Refine, Sidecar, Laravel, and Serverless

March 14, 2022

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Transcript

Chris
00:00:00 – 00:00:08
Alright. So, Aaron, you are the first guest on what may or may not be a podcast that I do for a while. If I actually try to get other guests, let's see what happens here.
Aaron
00:00:08 – 00:00:17
If I if I have my way, it will happen. I think I've been pushing you. You keep telling me, oh, I think I may start a podcast, and I keep saying you need start a podcast, and so now here I am.
Chris
00:00:17 – 00:00:23
So This is fun. Like, the 2 other times I've tried to start a podcast. It's been fun for those, like, 3 episodes before I didn't do it anymore.
Aaron
00:00:24 – 00:00:26
Okay. So you've you've been down this road before?
Chris
00:00:26 – 00:00:36
Sort of. I did one with a friend here in San Antonio, and that went for a decently long while, then we just just stopped. And then me and David did one when we first started Chipper, and then we got I remember that. Stuff.
Aaron
00:00:37 – 00:00:40
Yeah. What was it? Building building Chipper? Yep. Yeah.
Aaron
00:00:40 – 00:00:41
I listened to that.
Chris
00:00:41 – 00:00:55
This is kind of a this is kind of a continuation of that because we'll just, like, talk about business y stuff, I hope. I really just wanna keep talking to people and, inviting other people who have done business stuff and just ask them, like, how to live my life and what to do.
Aaron
00:00:56 – 00:01:07
So what's the, what's the what's the renewed energy? What finally pushed you over the edge to, like, besides me telling you you had to push you over the edge to actually do it?
Chris
00:01:07 – 00:01:08
That's all your fault. That's okay.
Aaron
00:01:08 – 00:01:10
I I'm fine with that.
Chris
00:01:12 – 00:01:24
I, bought out David's half of the company as of January 1st this year, 2022. So I've renewed energy is that I dumped a bunch of money into that company. I'd hopefully wanna get it back, which Okay. Will happen
Aaron
00:01:24 – 00:01:25
over time. Big reveal.
Chris
00:01:26 – 00:01:31
Yeah. I guess so. I don't know. It's not like a secret. It's just, you know, happened.
Chris
00:01:31 – 00:01:45
David just said, like, you know, we we both haven't worked out in a while. He he was interested in getting out. So, I happened to be able to do it. Like, I just launched Cloudcast, which is like, hey. Another business because why not have multiple businesses?
Chris
00:01:45 – 00:01:53
Sure. But I just launched that. Got a bunch of sales from courses and stuff. So I luckily had most of the, money required to buy Ozaf. So
Aaron
00:01:54 – 00:02:02
So now you are the sole owner and operator of Chipper CI. Yeah. Well, that feels pretty good.
Chris
00:02:02 – 00:02:12
Yeah. And, yeah. So now it's just a matter of, you know, seeing if I can grow it. Just kinda neat. Like, it it grew when we first launched it, which was, I think, Larica in 2019, maybe?
Chris
00:02:12 – 00:02:13
I see. New York?
Aaron
00:02:13 – 00:02:14
Yeah.
Chris
00:02:14 – 00:02:32
Something like that. And then it grew to a few 1,000 MRR and then hits a plateau and then it grew a little more. And then, we kinda faded out working on it probably a year, year and a half after it launched. So it's at this plateau, and it actually hasn't shrunk in MRR. It's been kind of stable or even growing a little bit.
Chris
00:02:32 – 00:02:51
So I figured doing some stuff is better than done. So, like, you know, maybe I don't have to do so much work to, grow a bit. So we'll see. I'm, like, 2 months into that process of, like, actually doing some work most most days of the week on this thing. So we'll see.
Aaron
00:02:51 – 00:03:13
So what's the so you bought out his half, so you immediately got the other half of the MRR. So that's good. What's what's the, I guess, what's the plan, or what have you been doing to try to grow it now that you're actually focusing on it? Do you feel like there's a lot of low hanging fruit?
Chris
00:03:15 – 00:03:42
Yes and no. Yes. The no part of that is because server stuff is kinda, like, difficult to get right, and that's the more complicated stuff. So I have a lot of I have a lot of planned features that involve, like, the build system and improving that and and adding features to it. The lower hanging fruit is, like there's a lot of, like, smaller features to do, but that's, like they're not growth features, but they are nicer things, like, more notification channels adding, like, teams and maybe Discord and that kind of thing for notifications instead of just Slack.
Chris
00:03:43 – 00:04:13
We don't have any email notifications at all for our builds, which is like you know, some people ask for that. But, really, what I've determined or what I've decided, is that really it's the top of funnel problem. Like, not a lot of people know about it. So the more people know about it, the more sign ups there are, and those eventually convert, to paying people if, they run into you know, they build them or whatever. If if they have to get out of the free tier in order to get unlimited builds or some other features.
Chris
00:04:13 – 00:04:33
Mhmm. So a lot of it is top of funnel. So the first features I've been focusing on are getting are to aid and getting people to know that shipper exists. So for example, adding a YAML file to define your build pipeline. So, like, the scripts that run whenever people push up code to GitHub or whatever.
Chris
00:04:34 – 00:04:50
Mhmm. Adding that is partially because, it enables some some nicer features I wanna do later to have, like, this YAML file in your repository that you can edit. But also because then you have a file that people can see, especially in open source projects. Mhmm. No.
Chris
00:04:50 – 00:05:21
The most the majority of people who pay for, Chipper CI are not doing open source projects, but they're kind of internal company stuff. So the other half of that is adding features that help with, open source projects. So, like, a, an area where you can publicly show your results of your builds, like your test testing and all that stuff. So that's out that's out already. So the YAML stuff and the public builds, but there's more to it, like being able to apply it for an open source project, and maybe I'll expand your build limits to something really high or unlimited builds or something like that.
Chris
00:05:22 – 00:05:40
And there's some build system features related to that, like, actually being able to test multiple versions of PHP, maybe concurrently or maybe not or just, you know, maybe in general. Kind of similar to how GitHub actions or something has, like, a matrix that lets you say, you know, version 7.4 or version 8.1 and version 8.0 of each v. Like, run your test against all of these.
Aaron
00:05:40 – 00:06:04
And that's not important for companies running their app. But, obviously, when when you switch to open source, it could be becomes super important because your library needs to work in all these different versions with these different versions of Laravel. Yeah. So we use, as you know, we use Chipper at work and have for a couple years, and it's just it's great. We, honestly, we hardly ever look at it.
Aaron
00:06:04 – 00:06:22
We use it through GitHub, and it reports back if everything worked. And if it didn't, we go inspect it. And, yeah, we've been we've been a happy user for a long time. So do you where how do you find, like, what's your what's your customer makeup like? Is it mostly companies like us?
Aaron
00:06:22 – 00:06:26
Like, just small Laravel shops that nobody's ever heard of?
Chris
00:06:26 – 00:06:44
I think so for, for paying companies. Yeah. Versus, you know, people who just sign up for the free tier. Like, you know, as you might suspect, the free tier is a lot of g@gmail.com addresses, so then the people who eventually pay are usually out of, you know, some business. Not a 100%, but, that's the majority of it.
Chris
00:06:44 – 00:06:50
A lot of them are companies I haven't necessarily heard of. Some I have through, like, you know, the Laravel community.
