Aaron Francis

Sean has had an extremely busy week with work, other work, and house stuff. Aaron has torchlight.dev up and running and ready to start selling.

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Transcript

Sean

00:00:00 – 00:00:05

Okay. I'm recording. Hopefully, I don't need a keyboard.

Aaron

00:00:06 – 00:00:14

Hopefully not because you don't have one. Well, been a busy week for you.

Sean

00:00:17 – 00:00:28

Yeah. So right now I can barely hear you because it's not you. It's the audio over here. Oh, and I have no keyboard, and I just tried to turn the volume up, and, of course, nothing happened. So

Aaron

00:00:28 – 00:00:30

I heard you're hitting the keys. Yeah.

Sean

00:00:31 – 00:00:42

Alright. Well, so we'll just have to do. Yeah. So yeah. Busy week because I'm in the middle of trying to buy a house and doing the we're under contract now and doing the inspection and all that crap.

Sean

00:00:42 – 00:00:49

But exciting because I actually was able to have an offer accepted. Took a few tries, so I'm happy about that.

Aaron

00:00:49 – 00:00:50

That's fantastic.

Sean

00:00:51 – 00:01:02

Yeah. And then it's a bit of, like, a Rube Goldberg machine with the everything, like, because we're buying a house. It's a second house for now. It's temporary. Temporarily our second house.

Sean

00:01:02 – 00:01:32

Like, we're not gonna well, maybe, like, I might keep this one because it's a 2 flat and it could be a rental. But, like, for a year, we're still gonna live here because Beth's work requires her to live in Chicago, and she wants to do it for another year. And then so we gotta get, like, a second mortgage on this house to pay for the down payment on that house, and then we're gonna have to rent that house out. And then yeah. So it's like and, of course, everybody's on my banking team and the real estate agents.

Sean

00:01:32 – 00:01:43

Everybody's flipping out because the the seller wanted a faster close date. So, like and because the way things are, you basically have to be like, sure. No problem. We got that.

Aaron

00:01:43 – 00:01:44

Whatever you want.

Sean

00:01:44 – 00:02:00

Yeah. So in, like, a few weeks, I have to finish 2 mortgages and, you know, do all this crap, buy a house. It's, it's a lot. But you know what, though? It's stressful now, but this will indeed be less stressful.

Sean

00:02:00 – 00:02:19

I think it's spreading out the stress. So I think that when we go to move next year, it's gonna be way less stressful because we already have a place. We could just move over there, sell the other place. You know, it doesn't have to be, like, timing everything, selling and buying at the same time, etcetera. So so that's cool.

Sean

00:02:19 – 00:02:21

So, anyway, that'll that'll be

Aaron

00:02:21 – 00:02:22

promoting some of the stress.

Sean

00:02:23 – 00:02:34

Yeah. It's like this was gonna happen anyway. It's, like, a little bit harder because and I'm like I've already been a landlord for a while, so I'm not so worried about the rental thing. Hang on one second. This is my real estate agent.

Sean

00:02:36 – 00:02:42

Yeah. Sorry. So there. Yeah. So that's basically my whole life is getting constantly interrupted by people being like, need to

Aaron

00:02:42 – 00:02:54

talk right now. Sounds fun. Mhmm. And Colleen is in the middle of a move as well right now, so it seems like everyone is moving. Yeah.

Aaron

00:02:54 – 00:03:00

She's off she's offline for, like, a week because she's moving I don't remember where, but

Sean

00:03:00 – 00:03:07

Well, she's moving temporarily, like, in within the city that she's in right now, and then eventually moving, you know, to the West

Aaron

00:03:07 – 00:03:08

Coast. That's right.

Sean

00:03:08 – 00:03:10

So it's like a double move.

Aaron

00:03:10 – 00:03:11

She's doing the temporary thing

Sean

00:03:11 – 00:03:21

too. See. And that's like that's a that's like we could've done something like that. But I feel like Colleen, you know, because they're military, like, she's they do that all the time. Yeah.

Sean

00:03:21 – 00:03:25

It's way less I mean, you just become a pro at it, I think.

Aaron

00:03:25 – 00:03:26

Yeah. I think so.

Sean

00:03:26 – 00:03:32

Probably still not fun, but probably way less, you know, you know what to do. So

Aaron

00:03:32 – 00:03:33

Yeah.

Sean

00:03:35 – 00:03:51

But, yeah, try to do all that and, like, continue to make progress on my side project and have a job. So it's been a lot of stuff. Yeah. Even Isaac, my 6 year old, he's starting to notice. He's like, oh, it's the weekend.

