00:02:13

What a week. What a week.

Ian

00:02:14 – 00:02:15

What you got? We got a lot to cover.

Aaron

00:02:16 – 00:02:19

Ask ask me some questions. Where do we wanna start?

Ian

00:02:19 – 00:02:23

So you launched on you had a day delay, if I recall. Had a

Aaron

00:02:23 – 00:02:24

day delay.

Ian

00:02:24 – 00:02:31

Launched on Friday. Yep. So what give us a we're here. Give us the behind the scenes. Why was there a day delay?

Ian

00:02:31 – 00:02:32

What happened?

Aaron

00:02:32 – 00:02:51

So there was a day delay because we were finishing the website, and I thought, yeah, we need, like, 15 minutes to build a whole, you know, learning platform. And it was close, but we needed a little bit longer. So the plan was to launch on Wednesday. Nope. The plan was to launch on Thursday.

Aaron

00:02:52 – 00:03:02

And Wednesday night rolls around, and it's, like, 8:30 or 9. And I'm, you know, sitting at the kitchen table working, and Steve calls, and he's like, hey, man. Are we gonna finish this tonight?

Ian

00:03:02 – 00:03:02

I was

Aaron

00:03:02 – 00:03:21

like, you know, it it sure isn't feeling like we're gonna finish this tonight. Yeah. And he was like, why don't we just launch on Friday then? I was like, well, that's actually a pretty good idea. So, you know, ideally, we would have launched on a, like, on a Tuesday or something, but Right.

Ian

00:03:21 – 00:03:22

The playbook.

Aaron

00:03:23 – 00:03:33

That, you know, stuff happens, and we launched anyway. And so fine. So we decided to we decided to punt. So then we worked on it all day Thursday. Mhmm.

Aaron

00:03:33 – 00:03:50

Hysterical thinking we were you know, we thought we were gonna finish on Wednesday night. So I worked on it all day on Thursday. Steve is working on the front end. He's doing a bunch of stuff too. And then Thursday night, Jennifer and I had, like, a a dinner party that we went to.

Aaron

00:03:50 – 00:03:52

So I went to this dinner.

Ian

00:03:52 – 00:03:53

Why not? And then Okay.

Aaron

00:03:53 – 00:04:04

Yeah. And then at, like, 9:30, I came back to the office and was like, great. Just gotta finish up. Went home at 3:30 that morning. So I stayed up all night Thursday

Ian

00:04:04 – 00:04:05

night boy.

Aaron

00:04:06 – 00:04:16

And came back up here on Friday, Friday morning, and started live streaming, which I think we gotta talk about this. Great great hack. Great hack.

Ian

00:04:17 – 00:04:21

When you've been in the whole night, that's what I recommend. Night. Right on to the livestream.

Aaron

00:04:21 – 00:04:37

Just give you give you that energy. So then, you know, Friday morning, I I don't know, around 10:30, 11 CST, something like that, we launched. And, you know, it started working. So we'll we'll stop there, and we can we can dive in on any any of the details.

Ian

00:04:37 – 00:04:48

Yeah. So woah. There was I mean, there's a lot right there. But yeah. I mean, you definitely made the right call because there's nothing I mean, especially with a course where, like, there's you know, you're hoping this course lasts a long time and all that stuff, but still there's gonna be a big day.

Ian

00:04:48 – 00:05:04

One, most likely is a lot of pent up demand. You hate to have that be like, everybody gets a bunch of errors and the camp actually buy and yep. How, what percentage of those people just never come back or whatever. So you gotta like, gotta make sure that at least works on some basic level. So good.

Ian

00:05:04 – 00:05:13

Good job hunting. I think one day he seemed totally reasonable. I don't know about this dinner party situation. Seems like a bad call. I don't know if I did a dinner party.

Ian

00:05:13 – 00:05:17

He did the day before I launch or apparently planned for the day of the launch.

Aaron

00:05:17 – 00:05:24

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was supposed to be, you know, the day of launch, and then we go out to dinner with friends. And it's like, oh, that was nice.

Ian

00:05:24 – 00:05:24

What a

Aaron

00:05:24 – 00:05:28

great day. But Sure. Really hoisted by my own petard there.

Ian

00:05:29 – 00:05:45

Although on the flip side, you were working all day. You know, there is a point of diminishing returns there where, like, the break, even if you know, then you're gonna have a long night. Like, there is a value in that break versus just being like, yeah, I'm gonna work 8 AM to 3 AM and straight through, and that doesn't always work.

Aaron

00:05:45 – 00:05:46

That wasn't gonna work.

Ian

00:05:46 – 00:05:51

So Yeah. Yeah. So it kinda probably worked out for the best, actually. So alright. So that's all good.

Ian

00:05:51 – 00:06:09

I mean, I think, I mean, Steve's I wanna talk a lot about Steve's then not here, but I mean, obviously, incredible job to produce this many videos in that period of time. I'm sure a lot of them, you know, didn't all need animation and crazy stuff, but still, like, that's a lot of videos to make sure that everything's right and all that.

Aaron

00:06:09 – 00:06:15

Yeah. So It's especially when we're doing dark and light mode videos.

Ian

00:06:15 – 00:06:29

What the what the you guys are fucking crazy. Let's just start right there. It's just we don't curse a lot in the show, but I think this is appropriate. Somebody tweeted this. I was like, what are they talking about?

Ian

00:06:29 – 00:06:40

This is obviously can't be correct. And then no. Apparently, it is correct. When you go to dark mode, you get dark slides on your crazy videos, and I I don't even know why you're thinking that's bizarre. And I think that's

Aaron

00:06:40 – 00:06:41

Isn't it great?

Ian

00:06:41 – 00:06:52

I guess. How did you do the gray? I didn't, like, I didn't have a chance to look deeply into this. So did you, like he puts in this after, or you had this up and you're doing it twice?

Aaron

00:06:52 – 00:07:03

So we we planned ahead a little bit with the color schemes. So I a lot of a lot of the work is just done in terminal, which is black and white, so that's nice.

Ian

00:07:03 – 00:07:03

Right.

Aaron

00:07:03 – 00:07:39

But the work that's done in TablePlus, Steve before I recorded anything, Steve gave me a custom color scheme that would look pretty good inverted. And so he actually he renders every video twice. And so it's not just like a, you know, a CSS, you know, rotation filter or something. So, yeah, all his animations, all the graphics, and all the screen work is rendered twice over over or, I guess, under the same talking head. So I didn't have to record everything twice, but he had a little script.

Aaron

00:07:39 – 00:07:48

And the he did stuff where, like, you know, you can invert it, and then certain colors in Final Cut Pro, you can pick and, like, rotate the hue. So if something inverted weird, he would, like, change it.

Ian

00:07:48 – 00:07:51

But Right. He basically, like, green screened it sort of,

Aaron

00:07:51 – 00:08:02

like Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, I'm separated from the footage all the time, and so he could leave my camera alone and just muck around with the screen, which is a lot. It's just a lot simpler.

Ian

00:08:02 – 00:08:06

Yeah. Wow. Good touch. Right? That was yeah.

Ian

00:08:06 – 00:08:11

I don't think I've ever seen that. Nobody's ever nobody's ever done it. It's it makes no sense. Who would

Aaron

00:08:11 – 00:08:12

why would you do that?

Ian

00:08:12 – 00:08:21

It's completely bizarre. But I guess I like it. It makes some kind of bizarre world sense. It's I mean, marketing wise, I like it. I don't know now.

Ian

00:08:21 – 00:08:23

Do you have to keep stuff forever? What are your thoughts there?

Aaron

00:08:23 – 00:08:29

Who knows? But it's a great it's a great shtick. It's a great shtick. I think it

Ian

00:08:29 – 00:08:31

Especially a great shtick thing. Yeah.

Aaron

00:08:31 – 00:08:41

It aligns well with the try hard brand, and it's one of those things that's, like, remarkable. So when you when you first do it and you see it, that's something where you would, like, go to Twitter and remark on it, and that's a good thing.

Ian

00:08:42 – 00:08:57

I love remarkability. I've never honestly had a product with great remarkability, but it's always something I want to have. Like Yep. Yeah. It's such it's so hard to come up with obviously, b two b is extra hard, but, like, for something like this where it's like, yeah, Having a little remarkability is so good and I don't know.

Ian

00:08:57 – 00:08:59

You read the purple cow? You must have read the purple cow.

Aaron

00:08:59 – 00:09:04

I mean, I stuff go have I read it or has it been just like, yeah, soaked into my brain?

Ian

00:09:04 – 00:09:06

I don't know. But I know. Yeah. You gotta have a purple cow.

Aaron

00:09:06 – 00:09:08

It's all there in the title. Yeah.

Ian

00:09:08 – 00:09:21

I got a big, hanging across from my office in my house. I have a gigantic sort of print of the cover that he did way back in the day. That's cool. And it's signed by him. Woah.

Ian

00:09:21 – 00:09:26

And it's only, like, it's signed and numbered. So I don't know. It's like, whatever. He did a 100 of them or whatever.

Aaron

00:09:26 – 00:09:27

Cool.

Ian

00:09:27 – 00:09:27

I've got one.

Aaron

00:09:28 – 00:09:33

So All these all these years, you've had the you've had the print and not found your own purple cow.

Ian

00:09:33 – 00:09:35

I know. Hey. Do something with it.

Aaron

00:09:35 – 00:09:37

You we'll get there. We'll find you one.

Ian

00:09:37 – 00:09:52

I know. I have I have a few ideas on this on, like, the I'm working on new HelpSpot website, and, I might I might utilize some of it there, but that's still that's still not the same as, like, in the product, in its core. There's just some crazy shit that, like, people are gonna So Yep. Alright. So let's not get off track here.

Ian

00:09:52 – 00:09:57

So Okay. Alright. So it's, you you you are up basically all night.

Aaron

00:09:57 – 00:09:58

All night.

Ian

00:09:58 – 00:10:02

Come in. You're like, hey. Let's livestream. Why not? So you you throw on the livestream.

Ian

00:10:03 – 00:10:13

You deal with technical difficulties, whatever other BS is going on. And alright. So how'd livestream go? I watched a good chunk of it. I watched the relaunch, I think.

Aaron

00:10:14 – 00:10:27

The livestream the livestream was great. I think the I think it's an ultimate it's like a hack for sure because you go live on Twitter, and Twitter, like, blasts it in everyone's face.

Ian

00:10:27 – 00:10:31

It's over the top now. Yeah. All over the new lives. Like, hey. By the way

Aaron

00:10:31 – 00:10:35

go to? Yeah. You can't get around. Yeah. Exactly.

Ian

00:10:35 – 00:10:36

Look. This bot is live right now. And

Aaron

00:10:36 – 00:10:49

you you cannot like, if everyone laments the the death of reach on Twitter, but then you gotta livestream because that's ultimate 100% reach. Everyone's gonna get shown it multiple times.

Ian

00:10:49 – 00:10:51

What they want you to do. Yes.