Aaron
00:06:50 – 00:06:51
Mhmm.
Chris
00:06:53 – 00:06:55
And yeah. That's the makeup.
Aaron
00:06:56 – 00:06:59
I've noticed you've been tweeting a lot more about it, which makes me happy.
Chris
00:06:59 – 00:07:08
Hey. And alright. So the other thing I did is I added a, onboarding question. How did you hear about us? And that's been kinda neat.
Chris
00:07:08 – 00:07:14
I don't the questions are all over the place, but they definitely reflect the fact that I've been on Twitter more because, you know, a
Aaron
00:07:14 – 00:07:14
lot of
Chris
00:07:14 – 00:07:32
responses are Twitter. And then there's some other neat ones, like, I saw you in the Lateral Forge documentation or the Lateral Vapor documentation because That's huge. Taylor and them are very nice and supportive. So, like, you know, we get little mentions of, of Chipper and and where where it makes sense to, like, in the documentation and that kind of thing.
Aaron
00:07:32 – 00:07:47
Yeah. Yeah. Being I'm sure being in those docs is wildly helpful. And I don't know you may not wanna name it if there is. Is there another Laravel, like, focused CI tool?
Chris
00:07:49 – 00:07:51
Not that I know of. Do you know of 1?
Aaron
00:07:51 – 00:07:52
No. I mean,
Aaron
00:07:52 – 00:07:54
no. And that's that's what
Aaron
00:07:54 – 00:08:13
I was thinking. Like, I do love in our ecosystem how many Laravel specific tools there are. And I feel like being the Laravel specific CI is probably probably gives you outsized benefits because then you do get those mentions in the docs and stuff like that.
Chris
00:08:13 – 00:08:36
Yeah. So it's still I and still, like, I don't it's still relatively unknown, I think, in terms of how large the Laravel and PHP community is. So I'm definitely definitely need to put a lot of work towards, like, kinda making that known. And we'll see what tactics I can come up with that other than those features I mentioned. Like, Eric lets me write for Laravel News, so I can, like, add mentions to to that for that.
Chris
00:08:36 – 00:08:47
And, you know, there's all sorts of those small things I can kind of build on top of to to see how I can, get the get the idea out there or get make Chipperci known.
Aaron
00:08:47 – 00:08:51
Are you an SEO wizard at all? Is that something that you focused on?
Chris
00:08:52 – 00:09:07
I no. Not specifically. I mean, I have it's in my mind. Like, I used to work at a marketing agency before this current job, and SEO was a big part of that. So I definitely have some background of it, but it's not currently a focus of when I, like, make articles for Tripper CI.
Chris
00:09:07 – 00:09:09
But I have had ideas of branding
Aaron
00:09:09 – 00:09:10
writing articles.
Chris
00:09:11 – 00:09:29
Yep. And then there's, I some ideas for articles I have are, like, I don't know I don't know if this is worth it yet, but, you know, you see the company's doing, like, my company versus this company. So, like, for CI versus GitHub actions, that kinda thing. So the the idea of those is getting the GitHub or I'm sorry. Getting the, Google search results for that.
Chris
00:09:29 – 00:09:38
So being, you know, number 1 or 2 or 3 for, you know, my product versus some other product, and you can make a comparison page, just so people land on your site. You know?
Aaron
00:09:39 – 00:09:52
I think that's I think that's totally. I mean, if you were to write, you'd have to look at, like, the volume. But surely, lots of people are searching Laravel GitHub actions. Right. Yep.
Aaron
00:09:52 – 00:09:52
And so if you could write an article that kind of explains, like like, this is, I think, one of
Chris
00:09:52 – 00:09:52
those things that's, underutilized is,
Aaron
00:10:00 – 00:10:16
I think, one of those things that's, underutilized is writing an article about the hard way to do it. And like Mhmm. Honestly, giving them, you know, giving them the way to do it, and then saying or you could just do one click with chipperci.
Chris
00:10:16 – 00:10:17
Right.
Aaron
00:10:17 – 00:10:35
And so they still get the information, so you're not punished by Google for, like, you know, click baiting. And you you leave like a good taste in the per in the visitor's mouth of like, oh, they gave me what I was looking for, but in fact, this, you know, seems like chipper CI is a lot easier. I'm just gonna say.
Chris
00:10:35 – 00:10:43
Yeah. I agree. I I really don't mind doing that. I love like, I've always, like, I've you know, I have service for anchors.com. It's just article after article about how to do stuff in servers.
Chris
00:10:43 – 00:11:02
And I I just, like, always have liked the rating process of that kind of thing and also making videos. And I don't mind, like, being like, there's how to use a competitor. Like, it doesn't bother me or feel like something that would hurt me necessarily. But exactly like you said, you could angle it, the the content to be like, look. It's kind of actually hard on GitHub actions.
Chris
00:11:02 – 00:11:17
Like, it's a lot easier over here, which is actually a lot of the reasons why we made Trippr. Like, everything was kind of hard to work with. I forget what products. Me me and David both used a specific one. Oh, CodeShip.
Chris
00:11:17 – 00:11:44
CodeShip was, like, kinda what Chipper's Chipper's kinda like an easier code chip to begin with. CodeShip didn't have a YAML file or anything. It's just like, here, write some bash scripts in our UI, which is what Chipper started as also. But it was still hard to set up, for a lot of, like, very kind of specific things like dust tests and just, you know, stuff specific to PHP and Laravel that chipper kinda made really easily. But then GitHub actions, I I spend a lot of time avoiding learning how to use them because it just seems so complicated.
Chris
00:11:44 – 00:11:56
I don't really get the concept of, like, what an action was for a long time. And now I do know what it means. And, like, I I actually kinda like it a bunch. Like, it's nice. So I I use that for my non PHP stuff all the time.
Aaron
00:11:57 – 00:12:00
Have you found that that's impacted Chipper at all?
Chris
00:12:00 – 00:12:06
I mean, people haven't told me if it is, but I'm sure people because their their free tier in GitHub is, you know, decent.
Aaron
00:12:07 – 00:12:21
It's pretty generous. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess if you said your MRR hasn't contracted a whole lot, then, you you know, you're not having a huge churn problem. And that's the deal, like, that's the deal for us is I I have chipper set up.
Aaron
00:12:21 – 00:12:38
I'm not gonna leave. Like, I do think I do think Chipper is easier to get the exact, Laravel setup running. But even, like, even if GitHub actions were easier now, which it's not, I'm not gonna leave. Right. I've got I've got it set up.
Chris
00:12:38 – 00:12:48
Damn. It's kind of sticky like that. So churn is low. And, you know, people have people have you know, as people churned out, because it still happens. People have
Aaron
00:12:48 – 00:12:48
Mhmm.
Chris
00:12:48 – 00:12:54
It always comes in waves, which is really annoying because, like, you'll get 3 cancellations in, like, 2 days. It feels so bad.
Aaron
00:12:54 – 00:12:54
Yep.
Chris
00:12:54 – 00:13:06
And then you get some people pay, like, oh, people pay and they come aboard over time, not in chunks, but they leave in chunks for some reason. So that's, like, super frustrating or super, like, anxiety producing.
Aaron
00:13:07 – 00:13:07
Yep.
Chris
00:13:08 – 00:13:09
That's fun.
