Aaron Francis

Ian and Aaron discuss Aaron's viral tweet, more problems with HVAC, accountability for your own time, and so much more. Sponsored by: - Bento https://bentonow.com/ - Stream https://getstream.io/chat/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=&utm_campaign=mostlytechnical - Laravel Cloud https://cloud.laravel.com/ - PHP Tek 2025 https://phptek.io/ Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical? Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more. 00:00 Video Game Historian 13:52 Do Up A Prototype 19:29 A Little Business Dad 29:28 Will AI Destroy SaaS? 39:15 Follow Up & Feedback 44:40 New York Muscle 01:04:00 Talking vs. Doing

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Transcript

Ian

00:00:00 – 00:00:01

Hello?

Aaron

00:00:02 – 00:00:10

Hello, Ian. How does it feel to be talking to famousx.com user and video game historian, Aaron d Francis? How's it feel?

Ian

00:00:11 – 00:00:17

Man, I can't believe I get to be in your presence every week. Every week. I I know someone.

Aaron

00:00:17 – 00:00:21

Have any questions, feel free. I'm very famous now.

Ian

00:00:21 – 00:00:30

I am one degree away from Elon Musk. How mad are you about that? It's crazy. No way. See, this is the thing.

Ian

00:00:30 – 00:00:38

It's just like with Trump and everybody else. Everybody doesn't like these people until you're in the circle and they can do stuff for you.

Aaron

00:00:38 – 00:00:39

That's right.

Ian

00:00:39 – 00:00:42

Right? I love Elon now. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a big fan.

Aaron

00:00:42 – 00:00:43

Big fan.

Ian

00:00:43 – 00:00:54

Big fan. You know what the government needs? They need a lot of help spots. They need help spots in every depart every department of the government got email. That's actually true, which is what makes it so

Aaron

00:00:55 – 00:00:58

What is so easy to get Ian. It was

Ian

00:00:58 – 00:01:04

so easy. Ian. All I need is what? A $50,000,000 contract with the government with nice and cheap And

Aaron

00:01:04 – 00:01:05

you'll never tweet again.

Ian

00:01:05 – 00:01:14

Come on. Zendesk's not gonna do it for 50,000,000. HelpSpot will do it for 50,000,000 here to save the taxpayer tons of money. Get me in there, Aaron. Get me in there.

Aaron

00:01:14 – 00:01:17

Everybody has their price. Ian's fifty million.

Ian

00:01:17 – 00:01:18

Doge me, baby.

Aaron

00:01:19 – 00:01:22

Oh, man. Wild week, How about that?

Ian

00:01:22 – 00:01:23

Maybe you should tell the people

Aaron

00:01:23 – 00:01:38

what happened. Let's tell the people. So last week, I tweeted a screenshot of red alert two, and it was very good tweet. Said the world you're born in no longer exists. Like, oh, devastating hits people right in the nostalgia.

Aaron

00:01:38 – 00:01:47

Great tweet. So that tweet went crazy. Got, at the time, up to a million impressions. Wow. It goes it goes further.

Aaron

00:01:47 – 00:02:01

But at the time, that tweet on its own on its own legs, a million impressions. Yeah. The next day and I don't wanna say I caused this, but it is good for the brand if if I actually did cause it because that's pretty powerful. But so we'll just pretend because we're here. It's our show.

Aaron

00:02:02 – 00:02:24

Okay. So the next day, I caused, Electronic Arts to open source the old source code for a bunch of Command and Conquer games, including, something very adjacent to the one I tweeted, but not actually Red Alert two. There's rumors that that source code is lost. Who knows? But so the next day, they open source, all the command and conquer source code.

Aaron

00:02:24 – 00:02:35

Huge, huge deal. Everyone's like, woah, this is crazy. This is c plus plus from the nineties. Like, electronic arts would never do something like this. This is so wild.

Aaron

00:02:35 – 00:02:55

And so then I quote tweeted my my tweet from the day before and said something like, you know, electronic arts just open sourced a bunch of the old source code. Who's gonna make a modern remake? And that was just kind of a quote tweet of the one before that. That tweet got a million impressions also. So the original one is up to 2,000,000.

Aaron

00:02:55 – 00:03:14

This one gets a million. No. And I don't know why I don't know why. Maybe it was just, like, in the zeitgeist, but this one got a lot more attention from, famous people, including one, Elon Musk, who replied to my tweet and said, cool. I played that.

Ian

00:03:15 – 00:03:16

That's crazy.

Aaron

00:03:16 – 00:03:24

It's great content. Sure, Elon. But the you know? The fact that he replied to my tweet and, you know, the very first thing I did when I saw that he had replied

Ian

00:03:24 – 00:03:24

Oh, boy.

Aaron

00:03:25 – 00:03:51

Is I went and I unmuted him because I didn't know if I was gonna I I've been like, you know, I have my very strict mute and, mute list and filter list of words and everything, and so I don't ever see anything from him, which is how I like to live. Somebody replied to, my tweet, and I saw that Elon was tagged. And I was like, this is weird. Who tagged Elon? Like, why did somebody tag Elon in this?

Aaron

00:03:51 – 00:04:03

This makes no sense at all. And I clicked through, and the tweet above that was, this is from an account you've muted. And I was like, no way. And I clicked view, and there it was.