Aaron

00:10:51 – 00:10:57

Yes. Exactly. So I went live on Twitter. You know, the first 30 seconds, it was like, hey. Your microphone's blowing out our ears.

Ian

00:10:57 – 00:10:57

And I

Aaron

00:10:57 – 00:10:59

was like, okay. Uh-huh. We'll start over.

Ian

00:10:59 – 00:10:59

So I

Aaron

00:10:59 – 00:11:13

went live on Twitter a second time, and that time it worked. And, yeah, I was really just, like, literally working through the details of launching. You know, I'm writing this launch email. I'm, like, deploying stuff. I'm talking to Steve on the phone.

Aaron

00:11:13 – 00:11:15

I'm like, wait. What's going on? What have we messed up?

Ian

00:11:15 – 00:11:16

Very cool. Yeah.

Aaron

00:11:16 – 00:11:18

It I I felt like it was fun. Like, it's a fun It

Ian

00:11:18 – 00:11:19

was.

Aaron

00:11:19 – 00:11:26

I had never seen that kind of content before, and I, you know, if I could watch Yeah. Adam Wavin and Steve launch something, like, I

Ian

00:11:26 – 00:11:27

would have

Aaron

00:11:27 – 00:11:27

watched that

Ian

00:11:27 – 00:11:28

for sure.

Aaron

00:11:29 – 00:11:41

So I thought, hey. Let's give it a go. And you know what? I think it was a great idea. The numbers, you know, all the numbers are made up on Twitter, and they don't really mean anything, but they're directionally correct.

Aaron

00:11:41 – 00:11:52

And so, you know, bigger bigger number is better. And I think Right. The livestream has, like, a 100000 views at this point, which means Wow. I don't know what it means. Yeah.

Aaron

00:11:52 – 00:11:52

Right.

Ian

00:11:52 – 00:11:54

But even if it's 50,000 in real life Like,

Aaron

00:11:54 – 00:11:55

even 10,000

Ian

00:11:55 – 00:11:57

or whatever. It's 10,000 more than you had before. Right? Like, it

Aaron

00:11:57 – 00:12:00

was Exactly. Good. Yes. Yeah. And No.

Aaron

00:12:00 – 00:12:10

But people were asking. Find it. Yeah. So yeah. A 101.3000 views according to Twitter, which, you know, the tweet itself has 300,000 views.

Aaron

00:12:10 – 00:12:15

So, yeah. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah.

Aaron

00:12:16 – 00:12:24

So that was good. It was fun. A lot of interaction. A lot of people being like, hey. Don't forget this, or why don't you change this email to say that?

Aaron

00:12:24 – 00:12:27

Dave Hickey came in with a great he was like

Ian

00:12:27 – 00:12:28

Came in with a haymaker.

Aaron

00:12:28 – 00:12:35

Bury the lead. It sounds negative, and I was like, that's a good point, Dave. And so I took out bury the lead. So So that was helpful. Thanks, Dave.

Aaron

00:12:35 – 00:12:36

Producer Dave.

Ian

00:12:36 – 00:12:45

Yeah. I feel like the, the sort of peanut gallery had some good comments on it. Like, helped actually helped you out, caught some things.

Aaron

00:12:46 – 00:12:53

Yep. Jason Beggs was the one that knew that, what was it? Queue workers weren't running because we were in maintenance mode, so that was good. It

Ian

00:12:53 – 00:12:56

came out the same. That's what you wanna figure out too. Yeah.

Aaron

00:12:56 – 00:13:01

Yeah. I just never ever ever used maintenance mode. Right. I was just literally never used

Ian

00:13:01 – 00:13:03

it in my life. Right.

Aaron

00:13:03 – 00:13:19

Yeah. And so I'm like, I I have no idea what could go wrong here. So that was helpful. And then, another happy side effect, I think, is when I put out the launch tweets, like, the proper, hey. It's live.

Aaron

00:13:19 – 00:13:32

Go get it. Mhmm. Everyone on stream interacted with that tweet and because they were, like, into the story now. And so they find the new tweet, they go comment or retweet, and that worked really, really well, I think.

Ian

00:13:33 – 00:13:52

Yeah. Especially nowadays where it seems like the algorithms of all these social sites are big on the, like and, you know, within the first, who knows how long minute or 5 minutes or whatever, like, they're gonna weight you more heavily if you get a bunch of likes in that time period. So you have a little army of people you can just send off to like it right away is definitely advantageous.

Aaron

00:13:52 – 00:14:02

Mhmm. Yeah. So that worked out awesome. Then the stream had kind of an ignomius, and my microphone quit working. Actually, my microphone works since OBS.

Aaron

00:14:02 – 00:14:13

OBS sucks. Yeah. And so I was just not audible for the last, you know, 3 minutes, and then I was like, well, guess I'll see you guys later. Thanks thanks for stopping by. Thanks for the 2 hours.

Ian

00:14:13 – 00:14:16

I'm just gonna sign off now. Part. Alright.

Aaron

00:14:16 – 00:14:17

So that's kind of a bummer.

Ian

00:14:17 – 00:14:19

But That's probably better. You had other stuff to do.

Aaron

00:14:19 – 00:14:30

Yeah. I I had to just freaking rest after all that. So, yeah, it that part went great. The the the stream was a it was a huge hack, and I'm definitely gonna do that again.

Ian

00:14:31 – 00:14:50

Yeah. No. I thought it was really cool because it was definitely, like, sincere, as is your style always anyway, but it was very clear you wouldn't like, well, let's have a problem and, you know, or or the like, or the other side of like, okay. We're gonna do the launch stream. Everything's set.

Ian

00:14:50 – 00:15:02

You're just there to, like, literally push the button. Like, I think having some stuff to do, yeah, which just made it way more interesting, obviously, than just like, okay. We're pushing the button, everybody. Yay. We pushed the button.

Aaron

00:15:02 – 00:15:02

Yeah. Let's push

Ian

00:15:02 – 00:15:03

the button to

Aaron

00:15:03 – 00:15:06

count my money. Like, that's not Right. That's not that's not very interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

00:15:06 – 00:15:09

So, no. The stream was awesome. I wasn't expecting that. So that was really cool. Okay.

Ian

00:15:09 – 00:15:10

So you pushed the button.

Aaron

00:15:15 – 00:15:16

Push the button.

Ian

00:15:16 – 00:15:38

You, you had it well, we we should talk about this because you were you had the mailing list and Yes. So there was some drama of sorts around how quickly to email the list and Yep. Bento's kinda telling you what to do. And then behind the scenes, other people are telling you what to do, whatever. So give us the give us the mailing list rundown, I guess.

Aaron

00:15:38 – 00:15:45

Yeah. So I use Bento for my email for all of my emails. Love it. It's great. Founders, super responsive.

Aaron

00:15:47 – 00:16:01

And so, you know, I've got a list of I forget what it was, like, 5,052100 people on this SQLite, list. The last email I sent was about DHH. So it was maybe, you know, 4 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, something like that.

Ian

00:16:01 – 00:16:01

Too long.

Aaron

00:16:01 – 00:16:07

Too long and too few. So when I sent it, there were, like, 22100 people on the list.

Ian

00:16:07 – 00:16:10

So some bunches, but I've never I've never gotten an email from

Aaron

00:16:10 – 00:16:28

you before. Exactly. So what I really needed to do and let this be a comfort to people who think that, people on the Internet have everything figured out. I freaking didn't have everything figured out. What I what I really needed to do was send an email to the entire list, like, a week ahead of time.

Ian

00:16:28 – 00:16:29

Right.

Aaron

00:16:29 – 00:16:31

Maybe 2 or 3 emails.

Ian

00:16:31 – 00:16:33

I think so.

Aaron

00:16:33 – 00:16:44

Just so that, like, Gmail understands, 1, this domain, high performance SQLite, it sends emails, and 2, people like that. And they're like, Yeah. They don't market spam. They read it. Like, this is a good thing.

Aaron

00:16:44 – 00:16:56

Right. And so, you know, Bento has this, UI help text that's like, hey. We recommend sending, you know, this many emails per hour, to a list this size.

Ian

00:16:57 – 00:17:04

And I, you know, I cheated a little bit. I bumped it up a little bit. It looked low. It would've taken you, like, 2 days or something to send

Aaron

00:17:04 – 00:17:04

it, or

Ian

00:17:04 – 00:17:05

it was like yeah.

Aaron

00:17:05 – 00:17:22

And so I was like, let's spread it out over I think I chose 6 or 7 hours, which is still less than ideal. Yeah. Ideally, I would've had the site ready at midnight, and I could have started email sending at 4 AM. And, you know, by 11, everybody has their emails, but, you know, I didn't.

Ian

00:17:22 – 00:17:29

But then you wouldn't have done the stream, So I think I would have done the stream. Yeah. It would have been different anyway. It would have been a different type of thing. So, yeah, I

Aaron

00:17:29 – 00:17:30

think that's fine.

Ian

00:17:30 – 00:17:32

So Gmail shut you down for a little bit?

Aaron

00:17:32 – 00:17:45

Gmail shut us down for a little bit, and very helpful people have been saying like, oh, you should switch to postmark. It's like, okay. Thank you. That's very helpful. However, that is not what I'm talking about whatsoever.

Aaron

00:17:45 – 00:17:53

Like A different Gmail Gmail has limited our domain for 24 hours, regardless of who I use.

Ian

00:17:53 – 00:17:54

It's not the provider. Yeah.

Aaron

00:17:54 – 00:18:04

Could use anybody. And so and, of course, in behind the scenes, you know, the founder of Bento is DM ing me, and he's like, hey. Here's what I'm seeing. Yes. Here's I'm seeing the soft rate limit.

Aaron

00:18:05 – 00:18:12

Here's when it will be lifted. Here's what you should do. And it's like, great. That's really helpful. And he helped me switch over to a different, domain.

Aaron

00:18:12 – 00:18:17

So I sent a few emails from the aaronfrances.comdomainafterthat because that was Mhmm. You know, it's been around for 15 years.

Ian

00:18:18 – 00:18:18

Yeah.

Aaron

00:18:20 – 00:18:32

So that was kind of a bummer because, 1, a few launch emails, like, bounced around no man's land for a little bit. Everything eventually got retried. You know, Gmail didn't block us. They're just like, hang on a second. Yeah.

Aaron

00:18:32 – 00:19:01

But the real bummer is, we have this this auth flow where, like, you could check out without being logged in, which I think is pretty important. And then when you get back to so you then you like, you're redirected to lemon squeezy. You process the order, and then you get back to our domain. And what we do then is, if you're not logged in, we instantly create an account based on the email that you provided to Liv and Squeasy. And then we say, great.

Aaron

00:19:01 – 00:19:16

You have an account. You're already logged in, so begin watching. And, also, we sent a reset email or basically, like, a claim your account email that you can use to set your password. And, of course, those were the ones that, like, people were like, hey. That's not true.