Aaron
00:13:09 – 00:13:14
Yep. Well, that's exciting. You're the you're the sole owner now.
Aaron
00:13:14 – 00:13:14
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:13:15 – 00:13:22
And so you feel, like, you have new energy for the whole deal.
Chris
00:13:22 – 00:13:32
Yeah. Which has been nice because I lost that for a while. Yeah. Because we were both me and David are both really busy and stuff. We both have well, I I have, like, a full w two job.
Chris
00:13:32 – 00:13:49
David maintains Nova, which turns out to be, you know, a lot of work also. Yeah. So and then you get this, like, kind of gruesome calculus of, like, well, I own 50% of this thing. You know, David might be too busy this month to do anything. Should I work on it?
Chris
00:13:49 – 00:13:58
Right. You know, and really push push this boulder up the hill. You know what I mean? Yeah. So it's it's you know, that calculus is like, well, I only own 50% of this thing.
Chris
00:13:58 – 00:14:01
I don't know if that's worth it. And you know how hard it is just
Aaron
00:14:01 – 00:14:02
from, like
Chris
00:14:02 – 00:14:08
Yeah. Listening to other business podcasts. Like, it's not there's no, like, easy layup really. Now I have
Aaron
00:14:08 – 00:14:17
kind of Listening to other podcasts, everything's a layup. Listening to other podcasts, it's like, well, you know, I tried this thing, and now we're at 30 k.
Chris
00:14:17 – 00:14:28
I don't know how people word things so nonchalantly. Like, they're so nonchalant about their successes. I was just like, and this really makes you know, the survivor by by, survival I can't why can I not say
Aaron
00:14:28 – 00:14:29
it word? Bias?
Chris
00:14:29 – 00:14:42
Bias? I cannot say the word bias. Okay. The survival bias is, like, so real. It really hit me this past year about how strong how much stronger that bias is than, than, you know, you might think without giving it any, like, real consideration.
Chris
00:14:42 – 00:15:00
Just like everyone you hear in any podcast has had some kind of success because, like, people whose businesses aren't working or probably aren't going in podcast, so talk about it at least. Yep. So survival bias is, like, extremely real. But then I'm also always I don't know, weirded out is the term that comes to mind, but that's not really that. But I'm always suspicious.
Chris
00:15:01 – 00:15:17
I don't know if suspicious is right. But, like, people just, like, talk about the successes kinda nonchalantly. Like, oh, yeah. We just, you know, decided to do this and then this and this and this and this happened, and we started growing. And, like, maybe that's just how you talk on a podcast because you don't have time to, like, get super in-depth of, like, this the process and everything.
Chris
00:15:17 – 00:15:26
So that's the shorthand for it, but there's so much there must be so much going on behind just, like, the sentence they said or we tried this and that actually works.
Aaron
00:15:27 – 00:15:55
Yeah. And I feel like when people come on so there's a difference between listening to 2 bootstrappers talk over, like, 2 years on their podcast and then hearing that same person go on someone else's podcast. And they have to compress, you know, 2, 5, 10 years into a 30 or 45 minute show. And so they're like, yeah. You know, we hit a couple of rough spots, but then we figured out referral marketing and we started to grow.
Aaron
00:15:55 – 00:16:13
And so, like, when I hear somebody that I've listened to for a couple years say that, I'm like, okay. I know I know how much you're compressing into that one sentence, and I know why you're doing it. But then when I hear other people say that that I haven't followed, I'm like, oh, yeah. That sounds super easy.
Chris
00:16:13 – 00:16:16
Right. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Just come up with the right tactic.
Chris
00:16:16 – 00:16:17
No big deal.
Aaron
00:16:17 – 00:16:21
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So you got you have Chipper.
Aaron
00:16:22 – 00:16:23
You have servers for hackers.
Aaron
00:16:24 – 00:16:24
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:16:24 – 00:16:27
You have Cloudcasts. What else are you hiding over there?
Chris
00:16:28 – 00:16:28
A job.
Aaron
00:16:29 – 00:16:30
Yeah. A job in
Chris
00:16:30 – 00:16:39
your family. Right? Service or hackers, I don't do anything on it. So we can just, like, kinda forget about it. It just exists, and the SEO is great.
Chris
00:16:39 – 00:17:00
So, and I have, a newsletter there with, I don't know, like, 20,000 people on it or so, but, like, kind of ever lowering open rates in that UL list. But I still use that and talk to them. Yeah. Well yeah. Especially around, Black Friday, which is, like, kinda when all the sales for courses and stuff really happen for anyone who's kind of in that world.
Chris
00:17:00 – 00:17:13
Mhmm. So, I don't have I used to have more optimized, like, pipelines, that kind of stuff for courses. I don't really have that as much right now. I just didn't see, like, super good results from it, but also it's a lot of work to settle up and maintain.
Aaron
00:17:14 – 00:17:14
Yeah.
Chris
00:17:14 – 00:17:19
And the content, you know, isn't super evergreen necessarily. It gets kind of crusty. So
Aaron
00:17:19 – 00:17:20
Yeah.
Chris
00:17:20 – 00:17:38
And I never like, a year or 2 later, I never end up liking the the email sequences I've written, you know, 2 years ago. So I just, like, kinda nixed it all. Some stuff might still be up there. So anyway but there's still, you know, those courses that service records.com has some courses, and those are still good and relevant. I don't push them really until Black Friday.
Chris
00:17:39 – 00:18:04
Cloudcast, I am actively adding videos to, for AWS courses. And I actually like that lot, and I've always liked that process. So that's that was Cloudcast I started when, before I thought I would ever own, you know, all of Tripp or C Isla. That got created and started before that. So now I have kinda 2 things competing for my side project at time, outside of work, which is fun.
Chris
00:18:04 – 00:18:05
But I actually don't
Aaron
00:18:05 – 00:18:07
Yeah. It's super finite.
Chris
00:18:07 – 00:18:22
I haven't yeah. God. I haven't, I haven't had a lot of issues switching back and forth between them. Like, it certainly feels bad to be like, oh, I really wish I could be working on this instead of that. But, I like the process of both things I'm doing right now.
Chris
00:18:23 – 00:18:42
Like, the AWS stuff is fulfilling of the the part of me that always likes to kind of, like, learn something and then write about it or make videos about it. Like, that's always been a thing I like to do, which is why servers for hackers exist to begin with. So I still like that process. So right now, I'm working on, like, a course about Lambda. I have 2 modules.
Chris
00:18:42 – 00:19:10
I don't know how many that'll be, but, Cloudcast is set up kind of nicely where I like where I can just kind of add a module or a few videos to it when I want because there's, most most people who've paid for it have subscribed for a year. So they just get whatever I've created immediately because they have access to everything. Some people have purchased just a simple course in which case, you know, I'm not adding to the the first course I made right now. I'm just, adding new content to new modules and courses and whatever. So that's going on.
Chris
00:19:10 – 00:19:14
So every few weeks, I'll switch over to Cloudcast, and then I'll switch back to Chipper and that that kind
Aaron
00:19:15 – 00:19:19
of thing. And how are you finding Cloudcast's,
Aaron
00:19:20 – 00:19:20
trajectory?
Chris
00:19:20 – 00:19:39
Black Friday was good, and then I had no sales forever. And then sales trickle in nowadays when I add stuff. And then this Black Friday will probably be good again. But, you know, but then it'll it'll go back down to to not much. So this is, like, another top of funnel problem because I have I have to, like, really get the word out about it and that kinda thing.