Sean

00:03:51 – 00:03:51

Oh, dad's gotta go to

Aaron

00:03:51 – 00:03:54

work. Oh, no.

Sean

00:03:56 – 00:04:07

But I try to limit it to one day one weekend day. So that way, I can, like, one day, at least on the weekend, I can yeah. I'm not doing any work, and I was saying

Aaron

00:04:07 – 00:04:07

Yeah.

Sean

00:04:07 – 00:04:09

With the family, relaxing stuff.

Aaron

00:04:11 – 00:04:19

Yeah. I think I Slacked you at the end of a workday the other day, and I was like, hey. Do you wanna talk about JavaScript and dates? And you said my brain is fried. Can we do it later?

Sean

00:04:19 – 00:04:27

It's like Oh, yeah. It would have been utterly pointless. It would have been utterly pointless to try and, like, get my head around something that complicated at that moment.

Aaron

00:04:28 – 00:04:39

And, honestly, at that moment, I had it all wrong. So I went through, I think, 2 or 3 iterations before I finally came to something workable. So Yeah. You got lucky you got lucky there.

Sean

00:04:40 – 00:04:54

Yeah. Yeah. So it's awesome that we have we were just talking about how it's awesome that we have this big client because they have these bigger problems, which is forcing us to make our solution way more robust

Aaron

00:04:55 – 00:04:55

Yeah.

Sean

00:04:55 – 00:04:56

Than it was originally.

Aaron

00:04:58 – 00:04:59

Yeah. We've we're bad.

Sean

00:04:59 – 00:05:21

Right? So it's like a choice. Yeah. We could we could just be like, we can't really support, you know, clients like that. But on the other hand, you do all this work, and then it's like there's far less it's I've been on projects where the code base is mature and stable, and it just, like, a lot easier to to work with.

Sean

00:05:21 – 00:05:28

There's a lot less surprises, so things are more predictable. So that's a pretty big advantage, I think.

Aaron

00:05:28 – 00:05:58

Yeah. And if our whole our whole thesis is basically, listen. We've thought about this more than potentially anyone in the world, but definitely more than you who is about to either implement it yourself or buy our thing. If our thesis is we've thought about it more, this is, like, this is another point in our column of, hey. Have you thought about how these dates are gonna work with different time zones across different browsers, across different teams?

Aaron

00:05:59 – 00:06:25

Because we have. So, I mean, it is it is a little bit painful more so for you and Colleen because you're having to, like, do it immediately. But for me, it's like, oh, wow. This is a great, like, this is a great opportunity to make our thing even better, to make our moat even bigger because, yeah, we're gonna handle that out of the box now, and nobody else does. Mhmm.

Aaron

00:06:27 – 00:06:45

So I feel like it's a good thing. We've gotten we've gotten a couple of feature ideas that we've implemented from this client, that will benefit, you know, 75% of future clients, which is huge. We just wouldn't have gotten there.

Sean

00:06:46 – 00:07:16

I would say, probably you are I bet you agree with me that when we're done with this, when we're because well well, I don't know if this client project is gonna be, like, ever, like, a hard, like, we're done. It'll probably be on for a little bit. But when it's, like, essentially, like, it's in there, they're working on other stuff probably for a few months or whatever, like, we won't we won't hear from them. Then at that point, you know, we move back to the Laravel version

Aaron

00:07:16 – 00:07:17

with the

Sean

00:07:17 – 00:07:32

new version, finish that, and then be, like, feature, like, block. We don't do any no product work other than, like, emergency, like, bug fixes for customers that are paying us money.

Aaron

00:07:32 – 00:07:33

Exactly.

Sean

00:07:33 – 00:07:36

And, like, you know, no product work whatsoever.

Aaron

00:07:38 – 00:07:40

I 100% agree with that.

Sean

00:07:40 – 00:07:44

Long as possible. Yep. Yeah. Okay. And then it's just

Aaron

00:07:44 – 00:07:45

like same page.

Sean

00:07:47 – 00:07:50

Pure marketing, figure out how to spend our money.

Aaron

00:07:50 – 00:08:01

Yep. Figure out how to get rich somehow. No. I'm totally I'm totally on the same page. I think I think we had a complete enough solution before this client.

Aaron

00:08:01 – 00:08:21

And after this client, I think it's even better, and I don't think there's any reason any reason we should continue to build. Now if somebody somebody comes along and pays us a bunch of money and has a feature request, of course, we'll consider it. But before we get somebody to pay us money, no. We're done. We're totally done, which is great.