Aaron

00:19:16 – 00:19:19

This isn't coming through. Like, shit. Dang it. So Got

Ian

00:19:19 – 00:19:21

a little fancy there. A little fancy.

Aaron

00:19:21 – 00:19:46

Yeah. And it would've it would've worked great if we hadn't, like, hosed our deliverability on accident. I guess accidentally is the correct way to say that. So that was kind of a bummer, but I think, you know, I think it it worked out fine. I ended up just, like, people sent emails to support, and our support also got rate limited because because we can't send outbound emails from the domain.

Aaron

00:19:46 – 00:20:02

So we're kinda, like, we're kinda hosed there for a minute. But then we just we just freaking dealt with it, and it was fine. And I think it was only Gmail and only people that, like, bought when they were not logged in. And so it's just it's it's a pretty small amount,

Ian

00:20:02 – 00:20:03

but it

Aaron

00:20:03 – 00:20:06

was still kind of harrowing slash super frustrating.

Ian

00:20:06 – 00:20:24

Yeah. Oh, boy. What do you think about I know a friend of this show, Adam Waffen was kind of talking at one point about just having a single domain, which makes a lot of sense. Like, you know, the company domain or whatever you wanna do, but like this way you don't have to re set it up for time and Postgres domain. Probably gonna have a a bigger list.

Ian

00:20:24 – 00:20:25

Right? So next time you

Aaron

00:20:25 – 00:20:25

I know.

Ian

00:20:26 – 00:20:29

20,000 people on the list, you might still get soft limited because they'll be like, well,

Aaron

00:20:29 – 00:20:30

not I know.

Ian

00:20:30 – 00:20:39

20,000 people. And last time they only sent the 5,000 that's big change or whatever. Like, so there's other Yeah. Potential weirdness in there. Plus a lot of domains, man.

Ian

00:20:39 – 00:20:47

It's like you're planning on doing a number of these courses. It's like everyone's own domain. So infrastructure. Yeah. Kind of a lot of junk.

Aaron

00:20:47 – 00:20:48

We'll just wanna empire. I'm

Ian

00:20:48 – 00:20:54

all about collecting domains, but, like Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. I love it. I actually have a domain story too we can talk about, but, we'll

Aaron

00:20:54 – 00:20:58

I love a domain story. Let's let's talk about what Adam said, though.

Ian

00:20:58 – 00:20:59

Yes. So what do you

Aaron

00:20:59 – 00:21:10

So Adam Adam was like, hey. You shouldn't ever send emails from that domain. And I'm like, I don't know. I'm not buying it. I mean, I I'm not buying it.

Aaron

00:21:10 – 00:21:26

I understand. I think I think, technically what do I think? I think if I'm a user, I wanna get emails from high performance SQLite dotcom, not from TryHard Studios because who are they? You know? That's kind of my first gut reaction.

Aaron

00:21:26 – 00:21:35

It's like, I don't know TryHard Studios. Why why don't I talk to them? Now provided we get something like database school, that's a little bit closer. Right.

Ian

00:21:35 – 00:21:39

I thought at one point, you were talking about doing more of a, like, an overarching brand for

Aaron

00:21:40 – 00:21:40

Yes.

Ian

00:21:40 – 00:21:41

These courses.

Aaron

00:21:41 – 00:22:00

For sure. We are, and we will. And at that point, you know, I'd be curious actually what domains Wes send Wes Boss sends emails from for his Yeah. Various courses because he has a lot of standalone sites as well. Like, each, you know, each course is kind of its own mini brand.

Aaron

00:22:00 – 00:22:20

And I wonder if he sends so there's some sort of combination of marketing emails, transactional emails, and no emails. And what like, which of those 3 does he do marketing plus transactional, or does he send marketing from his West Boss domain and transactional from the course domain? So I'll need to do some research there. But

Ian

00:22:20 – 00:22:25

Yeah. I would be surprised if he used different domains for each, but

Aaron

00:22:25 – 00:22:26

tossing emails?

Ian

00:22:27 – 00:22:30

Yeah. I would think that he has a centralized domain.

Aaron

00:22:30 – 00:22:48

What what are your so on the back end on the back end, everything dumps into 1 Bento account. Right. And so it's not like I'm managing, you know, 6 Mailchimp instances, and they're the twain shall meet. Like, everyone goes into one pool, and they get tagged with certain things. And so, like, I'm happy about that.

Aaron

00:22:48 – 00:22:52

So what are your what what what do you think about this domain situation?

Ian

00:22:52 – 00:23:03

I mean, I think yeah. To me, the the issue is that you're sending bulk email, which is already like, you know, a a a little bit of a negative, right, compared

Aaron

00:23:03 – 00:23:03

Ian

00:23:03 – 00:23:22

a transactional email. And then you're always gonna have a new domain. So, like, you're always gonna be in the worst spot. So I don't know. I just feel like I think I I would go with 1 domain because I think, like, even if you lose a small percentage of it because it's always new domains, like that's still a small percent.

Ian

00:23:22 – 00:23:42

Like 5% of the emails don't get seen. Sure. Because you're not on a more established domain. Like that's still kind of significant. And then also if you do like 6 of these, that's like just a lot of like sort of annoying stuff to set up bigger and, yeah, make sure it's all right and, like, all that stuff.

Aaron

00:23:42 – 00:23:43

Yeah.

Ian

00:23:43 – 00:24:05

So I'd probably use 1, but I don't know. I mean, because you could always change the personal name part to address your other concern. Right? Like, it could be from I mean, it depends how you wanna run that, but, like, you can use other ways to deal with that. I think you can also even like, there's some trickery you can do with, like, the reply to email so that you're sending it from the main email, but the reply to is the other is the more direct domain.

Ian

00:24:05 – 00:24:25

And then, like, you could do some just forwarding and stuff. But so I believe what would count for your reputation is the from domain. Although you definitely wanna check that. So there are some shenanigans there, but I don't know. I think building up the, like, the sort of value and the trust of your of one domain seems good.

Aaron

00:24:26 – 00:24:44

It does seem good. I that that part is compelling to me. That that does seem good. But I don't know you know, if we, I don't know, if we end up moving all of these courses under one domain, then that makes it easy. Like, that's the easy easy answer.

Aaron

00:24:44 – 00:24:50

Yeah. If we continue to have separate properties per course, that's more of an open question.

Ian

00:24:50 – 00:25:06

I don't love, I guess, on the flip side, kinda I think to your point is I don't love try hard studios as the the main domain in that scenario, I guess. Makes no sense. Yeah. It's kind of a weird nobody's gonna probably Good domain that.

Aaron

00:25:06 – 00:25:07

Right? It's a it's a great company. It's a

Ian

00:25:07 – 00:25:08

good company.

Aaron

00:25:08 – 00:25:09

You have to admit. Yeah. There you go.

Ian

00:25:09 – 00:25:11

Yeah. I like that. But like Okay.

Aaron

00:25:12 – 00:25:15

But it's not associated with SQLite in any way, shape, or form.

Ian

00:25:15 – 00:25:26

Yeah. Like, that part's a little weird possibly. So I guess you just have to see. If you end up going with the the overarching brand, which Mhmm. Seems like a good idea, I think overall, because then you can build up that.

Ian

00:25:26 – 00:25:30

I think so. Outside of email, you get like that credibility and like, I

Aaron

00:25:30 – 00:25:30

think so.

Ian

00:25:30 – 00:25:46

You're just doing like, like what West boss has done, but he uses himself like you're gonna use this other thing, entity. I I mean, it's still even I don't think it's a horrible idea to go the West boss route completely either. I mean, it could just be Aaron Francis and everything's Aaron.

Aaron

00:25:46 – 00:25:48

Just build it all around me.

Ian

00:25:48 – 00:26:09

Domain. Just build it all around you. And I mean, that's probably honestly the best, like if you wanna just straight maximize dollars, I think Aaron Francis is probably the best way to go about it. Cause you're, they're finding these products through you, through your name, your Twitter account, your YouTube, whatever, like it's all consistent. The email comes from aaronbrantz.com.

Ian

00:26:09 – 00:26:25

Everything's Aaron Francis. Like, obviously, whatever. It's TriHard Studios, Inc, blah blah blah. But, like, that's why I got the action is having it all be you is the optimal, but that's kinda weird when you're in business with a partner and all that stuff. Do we want to just be aaronbrances.com and everything?

Ian

00:26:25 – 00:26:26

I don't know. But

Aaron

00:26:26 – 00:26:35

Steve and I have talked about that a lot, and I'm always like, oh, man, Steve. We gotta get you out there more. And he's like, oh, man, Aaron. I don't wanna be out there more. So I don't think I don't think that would I don't think that would matter.

Aaron

00:26:37 – 00:26:51

I think, 1, I feel man, what a I feel like maybe that that sparks in me some sort of, like, vanity or, like, you need to be more humble about this. Like

Ian

00:26:52 – 00:26:52

but

Aaron

00:26:52 – 00:27:13

I'm also I also wonder, like, I also wonder if that is, like, thinking thinking small. Like, does it have more gravitas if a stranger lands on, you you know, aaronfrancis.com/sequeliteorsequelite, you know, high performance sequelite.com. You know what I mean?

Ian

00:27:13 – 00:27:28

Well, yeah. I don't think like the product domains. I'm not saying that that, like how west does it where he has different domains for the products. But it's like, you know, it's sort of an Aaron Francis thing, your face is on it, which is already is like it's coming. The emails are coming from you.

Ian

00:27:29 – 00:27:39

I mean, there is a, a small, a thinking, the, the thinking small part about it to me is that it could get weird. Like this gets big and someday you wanna sell it.

Aaron

00:27:39 – 00:27:40

Like, it's

Ian

00:27:40 – 00:27:54

weird that like, like now you're so tied to it that it's basically not sellable probably, like, really? Or at least it's gonna hurt its value because, like, you're not going with it, presumably. And now they own aaronfrancis.com. And what use is that? Right.

Aaron

00:27:54 – 00:27:58

It's not handing over sending ability from my domain. Like, that's Yeah.

Ian

00:27:58 – 00:28:17

I mean, that part gets weird. So but without that, you're obviously hurting the products a lot, presumably, which is gonna be true no matter what, but it's even more so if it's, like, very tied to you and your personal domain. Right. So, yeah, that part's not great. I think the middle database school is like an interesting middle ground.

Ian

00:28:18 – 00:28:25

Obviously, it's a little more limiting if you do a high performance Laravel, of course, like that going database school. I guess that's just its own thing. Right? So like

Aaron

00:28:25 – 00:28:28

We have brands on brands on brands. I'm fine with

Ian

00:28:28 – 00:28:28

that.

Aaron

00:28:28 – 00:28:32

Auto rates. I just want a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Maybe I'm just a hoarder.

Ian

00:28:32 – 00:28:34

Just love a good domain.

Aaron

00:28:34 – 00:28:39

Yeah. We should get Wes on here. We should invite Wes to come in and tell us all the answers.