Chris
00:19:39 – 00:19:53
But I'm not pushing that as hard as chipper because I see a lot more potential in a SaaS than even if there's even if there's subscriptions on Cloudcast, I see a lot more potential in, like, a a true SaaS, like, Chipper CI in the long term. Yeah. Because it's kind of
Aaron
00:19:54 – 00:19:56
it's, like, kind of a content treadmill. Right?
Chris
00:19:56 – 00:19:56
If Yep.
Aaron
00:19:56 – 00:20:02
If you were to stop, eventually, people would stop signing up. I guess servers for hackers. There you go. Like, you stop. Exactly.
Aaron
00:20:02 – 00:20:05
People still pay for it, but not as much as they used to. Yeah.
Chris
00:20:05 – 00:20:21
And that was never subscription. Those are always one off purchases for courses, and cloud class is a subscription. Although, you know, we'll see. I'll I'll have massive churn a year from doesn't need the next by Friday, I'm sure, because people won't wanna rebuy new into next year, but other people will. So, you know, that'll balance out.
Chris
00:20:21 – 00:20:44
I the way I see it right now is that Cloudcast, I'm still gonna do because I like that a lot. Mhmm. And it's also kind of nice for that Black Friday bump to get money, which pays for, you know, house expenses and just stuff Right. Life in general while I'm trying to grow chipper CI also to be at the longer term thing. And if chipper like, you know, if it's another year or something just like it's not going anywhere, then I can kind of, you know, switch what I'm focusing on if I really want to also.
Chris
00:20:44 – 00:20:52
Because Okay. I think I think courses on AWS is kind of a topic that's not going anywhere. So the you know, there's potential in both of these businesses. So
Aaron
00:20:54 – 00:21:04
So what's what's the plan here? What what's your life what's your life plan? You've got a good job. Right? You you presumably like your job because you've been there for a 1000 years.
Aaron
00:21:05 – 00:21:05
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:21:05 – 00:21:23
So you've got a good job. You've got 2 kids, wife, house somewhere in Texas, and you've got all these side projects. So, like, basically, we're the same. Perfect. So what's what's the plan?
Aaron
00:21:23 – 00:21:25
Like, what are what are we doing here?
Chris
00:21:26 – 00:21:38
I don't know, man. It's depressing. I turned 37 last November and, like, everyone who's, like, way more successful than me is way younger than me. So, like, this is like a constant metal burden. Yeah.
Chris
00:21:38 – 00:21:45
No. No. No. No. I mean, like, I don't that doesn't weigh me down all the time, but there's certainly times I'm just like, oh, okay.
Aaron
00:21:45 – 00:21:45
Yeah.
Chris
00:21:46 – 00:21:57
But all I've planned is just to see what I can do with these hypothesis and hopefully, you know, take over either do a very good job of supplementing my, main job or
Aaron
00:21:57 – 00:21:57
Mhmm. You
Chris
00:21:57 – 00:21:59
know, replace it and grow more.
Aaron
00:22:02 – 00:22:08
So you do have desires to maybe one day be completely independent.
Chris
00:22:09 – 00:22:10
Yeah. I wouldn't mind that outcome.
Aaron
00:22:11 – 00:22:16
Yeah. I feel that. It's not easy.
Chris
00:22:17 – 00:22:29
No. I mean, there's a lot of I mean, like, health care, of course. You know, there's a whole rant to be had about that. So that's, like, a whole, like, concern also. Then, But then also, you know, the worry of being reliant.
Chris
00:22:29 – 00:22:42
Like, I I we've talked about this before. Like, I don't know if I I'm not a person who's built to do freelance. Like, I'm sure I could if I needed to, but my personality would not do a great job of that. I don't think that would be very stressful for me.
Aaron
00:22:44 – 00:23:08
Yeah. So then that cuts out, potentially huge chunks of money. Like, with freelance, you could do, you know, a 6 week engagement and make a huge chunk of money and then use that as sort of the replacement for the w two. But since freelance is out, you're kind of your scope is narrowed to courses and SaaS.
Chris
00:23:10 – 00:23:22
Man, when you word it like that, jeez. But yes. Am I wrong? Yeah. But, I mean, the the I the freelance stuff is like I know that would take up a lot of work.
Chris
00:23:22 – 00:23:37
I would have to Oh. I would have to ramp up freelance and then also quit, you know, or something like that so I don't have time to do the freelance. So and then, you know, there's this lag between getting the job done and getting money. You don't know how the engagement is gonna go. There's, like, so much fear around that decision.
Aaron
00:23:37 – 00:23:39
Listen. I'm not trying to convince you to
Chris
00:23:39 – 00:23:47
do to do relays. Right. I don't like it. I like the people I want to do too much. I mean, it's off there's definitely a comfort zone thing.
Chris
00:23:47 – 00:24:16
Like, I stay at jobs for for too long in some respects. But there's reasons for me to be, god, 8 years at user escape right now. There's, like, good reasons around the the employment stuff where, like, there's there's freedom to there's freedom there's relative freedom of time versus, say, other jobs, and there's also, Ian doesn't try to own any I IP or anything. Like, there's no clause of him owning anything or side projects. And that stuff's always been what he has liked about us reportedly.
Chris
00:24:17 – 00:24:21
Like, you know, about how all the employees are kind of entrepreneurial and
Aaron
00:24:22 – 00:24:28
Well, he's the same way. He's out there he's out there with, what was it, thermostat, and then now NFTs.
Chris
00:24:28 – 00:24:29
Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron
00:24:29 – 00:24:53
I'm he'll never listen to this, so I feel comfortable telling you. But, he got so hard into NFTs that I had to unfollow him on Twitter for a while because I love him to death, and I think he's wonderful. But it was so NFT heavy that I was like, bro, I have no idea what you're talking about. And so and maybe at some point, it'll pass, and I can go pick him back up. But Right.
Aaron
00:24:54 – 00:25:02
Yeah. It seems like the only person that's ever left Userscape is Taylor. I mean, it seems like everyone that works there has worked there forever.
Chris
00:25:02 – 00:25:13
Yeah. Eric is at 10 years, I think. Matt, who started before after me, is at 6 years, and he announced it. So, you know, he's not going anywhere.
Aaron
00:25:13 – 00:25:18
Yeah. And it seems like Eric just plays golf all day.
Chris
00:25:18 – 00:25:20
So I know. Who could who could have a job
Aaron
00:25:20 – 00:25:21
like that? I don't know.
Chris
00:25:21 – 00:25:34
We'll find out he's been working from, like, the golf, bar for, like, the second half of the day, then he just goes immediately to do, you know, the back night or something. Amazing. His kids are a little older. He can get away with it.
Aaron
00:25:34 – 00:25:36
Yeah. So how old are yours?
Chris
00:25:36 – 00:25:42
24. Okay. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Chris
00:25:42 – 00:25:48
It's, fun. You know? It's like like, terrible twos is fine. That's easy. 34 is harder.
Aaron
00:25:49 – 00:25:50
Really?
Chris
00:25:50 – 00:26:09
Yeah. They have more arguing skills and employ them constantly. Or just, like, completely grandstanding. It's kind of funny. I mean, it'd be funny if, like, it didn't happen in the middle of my work day that, like, I had to, like, stop and and try to get a kid to pee because for some reason, that's so randomly hard to get a key or a kid who doesn't wanna pee.