Aaron

00:08:21 – 00:08:22

What a good feeling.

Sean

00:08:24 – 00:08:32

Yeah. It's like there's no way. I have absolute confidence. And a lot of times, you know, you do a thing and you're like, what's my minimum viable product? Well, okay.

Sean

00:08:32 – 00:08:35

We we have way more than minimum viable products.

Aaron

00:08:35 – 00:08:36

Absolutely. Yeah.

Sean

00:08:37 – 00:08:50

I don't it would be an abs it would be a mistake to spend more time on it, like, a massive mistake. I would say this is a mistake except we're getting paid a lot of money. So, like Yes. That then becomes our bankroll for everything else we wanna do.

Aaron

00:08:50 – 00:08:51

Yes.

Sean

00:08:51 – 00:08:52

So it's worth it, but

Aaron

00:08:52 – 00:09:09

Totally worth it. And we were gonna we were gonna hit this. We were gonna hit these, feature roadblocks eventually with someone. And you I mean, there's an argument to be made. You should do it later, but we're getting paid.

Aaron

00:09:09 – 00:09:15

So it's not like we're just building in our basement. Like, a client is paying us to solve these problems

Sean

00:09:16 – 00:09:16

That they have.

Aaron

00:09:17 – 00:09:18

That they have. So what And

Sean

00:09:18 – 00:09:19

another client's will. Yeah.

Aaron

00:09:19 – 00:09:24

What's the problem here? The Right. Just it just changes what we thought was like, how we thought it was gonna happen.

Sean

00:09:24 – 00:09:37

It's like if we were both full time on this, we'd be able to do this and be working on the PHP thing at the same time. It's that's the issue. It just slows down the thing that we want to do, which is sell it as a product Right. Which we will. I want to do that.

Sean

00:09:37 – 00:09:46

That would be way better than continuing to do the the contract work. But Yeah. But it's okay. Right? Like, it we'll get there.

Sean

00:09:46 – 00:09:49

We're gonna get there. We're gonna get there. Yeah.

Aaron

00:09:50 – 00:09:59

Did you see in our Slack the other day that I helped Benedict debug his query builder or, I guess, improve his query builder?

Sean

00:09:59 – 00:09:59

Yeah.

Aaron

00:09:59 – 00:10:22

So Benedict at user list has built a query builder internally a long time ago, and he helped or he asked me a long time ago, hey. How are y'all doing it? And I gave him some, you know, ideas. And I was listening to his podcast just, like, 2 days ago, and he was talking about these query troubles he was having. And so I DM ed him in Slack and was like, hey, dude.

Aaron

00:10:22 – 00:10:45

Send me send me your SQL. I'm happy to take a look at it. And he sent me the generated SQL, and within, like, literally 5 seconds, I saw the problem. Like, I know I know exactly what's happening here, and it took me, like, 2 minutes to just cowboy code, like, change it all around, and I sent it back to him. And he was like, okay.

Aaron

00:10:45 – 00:11:03

I'll I guess I'll run this, and it it worked 10 seconds down to one second. And I was like, this is exactly why we exist. Because one of the one of the feature, like, we're talking about, you know, performance improvements that Colleen is working on, this is the thing that she is currently working on is Mhmm.

Sean

00:11:04 – 00:11:04

Taking basically the format that is default, which is what Benedicte

Aaron

00:11:04 – 00:11:24

was generating, and you know, I doubt myself a lot, but after that, I was like, man, I really know a lot about query builders. Like, I know a lot about query builders, and I know a lot about SQL, and I feel good. And that was that was pretty encouraging.

Sean

00:11:25 – 00:11:40

Yeah. Well, and if we finish it up for this client, I mean, you can't if you're feeling doubt at that point, I believe you have some Yeah. Rational evidence that you could tell your doubting mind, like, hey, doubting mind. That doesn't make sense anymore. Yeah.

Sean

00:11:40 – 00:11:41

Yeah.

Aaron

00:11:41 – 00:11:47

That that will be good. So Like, that was a good win. They're real. Yeah. They're they're super real.

Sean

00:11:48 – 00:12:10

I think, you know, I don't know how much because it feels like we're not you you're, like, kind of spinning your wheels over there. There's nothing for you to work on. Mhmm. That made me realize, though, like, these things that we just did, like, okay, we just figured out the date time picker problem and all the complications that come with that. And you just talked about optimizing your queries.

Sean

00:12:11 – 00:12:14

Mhmm. Those are pretty decent, like, technical blog posts.