Ian

00:28:39 – 00:28:47

We we had him on for a stupid reason. We were talking about having him come on for a stupid reason. We should have him come on for a real reason. Yeah. It was like, let's talk about hey, Wes.

Ian

00:28:47 – 00:28:51

Let's come on and talk about socks. We could do that for an hour.

Aaron

00:28:51 – 00:28:53

Did he say yes?

Ian

00:28:53 – 00:29:01

Well, so, I think he did or something, but then, like, he didn't write me back at another point. And then, then I just talked

Aaron

00:29:01 – 00:29:02

to him.

Ian

00:29:02 – 00:29:05

Just popped the kid. No. No. No. We popped it out.

Aaron

00:29:05 – 00:29:05

That's right.

Ian

00:29:05 – 00:29:14

That's right. Then I was like, I'm not gonna harass him about, like, coming out and talking about socks when he's got, like, a 3 day old, so I just kinda let it be. But We should have him come on

Aaron

00:29:14 – 00:29:15

and talk about this.

Ian

00:29:15 – 00:29:16

Yeah. This this is this is

Aaron

00:29:16 – 00:29:20

more of a this is more of a carrot than socks. Although he may wanna talk about socks, which I, of

Ian

00:29:20 – 00:29:26

course, would be open to. Yeah. We could do that as a fun little aside, but I don't know if we need an hour on socks, so we could

Aaron

00:29:27 – 00:29:28

No, probably not.

Ian

00:29:28 – 00:29:29

Fold it in. Fold it in.

Aaron

00:29:30 – 00:29:30

Yeah.

Ian

00:29:32 – 00:29:36

So okay. So Alright. How do we go.

Aaron

00:29:36 – 00:29:37

We'll figure that out.

Ian

00:29:37 – 00:29:45

Emails are loud. Tell me, are you happy? Are you are you high level happy, medium level happy, low level happy, competitive this

Aaron

00:29:45 – 00:29:47

time? Launch or just in life in general?

Ian

00:29:48 – 00:29:52

Well, let's go with money from the launch. I want money from the launch.

Aaron

00:29:52 – 00:29:57

But that does constrain it quite a bit. Yeah. Okay. So I'm gonna reveal actual numbers here.

Ian

00:29:57 – 00:30:00

Oh. Woah. Yeah. Woah. Woah.

Ian

00:30:00 – 00:30:04

Alright. So legalize So we got hold on. Hold on. So we got a little Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

00:30:04 – 00:30:13

Rebuild this, and I don't think you're gonna reveal this. I don't think you should reveal this, that you have Yeah. Some sponsor money. From day 1, you got some sponsor money. Just a little baseline of money.

Ian

00:30:13 – 00:30:14

Right?

Aaron

00:30:14 – 00:30:14

Not like

Ian

00:30:14 – 00:30:16

Which I will which I will not reveal because that is only partially my business. That is partially Tursa's business, and I don't wanna talk

Aaron

00:30:16 – 00:30:20

to her. A nice amount of money. It's not like Yep.

Ian

00:30:20 – 00:30:33

You're not gonna work for a year because of this amount of money, but it's a nice little seed money to, like, get you going, get the project done, brand into the company. Okay. Great. Yep. You have a baseline money.

Aaron

00:30:33 – 00:30:40

Food on the family while we were while we were doing this course. And that was, extremely helpful. It was it was necessary.

Ian

00:30:41 – 00:30:48

Right. A nice little stress buffer from after the layoff in between by that time to do this. Okay. Yep. So now Alright.

Ian

00:30:49 – 00:30:56

You launch and there's money involved. People are pulling out their credit cards, the paying you guys. Give us numbers, I guess.

Aaron

00:30:56 – 00:31:04

Do do you remember what I said what I what my target was? Because I certainly don't. I think I said it on podcast last time.

Ian

00:31:04 – 00:31:06

What? I think you were trying to get to a 100,000

Aaron

00:31:07 – 00:31:07

Yeah.

Ian

00:31:07 – 00:31:08

In the near term.

Aaron

00:31:08 – 00:31:12

In the Yeah. In, like, in the first 2 months, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

00:31:12 – 00:31:13

And something like that.

Aaron

00:31:14 – 00:31:26

Okay. So do you I mean, this could make me look really good or really bad. Do you wanna take a guess? If you come in super high, remember, I'm gonna look like an idiot, so give me the homie guess. Dollars.

Aaron

00:31:26 – 00:31:27

Yeah. Thanks.

Ian

00:31:28 – 00:31:32

Alright. I'm gonna go with, I'm gonna go with 72,000.

Aaron

00:31:34 – 00:31:38

Wow. That is a pretty good guess. Are you ready for the big reveal?

Ian

00:31:39 – 00:31:40

Yeah. What is it?

Aaron

00:31:40 – 00:31:42

Is this a small $79,244.

Ian

00:31:45 – 00:31:47

Very nice. Very

Aaron

00:31:47 – 00:31:49

nice. So bad.

Ian

00:31:49 – 00:31:52

That is a good, what do we got? Day 4 or something like that

Aaron

00:31:52 – 00:31:59

here? 4. Yeah. So over one one weekday plus a weekend, $79,000.

Ian

00:32:00 – 00:32:01

I like it.

Aaron

00:32:02 – 00:32:08

Thoughts on that? Let's let's, let's spin that out a little bit. Yes. That's a lot of money. We'll just start there.

Ian

00:32:08 – 00:32:09

Nice chunk of chain.

Aaron

00:32:10 – 00:32:18

A lot of money. When you look at all that money and you divide it by 2 for me and Steve. Right?

Ian

00:32:18 – 00:32:31

And then There's this there's this slot machine that I played on occasion, and it when you hit some money, it goes, that's a lot of money. And so you just said, that's a lot of money. I can't help, but laugh there. That's a lot of money.

Aaron

00:32:31 – 00:32:33

We gotta find that clip.

Ian

00:32:34 – 00:32:36

That's a lot of money.

Aaron

00:32:37 – 00:32:39

Alright. That's a lot of money.

Ian

00:32:39 – 00:32:39

That's a lot of money.

Aaron

00:32:41 – 00:32:46

You divide it by 2, and that gets to be less money. Right? Because there's Steve and I both exist.

Ian

00:32:46 – 00:32:48

I think it's half the money.

Aaron

00:32:49 – 00:32:50

I can't verify that. I'm on

Ian

00:32:50 – 00:32:52

I don't do math live, but I think that

Aaron

00:32:52 – 00:32:56

that sounds right to me. So Okay. It it becomes, let's say, half.

Ian

00:32:57 – 00:32:57

Yes.

Aaron

00:32:57 – 00:33:07

So still a lot of money. And then you say, alright. Well, that took, we'll say, maybe 3 months to do. And the money per month just gets to be a lot smaller. So

Ian

00:33:07 – 00:33:07

Yeah.

Aaron

00:33:07 – 00:33:25

It is a lot of money, and I'm extremely grateful that it worked because I think this shows us the model can work. So that's, like, that's the big takeaways is okay. We can do this. This is gonna work. This is not a life changing retire amount of money, obviously.

Aaron

00:33:25 – 00:33:38

Yeah. This is we we need to do several more of these to, like, make as much as we were making. And, of course, my goal is to double what we were making at, you know, the old company. So Yep. We'll we'll get there.

Aaron

00:33:39 – 00:33:52

So feelings are I am extremely happy. I think with with the with the launch and the the money, I'm extremely happy in life. Mhmm. There's such a lot of pressure. But with the launch, I'm extremely happy.

Aaron

00:33:52 – 00:34:04

It went great. I'm Great. I'm very, very optimistic about the future of this company, and I think it is going to work. So what do we do from here? We gotta turn it into a business.

Aaron

00:34:04 – 00:34:22

Right? So we had a we had a fun, big launch, and we did a thing, and it worked. And now we've gotta we've gotta, like, 1, we've gotta shore up some of our existing assets. And then 2, we've gotta turn we've gotta turn these we've gotta turn these assets into evergreen pro producing

Ian

00:34:22 – 00:34:26

assets. Got it. Got it. I feel like it's absolutely critical.

Aaron

00:34:26 – 00:34:36

We cannot live launch to launch. I've already God. I've already declared to my wife that the next one will be very different. Not gonna be this stressful.

Ian

00:34:36 – 00:34:38

Yeah. No.

Aaron

00:34:38 – 00:34:41

No. No. No worry. I fully committed. I yeah.

Aaron

00:34:41 – 00:34:48

I said it's a 100 percent gonna be different. Left myself no wiggle room. So No wiggle room. Very, very smart, Aaron.

Ian

00:34:48 – 00:34:49

Very good, man.

Aaron

00:34:49 – 00:35:10

Yeah. So here's the here's the here's the going forward plan, and then I'll let you, rebut. Going forward plan is to, one, shore up the you know, I've 1 there there are several videos I need to finish, and so that's good. Right? Because that will be an excuse to email, an excuse for people to buy and talk about course some more.

Aaron

00:35:11 – 00:35:19

So the early access thing worked out pretty well because, 1, I needed, to stop, and 2, now we have a reason to email people. So that works out great.

Ian

00:35:19 – 00:35:19

Yep.

Aaron

00:35:19 – 00:35:34

So that will keep going. And then, we need to figure out and this is this is an exciting thing. This is not a a despairing thing. We need to figure out the flywheel. So we're gonna, you know, we're gonna do content, and we're gonna pay for ads.

Aaron

00:35:34 – 00:35:47

Like, this has been people have done things before where you pay for advertising and you make money on the back end. Like Right. Bootstrappers have not yet discovered this this reality. I think I think we're gonna try it. So Okay.

Ian

00:35:47 – 00:35:47

We'll do

Aaron

00:35:47 – 00:35:54

some of that. Interesting. On yeah. Whether on Twitter or, honestly, Reddit, we're gonna try that as well. We'll see.

Ian

00:35:54 – 00:35:54

That's interesting. I would

Aaron

00:35:54 – 00:36:12

have yeah. Yeah. We'll have some some fun fodder for the show there. So shore up that asset. And then I think in the in the near term, we're gonna turn a lot of attention to screencasting.com, and Steve and I are gonna redo that together because, you know, that was just an Aaron Francis joint.

Ian

00:36:12 – 00:36:13

Yep.

Aaron

00:36:13 – 00:36:44

But we're gonna redo it together and expand the offering there and kind of bring that into the fold more fully. And then, hopefully, we can start pushing those assets forward and, hopefully, start getting a little bit of a flywheel going with those. And that will lay the base of TryHard Studios' income upon which we can build new launches that fall off, but then add a little layer that grow over time, new launches. And hopefully by the end, our cohort graph is up into the right. So that's it.

Aaron

00:36:44 – 00:36:45

What do you got?

Ian

00:36:45 – 00:36:56

I like it. Yeah. It's just super I mean, I feel like everybody lets the courses fall off. They're, like, launch the course, then that's it. They move on with their lives.