Chris
00:26:09 – 00:26:18
But I hasn't peed for 4 hours to go to the bathroom. It's just like grandstands. Like, no. So it's that kind of thing.
Aaron
00:26:18 – 00:26:24
My gosh. Mine are 9 months, so I'm still I'm still on easy street, it sounds like.
Chris
00:26:24 – 00:26:29
Right. Well yeah. I mean, it always depends. Everything's a different phase. So, like, what's easy and what's hard changes.
Chris
00:26:30 – 00:26:38
So my friends who have my friends who have teenagers, they're like, it's not really physically tiring anymore, but it's very emotionally tiring. It's how they describe
Aaron
00:26:39 – 00:26:39
I'm sure.
Chris
00:26:39 – 00:26:40
Their their 3 teenagers.
Aaron
00:26:41 – 00:26:46
Jeez. And your wife, she has a job. Right?
Chris
00:26:46 – 00:26:49
No. Not since our first was born. So she hasn't
Aaron
00:26:49 – 00:26:50
worked for
Chris
00:26:50 – 00:26:52
4 or 5 years. Something like that.
Aaron
00:26:52 – 00:26:53
Okay. So that's helpful.
Chris
00:26:54 – 00:27:04
Yep. She's a house and the kids go to a day school a few days a week, you know, to have 12 kids. So that's half a day. So, like, right now, I'm recording because they're both out of the house.
Aaron
00:27:04 – 00:27:09
Gotcha. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. My wife also works in the house.
Aaron
00:27:10 – 00:27:33
She works way harder than I do, but she doesn't have, you know, a full time job. Right. And I don't I honestly, like, I don't know how we would do it. Otherwise, if she had a full time job and had to especially if she had to be in an office somewhere, I I I have no idea, and I understand that, you know, we're extremely privileged to be able to have her stay at home full time, but.
Chris
00:27:33 – 00:27:34
Right.
Aaron
00:27:34 – 00:27:36
Man, I don't know how people do it.
Chris
00:27:38 – 00:27:51
It's crazy. I mean, it's hard. Everything about you know, no one tells you this. Like, here, have some kids your grandparents say or your parents say that you have it, and you realize that they asked you or told you that out of revenge. It's, like, definitely some kind of revenge for people who are pushing kids like you.
Chris
00:27:51 – 00:27:53
I was like
Aaron
00:27:54 – 00:27:55
That's funny.
Chris
00:27:57 – 00:28:02
I'm definitely pushing kids onto my kids. Like, oh, when do I when do I gonna have grandkids? It's happening.
Aaron
00:28:03 – 00:28:16
No. That's it's, it has been extremely fun. But boy, it sure is it's hard work. Yeah. Like, there are definitely there are definitely 2 sides to it.
Aaron
00:28:16 – 00:28:31
And to totally play up the positive side, I think is disingenuous, and to totally play up the negative side is disingenuous. I think there needs to be a little bit more balance that, like Right. Yeah. It's amazing, but also, heads up, it's super hard.
Chris
00:28:33 – 00:28:41
And yep. I was just about to send out some complaints, but I'll I'll hold off for that. However, peep people who are parents know. It's just
Aaron
00:28:41 – 00:28:48
it's just They know. And if you don't if you don't have kids yet, they're great. It's also very hard. So enjoy.
Chris
00:28:48 – 00:29:02
Alright. It's your turn to tell me about Hammerstone. What is going on? Oh. Specifically, you I like how you're using Twitter and then also very much in the Laravel space and, like, adding value to the Laravel world.
Chris
00:29:02 – 00:29:11
But then you also have this product, and I don't hear much as much about it. I kind of only know about it because of your podcast. It's, like, I don't think you tweet about it too much or anything. Right?
Aaron
00:29:11 – 00:29:18
No. No. I really don't. So Hammerstone is my side business. I also have a full time job.
Aaron
00:29:19 – 00:29:49
So Hammerstone is my side business, and it's me and 2 other partners, Sean and Colleen. And we build components for Laravel and Rails applications. And the one that we're starting with is a query builder. It's like a visual query builder for your users. So, like, if your users need to say, you know, I wanna see customers that are in Texas name includes Aaron and is tall.
Aaron
00:29:49 – 00:29:58
Right? They could do that, hit go, and we would handle we handle the front end, the back end, the validation, the storing of the filter, the actual query, everything.
Chris
00:29:58 – 00:29:59
Cool.
Aaron
00:29:59 – 00:30:24
So that's what we do. So it works out really so we started this a couple years back, and the goal was alright. We're gonna build the Laravel and Vue version because I'm a Laravel guy. Sean is a front end guy, and so we decided I'm gonna build it in Laravel. He's gonna build the Vue version.
Aaron
00:30:25 – 00:30:49
And our initial marketing plan was, like, I'm gonna try to do developer relations, basically. Right? So I'm gonna try to get more into the Laravel, mind space and have more people know about me. So that was a couple years ago. And since then, it's it's definitely worked.
Aaron
00:30:49 – 00:31:19
I mean, that part of it has worked. Right? So I decided, I think, almost exactly 1 year ago, I decided to start, like, taking Twitter seriously. And what that meant for me was, like, just share more of what I'm working on, and don't be afraid of looking stupid. And that's been basically the whole thing is I share what I'm working on, and I'm not afraid of people saying, well, actually.
Aaron
00:31:19 – 00:31:43
It's like, yeah, I just, you know, it's gonna happen. So that has along, along the way, and the reason I think part of the reason you don't hear too much about the product is, 1, I don't wanna just be tweeting about this paid product because that at some point people are like, dude, you're just out here shilling.
Chris
00:31:44 – 00:31:44
Right.
Aaron
00:31:44 – 00:32:13
Which is legit, and I don't I don't wanna do that. The other thing is it's taken us it's taken us a long, long time to bring something usable to the market because along, like, along the way, Sean and I were approached by a big company to say, hey. Can you come build this thing that you're building? Can you come build it in rails for us? We'll pay you and you get to keep the IP of the rails stuff.
Aaron
00:32:13 – 00:32:34
And we were like, oh, like, yeah. I guess so. Yeah. I I guess we will do that. And so we took this massive detour where Sean was now front end guy at client, and we brought Colleen on to port what I had written in Laravel to port it to Rails, and then she later became a full partner.
Aaron
00:32:35 – 00:33:07
And so part of the reason I don't tweet about, refine all the time is because it's taken a long time to get to the point where we have something to sell because we've been focused on this client that's paying us all this money to do it for them. Mhmm. And so that's one of the frustrating things of, side projecting is you just like it has to fit in around your life. Like you you just can't you just can't spend all your time on it. And so Right.
Aaron
00:33:07 – 00:33:44
All of Sean's free time was going to the client to build out this Hotwire front end because they're paying us to do it. And, therefore, I'm now in this spot where I'm, like, trying to build hype for Laravel, but we don't quite have the product ready. And so that's where that's where stuff like, Sidecar and Torchlight came in Right. Was how do I keep how do I keep the momentum going when I can't share this objectively interesting stuff I'm working on, but I'm not, like, I'm not I'm not working on it as much right now. So that's when I started, like, okay, what else can I do?