Aaron

00:12:14 – 00:12:15

Yeah. True.

Sean

00:12:16 – 00:12:18

Which I think would be, you know

Aaron

00:12:18 – 00:12:19

That would be beneficial for us.

Sean

00:12:19 – 00:12:30

Like, hey, are you working on this type of, you know, query builder thing? Like, are you just, like, writing queries, accepting user input with dates, or, like, etcetera? Like, here's

Aaron

00:12:30 – 00:12:31

how you That's a great point.

Sean

00:12:32 – 00:12:41

And that's also good, like, just SEO stuff now. Like, so we get the content on the site now. And even if it's not, like, a big hit in the, you know, newsletter world or whatever

Aaron

00:12:41 – 00:12:42

Percolates. Yeah.

Sean

00:12:42 – 00:12:51

It would still be useful still be useful as, like, a document that we could link off to as a writing marketing copy? Like, did you ever think about, like, these problems that you're at that you'll have?

Aaron

00:12:51 – 00:12:53

Like That's a fantastic point.

Sean

00:12:53 – 00:12:56

Look. Here's how we solved it. You know, stuff like that.

Aaron

00:12:56 – 00:13:15

Yeah. Because I could I mean, that's a great idea because I could go through the 3 or 4 wrong implementations of dates that I that I actually went through and coded and committed and then had to undo. Yeah. That's a fantastic point. And that would be fun.

Aaron

00:13:15 – 00:13:24

That would be fun, like, for me to work on. And we could I would need to get some kind of hammerstone blog set up, but that would be extremely easy.

Sean

00:13:25 – 00:13:35

Yeah. So, like, it won't be like a I doubt very much that that's the kind of content that'll be a big splash. Probably pretty muted response, but so worth it, I think. Like, as,

Aaron

00:13:35 – 00:13:36

you know,

Sean

00:13:36 – 00:13:41

Josh and our group talks about it, it's like an asset. Like, it would be useful for many, many things.

Aaron

00:13:41 – 00:13:52

Yeah. I think I could probably write 2,000 words on date pickers and JavaScript and query builders, and that's gonna be laden with the right keywords that we're looking for.

Sean

00:13:52 – 00:13:53

Bingo. Exactly.

Aaron

00:13:54 – 00:14:01

And it's, you know, at some point, it's a social proof of like, oh, shit. These guys have thought about this more than I have.

Sean

00:14:01 – 00:14:15

Exactly. Exactly. So then we get it out there that, like, the query builder thing is coming. I think we could link to our oh, by the way, we could have a link on the homepage to our docs that the docs are so complete, and I think they're worth looking at. You know?

Aaron

00:14:15 – 00:14:16

Yeah. We do.

Sean

00:14:17 – 00:14:22

And we gotta have, like, email box to be like, yeah. Let us know when it's done.

Aaron

00:14:22 – 00:14:24

Yeah. Let me write some of this down.

Sean

00:14:24 – 00:14:37

And then you could start doing that kind of stuff of, like I think it's I think it's probably, like, time now to start doing that because we'll be done. You know? I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Aaron

00:14:37 – 00:14:53

Yeah. I think that's right. So we do for the edification of the listener, we do have a ton of docs. We just don't link to them. They're like, you have to know the URL at this point because there's no product you can get.

Aaron

00:14:53 – 00:15:11

But, yeah, I think it's probably time. Link to refine docs and add email capture, add blog post about JavaScript dates as it relates to communicating with the back end. Okay. Cool.

Sean

00:15:12 – 00:15:15

When I clicked on the to purchase the package link?

Aaron

00:15:16 – 00:15:21

I don't think it goes anywhere. Hammerstonehq.com/login. Okay. Okay.

Sean

00:15:21 – 00:15:22

It doesn't go anywhere. Got it.

Aaron

00:15:24 – 00:15:42

For the reasons we don't link to the docs because you can't buy it yet. Purchase link. It's. Also, the OG tags are all wrong. I need to update those as well.

Aaron

00:15:43 – 00:15:59

Lots of fun things to do. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Great great idea on the, kind of sharing some of the I guess, how the sausage is made because that's gonna prove that we're experts.

Aaron

00:16:01 – 00:16:03

Okay. What else?

Sean

00:16:07 – 00:16:11

Oh, yeah. Sorry. I also got distracted again by all stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean

00:16:11 – 00:16:28

I think, yeah, that's that's my whole week. Trying to, like, keep my keep my brain focused on one thing and then Yeah. 5 text messages in, like, 5 seconds and, like, emails from lawyers. So Yeah. Yeah.