Ian

00:36:56 – 00:37:04

Seems critical to not do that. I don't know the best way to do it. That might be a West boss type question. He's kinda mastered this. Right?

Ian

00:37:04 – 00:37:04

Like, I don't know.

Aaron

00:37:05 – 00:37:06

Get him on here. Yeah.

Ian

00:37:06 – 00:37:24

You gotta get him on. But yeah. How do you do, like, relaunch every quarter? Do you read, like, is it just more of still, like, doing launches and just, like, relaunching or is there some way to make it more, just create some, yeah, ongoing flywheel type effect. I like the idea of advertising, especially Reddit, which I think will be a little more set and forget.

Ian

00:37:24 – 00:37:27

The Google is tricky.

Aaron

00:37:27 – 00:37:29

Sounds tricky. It feels tricky.

Ian

00:37:29 – 00:37:40

It's a little tricky. It's like super optimized on there and stuff. There's a lot of people going after things. I think if you like, I think like sequel, like course or something, you might be able to like really dial it in and try a couple like,

Aaron

00:37:40 – 00:37:41

yeah.

Ian

00:37:41 – 00:37:42

Right on the nose ones.

Aaron

00:37:43 – 00:37:45

There cannot be that many people advertising for that.

Ian

00:37:47 – 00:37:58

You would think not, but I don't know. You have these big, like, platforms like Linda or whatever. Like, whatever the JinkoS platforms just have everything. So they might be throwing money at everything. Like, that's what we base a lot in our world is like, they're just throwing money at everything.

Ian

00:37:58 – 00:38:11

It doesn't matter. I wonder about like, so did you ever see that, tweet from the guy who does Jenny AI? Mhmm. They might have talked about that a little bit in the audio.

Aaron

00:38:11 – 00:38:12

Keep going.

Ian

00:38:12 – 00:38:51

I'll post it up, but it's basically their how they've, like, built their, like, kind of flywheel with social media video. And, they're kind of angled to it is not to pay for the ads, which I would think would not be good for you guys probably either too much because, like, just to think, like, I don't know. I think if I get kind of expensive, but, but if and you guys are good at video. So, like, if you just basically, what they do is they make intriguing videos and the short short form videos. Because the thing with the short form video, like Instagram and TikTok and all that stuff, is that it's actually, like, quite decoupled from your account.

Ian

00:38:51 – 00:39:00

So, like, nowadays, it's not that you have a Yes. Account with millions of followers. It's like, hey. If you make something interesting and it gets that initial surge, we're just gonna send it to millions people. And that's great.

Ian

00:39:00 – 00:39:21

Right? So that's kind of the whole thing is they make fun, quick, short videos that and they do a lot of them and 1 or 2 take off every once in a while. And that's what Ben the driver. So since you guys are good at video, like, I don't think your sequel light video's gonna get sent to 2,000,000 people, but you don't need to get sent to 2,000,000 people. If it gets sent to a 100,000 devs.

Ian

00:39:21 – 00:39:29

Right. And 5% of them convert, then that's great. So Right. I don't know how you make it fun. I don't know how you make it so people are like, this is awesome.

Ian

00:39:29 – 00:39:41

They like it, whatever. That's your guy's job. But, I don't know. Something like that could be interesting where you do some, like, content oriented content for specifically marketing in these different sorts of channels maybe. Might be This

Aaron

00:39:41 – 00:40:12

is interesting. Here's a thought. Make I I I don't think I've cracked short form yet, and I don't super love it, But I will I will yes and your idea, and say yes and here's an idea. We could do long form, you know, whatever, 5, 10 minutes long, long form SQLite videos like I've like I've been doing, like I do, like I'm good at. And then we can pay, that also, like, you know, teaches you something, but also is like, hey.

Aaron

00:40:12 – 00:40:23

If you wanna learn more, there's there's a course. Go watch the course. Right. And then we can promote that on YouTube. So, like, you can boost your own videos and

Ian

00:40:23 – 00:40:24

pay to boost?

Aaron

00:40:24 – 00:40:39

You can, yeah, you can pay to get views. And maybe maybe that's a good way to advertise somewhat cheaply. That, ah, that's interesting. Actually, we already have some SQLite videos out, so maybe we should just try that.

Ian

00:40:39 – 00:40:45

Just boost those. Yeah. Add on the, like, edit them to have your core stuff, like, in it somewhere. And then, yeah. Yeah.

Ian

00:40:45 – 00:40:47

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

00:40:47 – 00:40:53

Yeah. I don't know. I I will say, like, the thing about the advertising is it does always add up very quickly. So it's like, hey. It's like Yeah.

Ian

00:40:53 – 00:41:04

Even not these Facebook and platforms that are ostensibly cheap, it's like, oh, it's 1¢ a view or whatever. Like, it's not a big deal, but, like, they don't usually convert super great. So, like

Aaron

00:41:04 – 00:41:04

Right.

Ian

00:41:05 – 00:41:11

You know? Yeah. You could go through 20, $3,000 like super, super quick. And in your

Aaron

00:41:11 – 00:41:12

mark, it's

Ian

00:41:12 – 00:41:35

easier to sell, which is good because like the one off purchase is usually easier to sell. But on the flip side, you know, there's no recurring part, which is bad. So it's like your cost of acquisition needs to be lower than, like, you know, the revenue. So, but I mean, people get good at this and they just play that game. I don't know if you guys wanna get good at it, or maybe again, there's like third parties that do this.

Ian

00:41:35 – 00:41:37

Always follow, like, the math is hard on that.

Aaron

00:41:38 – 00:41:40

Be good at it. I don't want to get good at it.

Ian

00:41:40 – 00:41:41

Right. Is

Aaron

00:41:41 – 00:41:43

there is there a way to do that? Yeah.

Ian

00:41:43 – 00:42:01

So if you play that game, like, I've known a few people in software who just got really good at it. It did take a long time, but they're like, hey. Like, their margin is tight usually with advertising, but it's like we make 9% or whatever, but it's like, hey, if you can just pile money in and you can make 9%, then Get credit card

Aaron

00:42:01 – 00:42:03

points on the back end and free money.

Ian

00:42:03 – 00:42:04

You get a credit card points.

Aaron

00:42:04 – 00:42:05

Okay.

Ian

00:42:05 – 00:42:21

Yeah. I mean, it's not as nice as when you get the 90% profit margin, but whatever. If you're just and it's but it's also often reaching a market you'll just never reach a different way. So if you can make the economics work of, like, you're making 5 or 10%, it doesn't really matter because it's, like, a bonus 5 or 10%.

Aaron

00:42:22 – 00:42:38

And there's something there's something that's even more valuable than money, and that is with love, truly. Love. That is that is having those people on your email list at that point. Right? So if you can get them in the door and you make a little bit of money off of them, that's awesome.

Aaron

00:42:38 – 00:42:42

But then you can continue to email them with new products and extensions and that sort of thing.

Ian

00:42:43 – 00:42:45

That's your recurring revenue on them.

Aaron

00:42:45 – 00:42:46

Right.

Ian

00:42:46 – 00:42:54

Is what else you can sell them down the line. So yeah. I mean, I think a combo. I definitely like the Reddit one. I think that's, like, you know,

Aaron

00:42:54 – 00:42:54

whatever the

Ian

00:42:54 – 00:43:12

SQLite thing is. I mean, there's also, like, what, I don't know how you would do this. This would be more like it's like advertising, but it'd be more like maybe a partnership or advertising with, like what, Caleb does with LiveWire. Right? Where obviously he fully controls the whole thing, but it's like on the docs, you saw on the screencast.

Ian

00:43:13 – 00:43:22

Yeah. Like, are there sequel light sites that get any kind of real traffic other than the Right. The docs would be great. I doubt the docs are gonna put a banner up for your course.

Aaron

00:43:22 – 00:43:24

I I can tell you it's 0% chance you

Ian

00:43:24 – 00:43:32

would do that. Docs, and they don't seem like they're gonna be adding the banner there. Yeah. So that's unfortunate. If the docs were an option, that would be cool.

Ian

00:43:32 – 00:43:43

But, but, yeah, is there other I don't know. Maybe there's other resource sites of some sort that you could get a banner on or somehow partner with or whatever. So there are some other things that's not too potentially. But I

Aaron

00:43:43 – 00:44:03

also wanna do affiliates. You know, we're on we're on Lemon Squeezy partially for that reason. Like, I don't super care about taxes. In fact, if I could turn off tax compliance on Lemon Squeezy, I would. But it makes everything else so much easier, including affiliates because they automatically handle the splits and the payouts and the tracking and all of that.

Ian

00:44:03 – 00:44:04

Oh, I think so.

Aaron

00:44:04 – 00:44:29

I do wanna, you know, I do wanna reach out to, like, Kent c Dodds, whom you continue to not know somehow. But I wanna reach out to Kent Kent C. Dodds and Wes and these people that are like, hey. We've got email lists of maybe React developers or otherwise front end developers, and we're not competitive, like, we'd we're not we're not gonna do a database course. And, hopefully, I can but, see, again, with That's a

Ian

00:44:29 – 00:44:29

really good idea.

Aaron

00:44:29 – 00:44:44

People, yeah, but with people like Wes, does the money the money is not gonna move the needle for him, I have to imagine. Yeah. Like, if he makes on a good day $10,000 off of selling my course, like, does that make him happy? I don't know. Should have him on.

Ian

00:44:44 – 00:44:46

I mean, everybody likes $10,000.

Aaron

00:44:46 – 00:44:47

Everybody likes $10,000.

Ian

00:44:48 – 00:45:01

Everybody likes it. That's a good point. But it is one of the best feelings in poker is, like, when you cash out your chips, if you've ever been lucky enough to cash out for over $10,000 Mhmm. And they just give you a stack wrap of $10,000.

Aaron

00:45:02 – 00:45:02

That's awesome.

Ian

00:45:03 – 00:45:07

It's a nice feeling. Just a wrap stack of 10. Glorious.

Aaron

00:45:07 – 00:45:13

Maybe that's how I that's how I that's how I sell them. I'm like, hey, Wes. Do you wanna get a wrap stack? And he's gonna be like,

Ian

00:45:13 – 00:45:16

I don't know what a wrap stack is. Oh, shoot.

Aaron

00:45:16 – 00:45:20

Yeah. Yeah. Make me believe this was more understood. I thought this was a common thing.

Ian

00:45:21 – 00:45:42

If they're poker players, I'll understand. The other thing you could do with those guys is you could take a different, like, there's like the affiliate angle, which they would presumably want if they were willing to do it at all, but you could also limit the downside for them and be like, hey, I'll just pay you $10. Like, you're gonna send do x, y, and z. And then if whatever, if we sell less than $10 worth, I'm out. And right.

Ian

00:45:42 – 00:45:59

But if we send more, then you're not getting any of that. But like, this is just like a here's $10,000 Don't even worry about it. You're gonna send this email with pitch or whatever you decide to do, or we're gonna cross and do a video or whatever. So you could sponsor. I don't know if they already have sponsored programs for their videos and things.