Aaron
00:33:44 – 00:33:56
What else can I gin up? And I didn't want I didn't wanna just create, like, you know, a dozen or 2 dozen open source packages that, like, solve, you know, kind of a problem, but don't really solve the problem.
Chris
00:33:56 – 00:33:58
You're not going the freak the freak way.
Aaron
00:33:58 – 00:34:19
Well, yeah. I don't wanna I don't wanna create 100 open source packages. I don't know how they have the energy to do that. But, you know, being being one person, I thought, okay. What what open source stuff can I do that's, like, interesting enough that people will latch on, and is just one package so it's maintainable my by me?
Aaron
00:34:20 – 00:34:39
And that's where Sidecar came in, which is the thing that lets you run Lambdas from your Larabell app. And that has worked. I mean, frankly, that's worked better than I expected because, like, it it was cool. And then inertia started talking about server side rendering.
Aaron
00:34:40 – 00:34:40
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:34:40 – 00:34:49
And that's where I've got, like, the first, like, concrete use case because people on Vapor couldn't do SSR because they couldn't have a node process running.
Chris
00:34:50 – 00:34:50
Right.
Aaron
00:34:50 – 00:35:17
And so I was able to kinda weasel my way into that, conversation about inertia SSR when that was good. And then I did the Laravel Worldwide Talk, and then I did Laracon just last week. And now I feel like, okay. There's there's some momentum here. And so I kinda, like, did what I set out to do, which was make interesting stuff and bring people along into the story, which was my goal all along.
Aaron
00:35:17 – 00:35:19
So Yeah. That's kind of the journey up to now.
Chris
00:35:19 – 00:35:25
Cool. And I can say it from the outside. I think I totally agree. Like, that's that's all been really great. I really like it.
Chris
00:35:25 – 00:35:28
No. Like, your your lerigan taco is super good.
Aaron
00:35:28 – 00:35:29
Oh, thanks. So so And
Chris
00:35:29 – 00:35:37
all and the projects that you're working on have been really good too. Like Torchlight, I use at Cloudcast. It's just, like, really better than other syntax silators I use.
Aaron
00:35:37 – 00:35:38
And then
Chris
00:35:38 – 00:35:44
Sidecar, of course, is cool too. You know? It's just, like, just throw Lambda into your project wherever you want. So many, like, weird possibilities he can do with that.
Aaron
00:35:45 – 00:36:12
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I think part of, like, I so I think part of what has made some of this work is so there's the whole, like, engineering as marketing, like, concept catchphrase maybe, where instead of instead of, I don't know, like, writing a blog post about how to get Lambda into your Laravel app. Right?
Aaron
00:36:12 – 00:36:36
Instead of doing that, you spend the time writing the package, and that has that has more durability. Right? So instead of doing what may be traditional marketing, you do engineering as marketing, And that can be writing an open source package. It can be writing a little a little tool that, you know, is just like a a website that does one thing. I saw yesterday merge my pdfs.com.
Aaron
00:36:37 – 00:37:03
And, like, it's a free it's a free tool, and some company built it just as top of funnel marketing. Like, hey, we built this thing for you, the community. Also, it's powered by us. Come check us out. So I think that's part of, like, what has made my strategy work is I want to attract Laravel people into the story, and so I'm doing all these Laravel things, and then, like, that's working.
Aaron
00:37:04 – 00:37:34
I think another part is, I'm like, I'm I'm excited. I'm objectively, like, excited about what I'm doing, and I think people kinda glom on to that. And I there's a there's this weird dichotomy between, like it's a false dichotomy, but people feel like, I think you have to either be excited or you can be cool. Right? And it's not cool to be excited.
Aaron
00:37:34 – 00:37:44
Right. And if if you're excited, you're not cool. You're you're cringe or you're lame. Right? But I think I think the Laracon talk is a good example.
Aaron
00:37:44 – 00:38:07
I was really excited about what I was talking about, and I think that came through to other people, and other people got excited about it. And so now we're all kind of, like, sharing in this excitement and moving in the same direction. And so, people are like, hey, I wanna follow along. I'm excited about what you're doing, because you're excited about what you're doing. And I just think that's so underrated.
Aaron
00:38:07 – 00:38:17
Everybody's trying to play it cool. Right. Not just in not just on Twitter, but in life, everybody's trying to play it cool. Right? Nobody wants to be seen as, like, hey.
Aaron
00:38:17 – 00:38:24
This thing's really excited and I'm amped about it. Nobody wants to be seen that way. They wanna be the cool guy. And I just I don't know. I think there's I think it's underrated.
Aaron
00:38:25 – 00:38:38
Being excited in public is underrated. I think being cool is, like, okay, like, you're cool. That's great. But I don't know. I just I just think people are people are too afraid to be excited.
Aaron
00:38:38 – 00:38:39
They wanna be cool.
Chris
00:38:40 – 00:38:58
Right. I like that. I think there's a, I think there's a good insight right there because you definitely have the excitement part there, and it's definitely infectious. And, also, like, just the the things you've were chosen to create, torchlight and sidecar are also really cool too. So, like, there's there's a combination of things going on here.
Chris
00:38:58 – 00:39:00
You're gonna have your own survival bias, I think.
Aaron
00:39:00 – 00:39:01
Absolutely. For sure.
Chris
00:39:01 – 00:39:16
Because Yeah. I think I like, there's a lot of stuff like, the bricks are being stacked in your favor, I think, because you're choosing good projects to work on. Your attitude towards someone's right. Your, idea to like, I know you did a lot. You told me that you did a lot of practice for that talk.
Chris
00:39:16 – 00:39:25
A ton. But the but the excitement was also didn't seem manufactured. Although, by then, I'm sure you did the talk so often that, like, it could have been. You know?
Aaron
00:39:25 – 00:39:37
Yeah. I mean, I I I literally practiced every single little throwaway joke in transition and everything. But, you know, when the time when the time comes, the energy hits a little different. So it was still
Aaron
00:39:37 – 00:39:37
For sure.
Aaron
00:39:37 – 00:39:39
It was still genuine. Yeah.
Chris
00:39:39 – 00:39:47
Cool. Yeah. So Yeah. I mean, you're you're stacking the bricks to me, from the outside, it looks like you're stacking the bricks in the right way to to get that all aligned.
Aaron
00:39:47 – 00:40:10
Well, thanks. I I appreciate that. And I'm very careful, like, I'm very careful to still, like, still be human. Like, I want to focus I want to focus kind of my output on specifically on Twitter. I wanna focus it on Laravel and things Laravel developers would find interesting.
Aaron
00:40:10 – 00:40:26
Right? But that doesn't mean I'm hot tips all the time guy. Right? I don't wanna be every day at 11 AM and at 6 PM I post a hot tip that I pulled from the documentation Laravel's documentation. Right?
Aaron
00:40:26 – 00:41:09
So I'm I'm trying to walk this this line between doing a lot of stuff in public and, like, you know, sharing what I'm working on and providing value, but also being a human. But then on the human side, not complaining about customer service or, in my case, and this is not universal, in my case I don't tweet about sports, which is easy because I don't watch sports. But, so I'm trying to, like, how do I still be human and get my personality across, but still focus kind of on the audience and, you know, one standard deviation away from the audience that I wanna that I wanna
Chris
00:41:09 – 00:41:09
hit. Right.