Sean

00:16:28 – 00:16:28

No. I think we're good.

Aaron

00:16:28 – 00:16:29

I remember that.

Sean

00:16:30 – 00:16:43

I think we're good. I feel so good about this. I am incredibly impatient about how long it is like, I want to have a have it be a product and move on to that phase of my life. You know?

Aaron

00:16:44 – 00:16:51

You. Okay. Well, I have a couple of things real quick. I'm gonna focus here. A couple of things.

Aaron

00:16:53 – 00:17:42

The Torchlight, highlighting API, I have got it all set up so you could log in and buy access to the API right now. So I finished that right now, and or I finished that, I'm sorry, last night. And, I've got it running on my own personal blogs. My own personal blog is reading it's like sending it off to be highlighted and getting it back and using tokens and validation and recording stats and everything. So I will probably be trying to onboard a few early customers to either try it out or hopefully hopefully pay to try it out here in the next week or so.

Aaron

00:17:42 – 00:17:45

So Nice. Yeah. That's ready to go.

Sean

00:17:47 – 00:17:48

And then, yeah, we will launch.

Aaron

00:17:49 – 00:18:07

Yeah. Andrew wants to use it for bullet train docks. I have a reference, the they're using common marker to transform their markdown to HTML. I have a reference, common marker extension. Obviously, it's all Ruby.

Aaron

00:18:07 – 00:18:20

I would need someone to port it to port, like, the or to create a torchlight extension for common marker. How do you feel about me finding someone to do that? So I understand. Andrew onboarded? Okay.

Aaron

00:18:22 – 00:18:30

Okay. I'll do that. I'll reach out to people in our Slack first. It should be I mean, it should be, like, a 3 hour project, but I'll find somebody, and I'll get it done.

Sean

00:18:30 – 00:18:31

Check check with, Barry.

Aaron

00:18:32 – 00:18:42

Oh, smart. Okay. I'll do that. Alright. That is I think that is probably all I've got.

Aaron

00:18:42 – 00:19:00

I will start working on that, and I will start I'll start writing that blog post. Also, there's some really cool stuff I've done on the Torchlight API so that we're not hosting an API. It's it's on Vercel and, like, it's great. We don't have to worry about infrastructure ever. So that's nice.

Aaron

00:19:00 – 00:19:04

Cool. And there's some cool stuff I can write about there. So I'll add that.

Sean

00:19:05 – 00:19:20

And then you should have, I so I was intending to, like, take a crack at the home page, the landing page, and I have no time. Yeah. I still have no time. But I was thinking hit up the hit up the Slack group Smart. Through an iteration of that.

Aaron

00:19:20 – 00:19:21

Talk

Sean

00:19:21 – 00:19:23

to them about, like, doing a launch and what you could do.

Aaron

00:19:23 – 00:19:24

Okay. That's

Sean

00:19:24 – 00:19:26

what I would that's what I would do for sure.

Aaron

00:19:26 – 00:19:36

Okay. I will add that. Talk to Slack group about. Like okay. Cool.

Aaron

00:19:37 – 00:19:38

Yeah. Are you

Sean

00:19:38 – 00:19:40

aware of the marketing power hour?

Aaron

00:19:41 – 00:19:46

I am aware of the marketing power hour. I've never joined the marketing power hour. Have you?

Sean

00:19:47 – 00:19:52

Well, no. Because that I don't even have 1 hour to devote to that in the moment.

Aaron

00:19:52 – 00:19:57

Much less a hour hour. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Aaron

00:20:00 – 00:20:12

Other than that, my wife is at 33 weeks, which is a lot. We bought her a mom car, so we've got a car big enough to hold babies now.

Sean

00:20:13 – 00:20:16

And But I thought you had a gigantic truck already.

Aaron

00:20:16 – 00:20:24

I have a 4 runner. So I have an SUV, but she had a small It's right. Just like sedan.

Sean

00:20:24 – 00:20:26

You have to have 2 cars.

Aaron

00:20:26 – 00:20:42

Have to have 2 cars, and the her car has to be big enough to hold the stroller as well, which her her car was not. So now we have 2 cars that can hold a stroller, bunch of bunch of car seats. Yeah. We're ready to go.

Sean

00:20:45 – 00:20:46

Nice.

Aaron

00:20:47 – 00:20:48

Alright. That it?

Sean

00:20:49 – 00:20:50

I think that's it.

Aaron

00:20:50 – 00:20:51

Alright. Let's call it.

Rough Week, Good Friday

Transcript

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