Ian

00:45:59 – 00:46:03

They may already have something set up where you can sponsor stuff. That's true. So maybe

Aaron

00:46:03 – 00:46:05

they'll just buy a slot in their email list or something.

Ian

00:46:06 – 00:46:16

Yeah. Or on their videos or if they do YouTube or whatever. So there might be some other options. But on the flip side, $80,000 is not that much money. Like, I know what you're saying is there's a lot of money, but it's also not that money.

Ian

00:46:16 – 00:46:18

If you start paying people $10,000 to do stuff, all of a sudden You

Aaron

00:46:18 – 00:46:21

should only do that 8 times and then you're it's game over.

Ian

00:46:21 – 00:46:22

That's right. That's not a lot.

Aaron

00:46:22 – 00:46:24

So It's not a lot.

Ian

00:46:24 – 00:46:35

It's tricky. It's tricky. We're only 4 days in. It'll be 4 days in. How it goes and like how it plays out over the coming even week or 2.

Ian

00:46:35 – 00:46:44

And just see like, do any sales hold, or does it kinda fall Right. More traditional, really, peters out kind of, and Yeah. Go from there.

Aaron

00:46:44 – 00:46:50

Yeah. I am confident that I think we can hit a 100,000 in 1 month total.

Ian

00:46:50 – 00:46:51

Yeah. That seems doable.

Aaron

00:46:51 – 00:47:07

Yeah. So I think that's doable. And then when we do when we do, I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna have to make a video for the the try hard YouTube channel that's like how I made a $100,000 on a course launch. I think I have to

Ian

00:47:07 – 00:47:09

do You have to. People love that stuff.

Aaron

00:47:09 – 00:47:10

Don't I?

Ian

00:47:10 – 00:47:12

It's catnip. You gotta make it.

Aaron

00:47:12 – 00:47:15

It is. Everybody everybody's gonna click on that.

Ian

00:47:15 – 00:47:18

And then the numbers, you have to maximize your sharing

Aaron

00:47:18 – 00:47:25

of numbers. Saying. So I talked to Steve this weekend, and I was like, hey. We're gonna record on Monday morning. Do are we cool sharing the numbers?

Aaron

00:47:26 – 00:47:33

And we decided, yes. It's good. Like, it's good marketing up to a point. And so at at a point, we will stop. Like, this is marketing.

Aaron

00:47:33 – 00:47:45

This is marketing. So at a point, we will stop, but the real driving factor was this YouTube video. So we decided, yes, we're gonna make we're gonna make a behind the scenes of a $100,000 launch YouTube video. And so Oh,

Ian

00:47:45 – 00:47:47

I like that. Have to share the numbers,

Aaron

00:47:47 – 00:47:53

so why not share them? Yeah. Yep. Isn't that good? And so there's another there's another angle we could do for that YouTube video.

Aaron

00:47:53 – 00:48:02

This, once it hits a 100,000, this will be my 3rd course that's done a $100,000 Oh, okay. Pretty pretty good.

Ian

00:48:02 – 00:48:03

I mean, it's taken

Aaron

00:48:03 – 00:48:23

you know, I'm not I'm not fat and happy, but, I am a little bit fat, so I'm working on that. But this is this will be my 3rd one, so that's that's pretty good. One of them, you know, took, like, 6 years to get there, so it's not really, you know, a $100,000 launch, but still, it's better than a poke in the eye, and that would make a good YouTube video, I think.

Ian

00:48:24 – 00:48:26

Now you gotta build the course about how to make courses.

Aaron

00:48:27 – 00:48:52

See, that's where it gets that's where I get, like, moral quandaries because my my my attempt at the course on how to make courses is screencasting. And the angle there is I will teach you to be technically proficient. Because what I don't ever wanna do is be the guy that's like, hey. If you just buy this thing for $997, you'll get super rich. Because I just know it's not true.

Ian

00:48:53 – 00:48:53

It's just

Aaron

00:48:53 – 00:48:54

not true.

Ian

00:48:54 – 00:49:01

That's one of the other businesses I wish I've had. Like, that's a great business. Like, get you over the business. Prettier. We're gonna make you healthier.

Ian

00:49:01 – 00:49:04

We're gonna make you smarter. We're Gonna teach you how to flip this real estate.

Aaron

00:49:05 – 00:49:13

Yep. It's all good stuff. It just feels it just feels like a slippery slope. I don't wanna I don't wanna go making these promises

Ian

00:49:13 – 00:49:13

to people

Aaron

00:49:13 – 00:49:18

because I know that it's not it's not totally possible. So I know. Yeah.

Ian

00:49:19 – 00:49:24

These are all just dreams I have. It's like how I would love to be a spammer, and I could do better at spamming than other people. But

Aaron

00:49:24 – 00:49:25

You could. Yeah.

Ian

00:49:25 – 00:49:28

Actually do it. You know? But I feel like I could I could do a good job at it.

Aaron

00:49:29 – 00:49:37

But See, spammer, I understand. Executive producer of a movie, I still am a little lost on. But spammer, I can wrap my head around spamming. Spamming is easy. Please.

Aaron

00:49:38 – 00:49:39

Please. That'd be so easy.

Ian

00:49:39 – 00:49:50

What else you got on the course? So we're gonna see a 100 k launch video thingy. That's gonna be fun. Uh-huh. Do you have some stuff planned out then for ongoing to keep it going?

Ian

00:49:50 – 00:49:56

Like, just in terms of your regular content stuff, you're gonna do some more videos. I guess you have this kind of the additional segments that'll be the obvious

Aaron

00:49:56 – 00:50:22

next day. The additional modules for the course, which will be will be good content for YouTube as well, because these these next modules are, like, full text search and JSON and maybe do some vector stuff. And, like, that's you know, some of these videos are, like, super in the weeds and would not do well on YouTube, but these full text search, I feel like, would be interesting. Yeah. So I'll do that.

Aaron

00:50:22 – 00:50:37

I'm gonna take you know, I'm taking a little bit of a break. It's, like, kind of a light week. Steve's out for 4th July, and I'm just, like, cleaning up stuff. So take a little bit of a light week and then finish the modules, pump out some YouTube. I gotta pump out some Laravel content on YouTube as well.

Aaron

00:50:37 – 00:51:15

That's kinda fallen off, during the crunch time. And then, yeah, I think, one thing I'm super looking forward to is just having a little bit more time to, like, scheme again because as much as I love creating database courses, that's not, like, what I wanna do with my whole life. And so there are some things that there are some things that I think, Steve and I are gonna work on that are a little bit outside the realm of normal, which is not that surprising for me, to to be honest. Okay. Up to and maybe including digging a swimming pool in my backyard, which we can talk about later.

Ian

00:51:15 – 00:51:16

Man, we need to

Aaron

00:51:16 – 00:51:43

But, like, you know, I I just kinda I kinda wanna scheme a little bit. And I I was thinking this weekend about, like, some of the schemes and, like, what is my what is my strategic answer for why I would want to do some of these things? And as much as I, like, tried to convince myself, my strategic answer just kept coming back to, I want to do it. And it was like, is that enough? That might be enough.

Aaron

00:51:44 – 00:51:57

That might be enough. It might be enough of a reason to say, like, I'm gonna do this thing because I wanna do this thing. And it's like that guy that's you know, that meme where he's, like, an energy field, and he's levitating. It's like, that's my reason. I wanted to do it.

Aaron

00:51:57 – 00:52:01

And so that's kinda where I'm feeling right now, but we'll see.

Ian

00:52:01 – 00:52:08

Now at one point, you had another course stacked up behind this one. Is there a little buffer between, or do you have another course you actually have to start?

Aaron

00:52:09 – 00:52:17

Oh, yeah. There's another one we have to start. Okay. But we do have we do have a little bit of, you know, a little bit of time. It's today's July 1, and I think we're not launching it's Postgres.

Ian

00:52:17 – 00:52:19

July 30th? Okay.

Aaron

00:52:19 – 00:52:29

Yeah. July 30th. So I have at least 3 or 4 minutes to rest. No. I don't I don't think we're launching that until maybe mid September or early October or something like that.

Aaron

00:52:29 – 00:52:30

I don't remember.

Ian

00:52:30 – 00:52:31

We got some scheming time.

Aaron

00:52:31 – 00:52:50

I have some scheming time. I have some dreaming time. I have some I have some time to, like, just do random crap. Like, I just wanna, 1, I wanna stream a lot more. I I wanna build a, you know, I wanna build a little internal tool for me to, like, keep track of my life, and that feels like a fun thing to stream.

Aaron

00:52:50 – 00:53:04

And that's one of those that's like, why are you gonna do that? Because I wanna do it. I just wanna do it. And the part of part of this business is, like, keeping me engaged and energized and motivated, and some things I just have to do because I wanna do it. So

Ian

00:53:04 – 00:53:26

I will say, and I'm this is, like, do as I say, not as I do 1,000 percent. But, there are people out there who are capable of this, and they have a huge advantage, which is, like, they need the scheming time. Right? But their scheming time is I'm going to scheme on marketing for the thing I just built. Like, I'm gonna come up with all I'm gonna use that scheming energy to market the thing I built or to whatever.

Ian

00:53:26 – 00:53:55

Yeah. Do something around the thing I already have that's profitable. And this is I've definitely I'm not good at any of this, so I'm not, judging here, but I do think that is a superpower that people have that I find fascinating of, like, my downtime is just scheming in a different angle on my main thing. And, so that's still, like, all the energy's going that direction, but I'm being also rejuvenated at the same time, which is, fascinating. But, yeah, it's never been I've never been too good at it myself.

Ian

00:53:55 – 00:53:56

But

Aaron

00:53:56 – 00:53:56

Yeah.

Ian

00:53:57 – 00:54:03

Maybe some people out there are. Maybe. Alright. So alright. So you're gonna keep us updated on that.

Ian

00:54:03 – 00:54:07

I wanna do a domain story. Come. Yeah. Switch the domain story?

Aaron

00:54:07 – 00:54:09

Tell me a domain story. I love a domain story.

Ian

00:54:09 – 00:54:26

I actually have a real thing to talk about, but I wanna talk about domain story first because while you're sharing numbers, I'm gonna share some numbers. So Yes. I, you know, I have this little side business, little scheme of my domains I own that I sell here and there. And one of them is tag.app. K.

Ian

00:54:26 – 00:54:27

Tag.app.

Aaron

00:54:28 – 00:54:29

Okay. Wow.

Ian

00:54:29 – 00:54:42

Short domain. Okay. Short dictionary word, technically appropriate. Right. And also now there's all the app has these like premium domains, because like whatever some words are more expensive than others and whatever.

Ian

00:54:43 – 00:54:52

So this one is premium, but it's not ultra premium. Some of them are, like, $1,000 a year. So to hold it, it's, like, a little pricey to hold. I think this one's, like, $200 or something. So whatever.