Aaron
00:41:09 – 00:41:21
Somebody told me recently, like, I really like following you on Twitter because you're a human. And I was like, okay. So that's good. That's, like, that's working. So that was, yeah, that was a huge compliment to me.
Chris
00:41:23 – 00:41:41
Yep. I like that as intentional. Like, you're doing all that kind of intentionally, but, also, you know, from the outside again, it doesn't look like you're, doing that intentionally necessarily. It just kind of seems like, you know, you're a person doing that on on Twitter, which, you know, is a good mix. Like, you know, people respect that.
Aaron
00:41:41 – 00:41:58
Yeah. I think I think the, maybe the best way to describe it is unthoughtful. Like, I am thoughtful about I'm not I don't think I'm formulaic in that I don't have a strict, like, content calendar strategy, whatever,
Aaron
00:41:59 – 00:41:59
but
Aaron
00:41:59 – 00:42:17
I am thoughtful about okay. What is, for lack of better term, what is my brand? And if I do have a brand, which I think everyone does, if I do have a brand, what, like, what do I want it to be? And what do I want to include? And what do I want to exclude?
Aaron
00:42:17 – 00:42:25
And then I kinda just use those as loose guardrails instead of rigid, content guidelines, I guess.
Chris
00:42:25 – 00:42:37
Right. In terms of refine, do you how do you think you're gonna try to roll that out to, like, start promoting it or when?
Aaron
00:42:37 – 00:43:03
Yeah. Yeah. So I've got, so refine is the name of our query builder. So right now, we are in this spot where we're kind of in a holding pattern with view 2 and view 3 because of the recent switch of defaults. We have got it to a point where view 2 and view 3 are gonna work, but I'm still I'm again waiting on Sean to finish that.
Aaron
00:43:03 – 00:43:11
So what I did in the meantime was I pulled the view 2 out and put it into a nova package.
Aaron
00:43:11 – 00:43:11
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:43:11 – 00:43:37
And so I'm now selling we're now selling, a Nova plug in. And so it works great with Nova because Nova is so constrained in terms of design Right. And layout. And so I don't have to provide renderless components for people to make it match their app because I can just make it match their app because I know their app is Nova. So that's been good.
Aaron
00:43:37 – 00:43:47
We've got maybe 6, 7, 8 people, like, integrating that right now with intent to to buy. So that's really exciting. We have one
Chris
00:43:47 – 00:43:57
person What's the pricing like on that? Is it a it's not a subscription, is it, or is it a one off? Or is it kinda like a Nova license where you get upgrade you have to pay for upgrades later?
Aaron
00:43:58 – 00:44:14
Yeah. So it's $1,000 a year. And in terms of if they stop paying, I think we'll just leave their access open to the the last version that they had. So would be like Nova in that way. So, yeah.
Aaron
00:44:14 – 00:44:32
It's a, the front end is fully open source. All both back ends, Laravel and Rails will be closed source, and you'll pay for basically private access to those composer repositories. Cool. So it's $1,000 a year. And, yeah, right now, the Nova stuff is going great.
Aaron
00:44:32 – 00:45:09
Like, people are plugging it in, and they are just thrilled to death with it, which makes me feel, like, super great because, you know, we've worked on this for so long and to have people finally using it and be like, yeah, you found like, you found the thing. There are a couple couple sharp corners, but you you you did the thing you set out to do, so that's really encouraging. In terms of, like, a broader release, I wanna pump as many people into Nova as possible right now just because the support burden is a lot lower, because there's no there's no front end support. Mhmm.
Aaron
00:45:09 – 00:45:10
And
Aaron
00:45:10 – 00:45:36
so that knocks out what I need Sean for, so I can do all of it myself, because it's all it's all back end. And then in terms of, like, getting the full version released, we have to we're like, we just have to finish the customization story, because the first people that have used the full version are, like, hey, this is great. I need to be able to customize this front end to match mine completely.
Chris
00:45:37 – 00:45:37
Right.
Aaron
00:45:38 – 00:45:56
And so we know the first, you know, couple of people that wanted to pay for it are, like, yeah. It's great. I just need this thing. And so I feel I think we all feel like we can't run more people through that funnel knowing that they're gonna get to the end and be, like, hey. How do I customize this to look exactly exactly like my app?
Aaron
00:45:56 – 00:45:59
And we say, yeah. We're still working on it.
Chris
00:45:59 – 00:46:08
So What's the, use case for people? Like, are they putting it in the app and then their customers are using it behind the scenes? Like, you know, not knowing necessarily what
Aaron
00:46:08 – 00:46:53
It depends. So some people are putting it in admin interfaces that only, you know, employees are using. So that's especially true with Nova is they'll put it on, you know, a resource page, and then they can filter down to, you know, companies in this part of the UK that have this many students and, like, they'll Right. They'll filter down on their Novo side. The people that are putting it on the, let's say, the non admin side, yeah, their users are using it, and they they provide things like you can imagine it it's kinda like a reporting interface for their users or, in some ways, an analytics interface.
Aaron
00:46:53 – 00:47:07
And so they're like their users want to be able to say, alright. Show me purchases in the past month, and the user's name is or the user lives in Texas and like, boom. Show show me all of those purchases or people or whatever.
Aaron
00:47:07 – 00:47:07
Cool.
Aaron
00:47:07 – 00:47:21
And so it's very much like, you can imagine it sits at the top of usually it sits at the sits at the top of an index page on top of a table of records, and you use it to, like, drill down to the records that you're looking for.
Chris
00:47:22 – 00:47:30
Right. Alright. So a $1,000 price point. So who is your audience? Sounds like businesses or small, medium business type audience.
Chris
00:47:30 – 00:47:32
Yeah. Exactly. Individual developers probably.
Aaron
00:47:32 – 00:47:44
Not individual developers, not hobbyists, probably not side projectists. So the the pain is so painful. Like, everyone has had to build something like this.
Chris
00:47:45 – 00:47:46
For sure.
Aaron
00:47:46 – 00:48:00
And you can go find you can go find a lot of abandonware on GitHub that solves half the problem. Right? It's like, hey, here's a jQuery UI query builder. Good luck with the back end.
Aaron
00:48:00 – 00:48:00
It's like, woah.
Aaron
00:48:00 – 00:48:06
Woah. Woah. Hang on. That that's the hard part. And so the pain is the pain is so painful.
Aaron
00:48:09 – 00:48:46
So it is, like, it is a known problem. I think we we do have some education around, like, I don't know that drop in components are very paid drop in components are a very big concept in Laravel, but, like, you know, in the dot net world, they've got component libraries where companies pay $1,000 a seat a year. And it's just like, yeah, it's a normal thing. Like, I think blazor is one of them. So this is a this is a tried and true business model, but there is, a little bit of novelty in the in the Laravel ecosystem.
Aaron
00:48:46 – 00:49:03
Right. Yep. Businesses that are either doing this already, but in a, you know, in a shoddy kind of way or businesses that are, like, looking down the barrel of implementing their own filter builder, query builder, and like, I, you know, I can't
Chris
00:49:03 – 00:49:04
save it for
Aaron
00:49:04 – 00:49:06
3 months to do it. Yeah. Exactly.