Ian

00:54:52 – 00:55:02

It's not that much to hold. So we had a guy this is kind of how domains work. Are you behind the scenes? It used to be up for I think even more. I don't know.

Ian

00:55:02 – 00:55:12

Some people would hold this domain for they'd want 6 figures, but whatever. I'm I'm not really into that. I'm like, I'm just trying to make a few bucks. It's valuable. It's real estate.

Aaron

00:55:12 – 00:55:12

It off the shelf?

Ian

00:55:12 – 00:55:22

I'm not gonna agree. Yeah. I acquired it right when the the app was launched, like, 4, 5 years ago. And so I've just been holding it. The guy offered us 3,000.

Ian

00:55:23 – 00:55:32

I said no. He offered, like, 6 or 7 or something. I just said no. Yesterday, it came back with 15. Oh.

Ian

00:55:33 – 00:55:38

I said no. You said no. You said no. Because I'm holding out for 19. That's up for 19.

Ian

00:55:38 – 00:55:46

I'm holding out for 19. It's worth 19. It's a single word, 3 characters long in tech, super applicable to a million businesses.

Aaron

00:55:46 – 00:55:47

Alright. Alright.

Ian

00:55:47 – 00:55:50

Tag that up. Alright. Okay. So he said 15. He said no.

Ian

00:55:50 – 00:55:52

19. I said no. I said instantly said no.

Aaron

00:55:52 – 00:55:54

That's it. He went away?

Ian

00:55:54 – 00:56:04

I already told him. I was like, I'm not negotiating on this one because it's like 19 is more than fair price. And here's the thing. If you have 50, you have 19. Right?

Ian

00:56:04 – 00:56:18

Like, if you had 3,000 then you come back for 4 and 5, what or maybe you just don't have 19. You can't get to 19. If you have 15, you have 19. Like, there's no scenario where you don't have 19 if you have 15. So That's I mean It really should be true.

Aaron

00:56:18 – 00:56:19

Is, but yeah.

Ian

00:56:19 – 00:56:23

No. They're not. Not in this scenario. They're really. Not in this scenario.

Ian

00:56:23 – 00:56:38

And they're like, I'm gonna start a company on tag dot app, but and I only have literally $15,000, but I don't have 19. Like, that's just not, no, they may choose not to, they may go with tag HQ or whatever. Fine. Then just go do that. I'm okay with that.

Ian

00:56:39 – 00:56:47

So we'll see. That'll be a little update next week. We'll see if we, get the sale. I'm feeling pretty optimistic because when they come back, usually

Aaron

00:56:48 – 00:56:52

They they moved a lot. From 3 to 15, they moved a lot.

Ian

00:56:52 – 00:56:55

That's what I'm saying. You're all the way up to 15. I think you'll get And it's worth it.

Aaron

00:56:55 – 00:56:56

15. That's great.

Ian

00:56:56 – 00:57:06

It's worth it. I should have made it 20 because then I would have 2 stacks of high society. Yeah. Yes. Two stacks, which should be a nice one.

Ian

00:57:06 – 00:57:07

Poker session.

Aaron

00:57:07 – 00:57:12

What's your best one like, what's your best sale? Have you had any any big ones?

Ian

00:57:13 – 00:57:18

Yeah. No huge ones. I think the biggest was 30,000.

Aaron

00:57:19 – 00:57:19

Okay.

Ian

00:57:20 – 00:57:25

Which I probably sold to a competitor, honestly, because it was, support that app.

Aaron

00:57:25 – 00:57:28

And That's a great domain for your core business.

Ian

00:57:28 – 00:57:37

I know. But it's also generic. Like, you can't really bring it. All these dom dictionary word ones are a little tricky because, like, there is, like, some legal stuff around. Can you really

Aaron

00:57:37 – 00:57:37

Yeah.

Ian

00:57:38 – 00:57:43

Trademark it or not? But anyway, I was gonna turn down 3 stacks of high society.

Aaron

00:57:43 – 00:57:44

No. No. No. No. No.

Aaron

00:57:45 – 00:57:45

Ian

00:57:45 – 00:57:53

Zendesk or whoever probably owns support that app out there. Whatever. And there nothing's ever been built on it. It's just sitting there. Watch.

Ian

00:57:53 – 00:58:01

I'll probably say that. It's like, there's all kinds of stuff on it now. But last time I looked, it was nothing there. No. It's just like some generic placeholder thing.

Ian

00:58:01 – 00:58:08

Yeah. Just like a loading page that never loads. Yeah. So there's nothing there. I think I I don't know.

Ian

00:58:08 – 00:58:15

I think I've done a few other ones, like, in the high teens, low twenties. Something like that.

Aaron

00:58:15 – 00:58:15

That's real money.

Ian

00:58:16 – 00:58:24

That's real money. There is like the carrying costs of holding all the other domains that you don't actually sell and things like that. So, I

Aaron

00:58:24 – 00:58:26

did not know you were a domainer.

Ian

00:58:26 – 00:58:29

I am. So if people don't like them, I'm one of them. You can

Aaron

00:58:30 – 00:58:30

That's right.

Ian

00:58:30 – 00:58:38

You can thank me for being part of the problem. But, no, man. I'm trying to get to my list, but I can't. Oh, well. Yeah.

Ian

00:58:38 – 00:58:51

Anyway, I've sold a few in there. I'm not like see, people who are really into it, like, they're out buying. It's like, I'm not I don't really buy any. I just like dot app was launched. I was like, this is a good domain for tech stuff.

Ian

00:58:51 – 00:59:06

I just bought ones that were available right from the beginning. And I've basically just been holding them. So most of them are dot apps other than the ones I bought for personal project of things that I'm never gonna actually build. And so then I'll put those over sale too if it's like a .com or Mhmm. Dotio or whatever.

Ian

00:59:07 – 00:59:09

So, yeah. So that's my little story. I hope

Aaron

00:59:09 – 00:59:10

you get your 19. That would be awesome.

Ian

00:59:10 – 00:59:21

I hope so. That would be awesome. That would be a nice little little, keeps me in business for another year on the domain business. It's like I could pay to hold the other real. Like it just feeds the beast.

Ian

00:59:22 – 00:59:27

Alright. So my other news for the week here is that we're hiring a dev. Yeah.

Aaron

00:59:27 – 00:59:28

This is big news.

Ian

00:59:29 – 00:59:30

Hiring a lab called dev.

Aaron

00:59:30 – 00:59:31

Time employee.

Ian

00:59:32 – 00:59:52

If you're out there, you wanna work at UserScape, working on HelpSpot and Lara jobs. And the thing I talked about last week, in terms of this AI proxy thing, we were discussing all that stuff. We have a job opening, which is pretty rare. We don't have a lot of job openings. Most everybody stays there a long time.

Aaron

00:59:52 – 00:59:58

What's driving the the need here? Because you you haven't hired a full time in a long time.

Ian

00:59:58 – 01:00:18

Yeah. Not in not in, for a software developer anyway. So, basically last year, Eric Barnes runs Laravel News, decided he was gonna go pretty much full time on that. So he still works some hours here, but not full time hours. And that's coming to end.

Ian

01:00:18 – 01:00:30

He's gonna go full time, full time on Lara Jobs in September. And so this past year is kinda like I could have hired somebody at that point even last year, but I was like, you have all the section 170 4 stuff. And I kinda wanted to see how that

Aaron

01:00:30 – 01:00:30

was gonna

Ian

01:00:30 – 01:00:48

shake out. So we just kind of went through without a full sort of, sort of dev setup. But with Eric dropping off all of his hours here soon, it's like, alright. Well, we gotta hire a software developer. So that's pretty much it.

Ian

01:00:48 – 01:00:55

So we're hiring a software developer. And I don't know. We'll see. It's, like, kind of interesting. The market's kinda interesting right now.

Ian

01:00:55 – 01:01:05

I feel like there's it's not, you know, a couple years ago, like, it was crazy. Right? And, like, every, like Yeah. Couldn't even hire developers. So I feel like there's more high quality developers out there.

Ian

01:01:05 – 01:01:19

We're also gonna broaden the search more than we have in the past where it's only been US in the past, but now, I'm on the go outside the US, probably not all the way to, like, you know, other side of the planet, but if you can work some east coast hours,

Aaron

01:01:21 – 01:01:23

Fully or overlap?

Ian

01:01:24 – 01:01:29

Overlap. Yeah. No. I wouldn't want anybody to, like, pretend to work east coast hours. That never works.

Aaron

01:01:29 – 01:01:32

Picking up at midnight or whatever. Yeah. That never ever works.

Ian

01:01:33 – 01:01:38

Yeah. So just the overlap of a couple hours just so we have to hop on a call or whatever.

Aaron

01:01:38 – 01:01:40

And half day Fridays

Ian

01:01:40 – 01:01:54

all year? Half day Fridays all year. Obviously, profitable, been in business forever. No start up y gimmicks and stock you're never gonna get and all that kind of stuff. You know about that stuff.

Aaron

01:01:55 – 01:02:01

Oh, let me tell you. Well, I guess, legally, I can't, but I understand that, that is a reality. Yeah.

Ian

01:02:02 – 01:02:16

That's interesting. So, I think, you know, there's some interesting things. You know, we've always had this trade off. We're definitely not at the top of the, pay range for sure. But on the flip side, you're half day Fridays.

Ian

01:02:16 – 01:02:19

You're working fully remote. That's never gonna change. You're kind of

Aaron

01:02:19 – 01:02:21

in the mix office budget.

Ian

01:02:21 – 01:02:38

You get money for computers and so on. You get time off. You get, you know, you're in the Laravel mix. Like, everybody who's been in dev here has talked to lots of Laricons and all those things. So I think there's some advantages there if you're interested in that part of your career, growth.

Ian

01:02:38 – 01:02:50

So, yeah, we'll see how it goes. I don't know. I think there's I've tried to put it at, like, a specific dollar amount because I'm sort of I've never done that before. Mhmm. So it's like a little experiment.

Ian

01:02:51 – 01:02:58

There's probably a little bit of flexibility in there for listeners to podcast, for example, potentially in the right scenario. But

Aaron

01:02:58 – 01:03:05

So the number on the site can I say it can I say it out loud? Yeah. It's on the site. The number on the site is a $120. Yeah.

Aaron

01:03:05 – 01:03:10

I didn't I read I read it all, but I don't remember are there benefits for US based employees?

Ian

01:03:10 – 01:03:31

Yeah. So that's also something I wouldn't I was gonna try, like, whatever. There was, there's some different scenarios where, like, people could be contractors or not or whatever. But the US based would have healthcare benefits, 401 ks, 3%, auto, Match? What they call it, but it's not a match.

Ian

01:03:31 – 01:03:49

You get 3% of your salary no matter what. Oh, cool. And you should you should also contribute to your 401 k, but, you'll get 3% of your salary regardless if you're in the US. That that would be those 2 are US only. If you're outside the US, then you would be a contractor for sure.