Chris
00:49:07 – 00:49:21
That makes sense. Laravel is kind of interesting because, a lot of the paid official Laravel products are geared at lower price points. So you get developers, hobbyists, and then also businesses who think it's super cheap. Because they're, like, I can't believe this is just $40 a month for this. You know what I mean?
Chris
00:49:21 – 00:49:35
Where you're like so with Eberly and Chipper, it's like, I'm just a student and $40 a month is way too much. So, you know, it's, you know, both into the spectrum. So it's interesting to to do the $1,000 price point. And that would mean interesting in a bad way. I like that idea Yeah.
Chris
00:49:35 – 00:49:46
Too. Because, because there's, like, it's just, you know, it's just not the same audience of, like, what literal Forage is necessarily. Or there is an overlap, but Forage has, like, all these other customers who are at, like, the $15 a price point.
Aaron
00:49:47 – 00:50:06
Even Nova puts downward price pressure on what we're doing. I mean, Nova's what? 99 or 299, something like that. And to buy all of Nova for 99 or 299 and then add on a component and then add on a component for a $1,000 is like Right. Yep.
Aaron
00:50:06 – 00:50:08
Well, this seems a little bit wacky, doesn't it?
Chris
00:50:09 – 00:50:20
Right. But, I mean, the value I mean, if especially if you if you get people to understand the value of it makes a lot of sense, especially for businesses. Because, like, can you imagine spending months on that feature?
Aaron
00:50:20 – 00:50:23
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have, and I've I've done it. Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron
00:50:23 – 00:51:04
So I think I think Laravel is an interesting, economic study because Taylor has such reach that and he is, you know, the forefront of paid Laravel products. He has such reach that he could have price it based on volume. I mean, he can price things super low, and he gets volume like none of us will be able to get, because none of us are are Taylor. And and then that kind of exercises downward price pressure on the whole ecosystem, but we'll see. It's still an open question.
Aaron
00:51:04 – 00:51:14
I mean, the people that have wanted refine have not cared a single bit that it costs $1,000. They're like, this is great. It's totally worth it. Where do I where do I pay?
Chris
00:51:14 – 00:51:15
Yeah.
Aaron
00:51:15 – 00:51:36
And so it'll be interesting to see over time how that plays out. I think in the rails ecosystem, this is gonna be a little bit easier. Like, people are just Rails is a little bit I think there are, it's an older ecosystem, and so there are some bigger companies there. And they're just like, yeah. A $1,000.
Aaron
00:51:36 – 00:51:46
That's fine. I mean, this client is paying us ungodly amounts of money to build it from scratch. And so Right. That has validated a big part of, like, yeah, people need to
Chris
00:51:46 – 00:51:55
to get their development funded. Like Yeah. You know, bootstrap company, no funding, but, you know, this person is this company is sending you a lot of money. So I
Aaron
00:51:55 – 00:51:56
don't know if you're loving
Chris
00:51:56 – 00:51:58
that much. Presumably, it's a good amount of money.
Aaron
00:51:58 – 00:52:02
Yeah. It's great. I mean, it's Colleen's full time job now. I mean, she's Oh, wow.
Chris
00:52:02 – 00:52:02
Alright.
Aaron
00:52:02 – 00:52:19
Fully embedded at the client working on working on refine all day every day for the client. Cool. And they're they're paying her, you know, her day rate. And so it's like, wow, this is this is unique. Talk talk about, like, survivorship bias.
Aaron
00:52:19 – 00:52:28
No. Nobody else gets nobody else gets a big company funding their development into a different market and then letting them keep the IP.
Chris
00:52:28 – 00:52:29
Like Yeah.
Aaron
00:52:29 – 00:52:32
I don't I don't that's not replicable. So yeah.
Chris
00:52:33 – 00:52:37
That's neat. And then you have 2 I don't know. I was gonna say 2 markets. I guess you kinda do. Right?
Chris
00:52:37 – 00:52:46
Laravel and Muriel is that those 2 worlds. So it's kinda neat too to see which which does better or how you might market differently to each.
Aaron
00:52:46 – 00:53:02
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Colleen has started talking about we're because we're at the point now where we can extract, the Rails gem, which is what they call their packages. Extract the Rails gem and start looking for people that wanna buy it.
Aaron
00:53:02 – 00:53:14
And there are some people on the list, and she started talking about, alright. Do we start going to Rails Conferences? And I think she's gonna submit some talks to rails conferences and try to do the same kind of developer relations stuff.
Chris
00:53:15 – 00:53:22
She's so, like, seems like shares the personality for that too. Like, very Oh. Outgoing based on her, her podcast. Yeah. Her Michelle's.
Aaron
00:53:22 – 00:53:33
She's gonna be perfect for that. And she's she's talked to, I think, a couple before, and she's just she's high energy, and she's likable. So she's Right. She's just gonna crush it. Cool.
Aaron
00:53:33 – 00:53:51
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And I think expanding beyond that, like, that's that's the inner circle of potential marketing beyond that. We need to start getting into, like, biz dev kind of stuff with agencies, I think.
Aaron
00:53:51 – 00:54:26
Like, I think that's I think that's gonna be a big move is if we can get in with, Laravel agencies, some that maybe, you know, focus on Nova or use Nova as a part of their tool chain, that's gonna be you know, if they do 50 apps in a year and half of them need something like this and half of those you can convince to buy. Like, that's a lot. That's a big deal versus the onesie twosies. So I think that's gonna be I think that's gonna be a next step is how do we how do we start doing some, like, big boy business stuff?
Chris
00:54:27 – 00:54:28
Get a sales team.
Aaron
00:54:29 – 00:54:29
Get a
Chris
00:54:29 – 00:54:35
support team. There might be, like, a dev support team for, like, the people who need to customize it fully too. That could be interesting.
Aaron
00:54:35 – 00:54:42
And there might be, there might be opportunities to do, support, or, like, customization integration engagements.
Aaron
00:54:43 – 00:54:43
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:54:43 – 00:54:54
Yep. Like, you buy the license, but then the engagement, like, we can do, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 day, integration setups and charge for those as well, which is Yeah.
Chris
00:54:54 – 00:54:54
That's interesting.
Aaron
00:54:55 – 00:54:57
Very normal. Like, that's a totally common thing.
Chris
00:54:58 – 00:54:58
Mhmm.
Aaron
00:54:58 – 00:55:08
But just not something that I I think a lot of bootstrappers have on their minds. We just wanna sell the thing and get out, but I think there's an opportunity to do some consulting.
Aaron
00:55:08 – 00:55:08
Right.
Chris
00:55:08 – 00:55:11
Yeah. Because that becomes a bit of a service business. Right? So that's
Aaron
00:55:11 – 00:55:12
Big
Aaron
00:55:12 – 00:55:12
what
Chris
00:55:12 – 00:55:13
people wanna avoid. But
Aaron
00:55:13 – 00:55:14
Yeah.
Chris
00:55:14 – 00:55:16
But if you lead into that, it could be really good.
Aaron
00:55:16 – 00:55:19
Yep. Exactly. Neat.
Chris
00:55:21 – 00:55:25
Okay. We're almost at an hour. I suppose Okay. We should wrap up.
Aaron
00:55:25 – 00:55:29
Well, this is the first one. So now you're setting a precedent that you're gonna wrap it About
Chris
00:55:29 – 00:55:29
an hour.
Aaron
00:55:30 – 00:55:32
Okay. That's fine. I like it.
Me

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

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