Ian

01:03:49 – 01:03:54

Right. And you wouldn't have those, but you would probably also have health care because you're not in the US. US.

Aaron

01:03:54 – 01:03:56

So live in some other country that does that for you.

Ian

01:03:56 – 01:03:58

That does that nice stuff for you. So

Aaron

01:03:58 – 01:04:05

But you don't have freedom. So You don't have freedom. You. So how did you come up with 120? Vibes?

Ian

01:04:06 – 01:04:37

You know, that's always there's always that element of vibes to the salaries. I also think it's like, I'm willing to have like more of a mid level person, which I think that's a pretty fair salary for given the current market, Like a more senior person would be great. I think in the US, probably not quite senior level person, like on the raw numbers, but I do think there are scenarios where the other benefits and the flexibility and things like that make up for that in some people's circumstances. So that's fine. Outside the us.

Ian

01:04:37 – 01:04:52

I think it's a very solid number for a senior Lara developer. Yeah. You know, I do run Lara jobs. I don't know if you're aware of that. And so I always keep an eye on, yeah, keep an eye on the, salaries and That's true.

Ian

01:04:52 – 01:04:52

It's pretty

Aaron

01:04:52 – 01:04:53

remarkable what people

Ian

01:04:53 – 01:05:05

are offering. Yeah. Like, I mean, then, like we're way above a lot of the jobs with Lara jobs. So, so I even thought about going less, but I was like, you know, I don't know. I feel like I want to be a solid number.

Ian

01:05:05 – 01:05:29

Yeah, you're not like blown away, but you're also, It's you know, there's so many factors like where you live. It's a ton of money in some places. It's not a lot if you're in New York City. Right? Like, so there's a lot of variability there, but even like DHH hero of the show, DHH, they just had to program a job up that starts at like 170 something and like has, you know, more restrictions than we have.

Ian

01:05:30 – 01:05:37

Like you can't have a side gig there and different things like that. So there are also things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Base camp, you can't have any side gigs.

Ian

01:05:38 – 01:05:44

Wow. So, you know, we're not like crazy far off of even people's dream job with D HH is like,

Aaron

01:05:44 – 01:05:45

right.

Ian

01:05:45 – 01:06:07

You know, we have some, advantages there. So, and I, I like to hire people who have side gigs. I think one of the things with working here is like, you kind of need to be pretty entrepreneurial in your nature because that's part of what we ask of you is that like, you're gonna be willing to talk to a customer. Like you can't just be the basement dweller dev. Who's like, I'm never gonna talk to a customer no matter what.

Ian

01:06:07 – 01:06:38

Like I'm not doing it. Like, so no matter talk to a customer, you're gonna have a lot of responsibility to, like, make decisions about the products and things and have at least some ability to have that mindset of, like, what the customer's thinking, how the customer uses it. So people who've either tried to do their own thing and maybe it didn't work out or who are interested in doing that in the future, I feel like I've tended to be pretty good fits, and pretty much everybody who's ever been a software developer here has been in that mold. So yeah. So we'll see how it goes.

Ian

01:06:38 – 01:07:00

I'm interested with, it's been a while since I hired a software developer, so it'll be cool to kind of go through the process and it's nice that Dave's here now. The producer Dave is, you know, involved heavily in the hiring process for this role. And, he's gonna be able to do the first half, so I don't have to be totally disheartened by, like, the hundreds of just, like, people who don't follow the very basic fractions

Aaron

01:07:00 – 01:07:01

I put in there.

Ian

01:07:01 – 01:07:11

Like, yep. That's gonna be nice to have somebody filter those. So I don't feel so bad about society. And, Yeah. So if you're in the market, give it a look.

Ian

01:07:11 – 01:07:14

My little ad. It was a well written

Aaron

01:07:14 – 01:07:24

it was a well written post. I liked it. It had all the stuff that, like, you would have worked on or you will work on. And Yeah. The pretty compelling, like, hey.

Aaron

01:07:24 – 01:07:41

We've been remote for 20 years or whatever it said, and we're that's never gonna change. Because I do think that is a fear of people getting these remote jobs, and then there's a return to office mandate. And it's like, well, f. Like, I live in, you know, BFE, and I'm not driving into an office. So I thought that I thought that was pretty compelling.

Aaron

01:07:41 – 01:07:57

And the half day, Fridays, every, like, every week, we when I was at the property tax company, I instituted half day Fridays on summer during summer only Yeah. Or not nonbusy season, I guess. It wasn't summer. It was non busy season. So, like, started in August and went through, like, January

Ian

01:07:57 – 01:07:57

or something.

Aaron

01:07:57 – 01:08:00

Mhmm. And people freaking loved it. But all year

Ian

01:08:00 – 01:08:01

long, they do love

Aaron

01:08:01 – 01:08:03

the ticket. That's the ticket.

Ian

01:08:03 – 01:08:16

We started summers. But then 1 year I was like, let's do it. We'll do it all year long. And it's actually like, I I mean, it's a pretty massive benefit. Like, if you add up the number of days, it's like 20 whatever days off, like Yeah.

Ian

01:08:17 – 01:08:42

Built into the built into the year. So, yeah, so it's really cool. I mean, it's awesome to be able to leave at noon and like, go hang out with your kids or do whatever you'd like to do and have that just do running around. I mean, like, I use it a lot just for, like, not fun stuff sometimes, but it's still cool because, like, whatever. I can go to the DMV when people aren't there at 2:30 or whatever and not, have that be like, I have to go after work or whatever where it's a nightmare.

Ian

01:08:42 – 01:08:56

So, yeah, it's it's really cool. Then I mean, that's the other thing. It's like it's like a huge impact job. Like Mhmm. You're gonna be writing code that's in the core of the app that pays everybody.

Ian

01:08:56 – 01:09:17

You're gonna be writing these new doing all the AI stuff coming up over the next I mean, starting heavily pretty soon here, but then over the next year, I think there'll be quite a bit of AI stuff. Well, there will be quite a bit of AI stuff. So, yeah. So it's gonna be a lot of kind of cutting edge ish, code work in, in the Laravel space. So, yeah, that'd be cool.

Aaron

01:09:17 – 01:09:18

What's exciting.

Ian

01:09:18 – 01:09:37

We also deal with on premise installs and we also deal with all kinds of other stuff. But it's a 20 year old app. So there's a lot of different sort of interesting aspects to it, I think, for the for the right personality. If you wanna just be in a Laravel 11 app that's squeaky clean and everything's perfect and brand new, this is not exactly that either. It's like this ain't it.

Ian

01:09:37 – 01:09:58

But, it's getting there. It's getting closer to that, but we are still we're still a ways away, but that would be part of this role of, like, continuing to push that forward. So a lot of cool, like, refactoring things, new dev, you know, worked with Matt who does development, worked with me as I do development. And, yeah. So I think it'll be a good gig for the right person out there.

Ian

01:09:58 – 01:10:02

Hopefully, you're listening. That'd be cool to hire a a show listener.

Aaron

01:10:02 – 01:10:03

That would be cool.

Ian

01:10:03 – 01:10:15

Slightly different topic. I've emailed 2 people over the weekend 2 companies over the weekend, and both of them Yes. Emailed support. And both of them were like, hey, friend of the pod. Love the pod.

Ian

01:10:15 – 01:10:16

Oh, we've made it. That's great.

Aaron

01:10:16 – 01:10:17

Yes. That's

Ian

01:10:17 – 01:10:22

great. When people I love it. Like, hooked in to the pod. I can give you your support.

Aaron

01:10:23 – 01:10:23

Love that.

Ian

01:10:24 – 01:10:25

Really cool. I was enjoying that.

Aaron

01:10:25 – 01:10:30

Love being special, Ian. That's all I want. I just wanna be special. I love being special.

Ian

01:10:31 – 01:10:32

You are very special.

Aaron

01:10:32 – 01:10:37

I am. I have I was born on Valentine's Day. That's special. I have 2 sets of twins. Good.

Aaron

01:10:37 – 01:10:39

That's special. That's crazy. I got 2 special things.

Ian

01:10:39 – 01:10:45

Oh my gosh. That's awesome. I got a lot of special stuff going on. You, have a very special flower. Born on Valentine's Day.

Ian

01:10:45 – 01:10:47

I think I forgot that.

Aaron

01:10:47 – 01:10:47

That's crazy.

Ian

01:10:47 – 01:10:49

My anniversary. My real anniversary.

Aaron

01:10:49 – 01:10:50

Oh, wow.

Ian

01:10:50 – 01:10:52

1st date anniversary, which I consider the real anniversary.

Aaron

01:10:52 – 01:11:00

Oh, yeah. Mhmm. No. I don't I don't even remember our first date. I think, actually, our first date's on the calendar, but I don't

Ian

01:11:00 – 01:11:05

remember it at all. Yeah. Being on Valentine's Day helps Martin a lot because it, like, sticks in there. You know? Mhmm.

Ian

01:11:05 – 01:11:11

I can't really forget that. All right. I don't know. Anything else you got here?

Aaron

01:11:11 – 01:11:19

I don't think so. There's there's one more on the list, but we can save that. We can save that for later. That feels that feels like it could could spiral, so we we should probably say that.

Ian

01:11:19 – 01:11:21

Yeah. We'll save that. It's been a few weeks. We'll give it one more.

Aaron

01:11:22 – 01:11:26

Yeah. No. Nothing else. Go buy my course. Go apply for Ian's job.

Aaron

01:11:26 – 01:11:29

Just give us all the money you have, and that'll be great.

Ian

01:11:31 – 01:11:35

I don't think I have that for you. Job post. Like, I don't know. For you, I guess, technically, you're

Aaron

01:11:35 – 01:11:38

giving them the money. So that last part just applies to me.

Ian

01:11:38 – 01:11:51

If anybody out there is very qualified and would like to pay me to work here, I am open to that sort of arrangement. I'm not against that. So Yeah. I'm flexible. We could work something out with that.

Ian

01:11:51 – 01:12:02

But yes, go buy a course. You know, you need to know sequel light. I've just been using it myself a bit. You gotta get in there. It's all the future of a lot of things, not about everything, but a lot of things.

Ian

01:12:02 – 01:12:06

You could everybody's defaulted to it now. I mean, that rails defaulted to it.

Aaron

01:12:06 – 01:12:08

Rails and layer values defaulted to it.

Ian

01:12:09 – 01:12:13

Yep. So, it's very cool, Tom. And you're right there.

Aaron

01:12:13 – 01:12:15

I'm right there. Tip of the spear.

Ian

01:12:16 – 01:12:28

Tip of the spear. Alright, man. Have a good week. Thanks everybody for listening. Follow us on mostlytechnical.com, mostly tech pod on Twitter and email into mostly technical podcast atgmail.

Ian

01:12:29 – 01:12:36

And definitely give us a like, subscribe, all that stuff. We really appreciate it, and, we'll see you next week. Thanks.

Aaron

01:12:36 – 01:12:37

See you.

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