Ian

00:04:03 – 00:04:04

Oh. And I

Aaron

00:04:04 – 00:04:13

clicked through, and I was like, surely, this is a parody account. Clicked through, and it was like, Elon Musk, two hundred fifty million followers. Right. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Aaron

00:04:13 – 00:04:33

And what I didn't want was to catch, you know, catch his ire because surely he's got some sort of, like, god view of, like, grievances or something. And I didn't want him to see, like, hey. This user that you just replied to, they have that that special badge that you asked for that shows when they've muted you, which I don't know if that's real or not, but I wouldn't put it past it.

Ian

00:04:33 – 00:04:34

I can see that. Yeah.

Aaron

00:04:34 – 00:04:39

And I was like, this is like, Twitter's kind of a big part of my livelihood. So let's go unmute the big boss just

Ian

00:04:39 – 00:04:39

for a

Aaron

00:04:39 – 00:04:46

second while I'm on his radar, and then we can get back to regularly scheduled programming. So that was that was the big one.

Ian

00:04:46 – 00:04:50

You were you were inches away from not even knowing he tweeted at you. That's a

Aaron

00:04:50 – 00:04:53

Inches inches away. Because I

Ian

00:04:53 – 00:04:54

had actually

Aaron

00:04:54 – 00:05:04

muted the thread. Like, I had muted the tweet itself. And, of course, I have him muted. And so I had just, like, clicked in to see kind of the activity of it Yeah. Just like on a lark.

Aaron

00:05:04 – 00:05:10

And I saw that, and I was like, oh, man. And so, yeah, I was I was freaking out.

Ian

00:05:10 – 00:05:15

So that's crazy. Elon, there you go. The Internet's a crazy place. It's a small world.

Aaron

00:05:15 – 00:05:21

Crazy place. Small, small world. Yeah. So now let's see. I you know, like I said, I have muted it, so I haven't kept up with it.

Ian

00:05:21 – 00:05:30

It's kinda funny because it's not his reply is even kind of related to your tweet, but it's really related to your in inner tweet, I guess, more so. Right? Like

Aaron

00:05:30 – 00:05:37

Yes. But And I think that's what helped the second tweet do so well was Yeah. It still had the power of, like, the nostalgia of that first tweet.

Ian

00:05:37 – 00:05:40

A lot of crazies? Any crazies show up?

Aaron

00:05:40 – 00:05:59

I got a I got a few because I said, who's gonna be the first to do a modern remake? Can AI do it? Then I got a few game developers that were just, like, seething mad that I suggested that AI might help them develop a game. Like, guys, this thing is helpful. Like, let's use what's helpful.

Aaron

00:05:59 – 00:06:07

So 948,000 on the quote tweet and 2,000,000 on the original tweet. That's my highest performing tweet ever,

Ian

00:06:07 – 00:06:10

for sure. Yeah. I want to have a conversation with you about this.

Aaron

00:06:10 – 00:06:11

Okay. So

Ian

00:06:11 – 00:06:23

let's just we're gonna take a tangent off this. I feel like, though, like, even your own follower count. Right? Yep. Like, I think when we started the podcast, you had, like, 42,000 or 40,000 or something like that.

Aaron

00:06:23 – 00:06:23

I don't know.

Ian

00:06:23 – 00:06:28

It was in that range. Right? And now what are you at? Like, 47 or 48 or

Aaron

00:06:28 – 00:06:31

something like that range. 48. Almost 48.

Ian

00:06:31 – 00:06:44

Okay. I still don't you feel like the power of the, like, big tweet is kinda gone. Like, it still gives you the juice, not you, to everybody. Right? Like, you you get the juice of, like, oh, it's a million views or 2,000,000 views or whatever.

Ian

00:06:44 – 00:06:48

But I don't know. I don't feel like it translates into followers. So

Aaron

00:06:50 – 00:06:59

I don't know if I agree with that. So the past week, I've probably gotten I've probably gotten seven or 800 followers.

Ian

00:06:59 – 00:07:04

Okay. In the past week tweet from Elon. Like, literally, Elon tweeted at you.

Aaron

00:07:04 – 00:07:04

So a few things. You

Ian

00:07:04 – 00:07:05

know what I'm saying?

Aaron

00:07:05 – 00:07:24

Yeah. A few things. It's very the the tweets that go so I've had, I think, two tweets go over a million. 1 was a little joke about getting laid off and how much COBRA, the health insurance continuation program, how much that costs. That one did over a million, and then this red alert one did, too.

Aaron

00:07:24 – 00:07:50

And they're not, like, they're not related to what I tweet about or what I do every day. Right. You know? And so so from that point of view, there's a very tenuous connection between viral tweet and followers because somebody that sees a red alert to tweet then kinda has to click through and be like, oh, this guy is also in tech. Like, I'm in tech, and that's already you know, you've lost, you know, 95% of the people.

Aaron

00:07:50 – 00:08:09

Sure. And then they have to say, like, yeah. I wanna follow this guy. So I think, you know, going viral for content that is, like, poppy and not, like, related to your main stick is probably not extremely helpful, but it's still helpful. I still, you know, almost probably got a thousand followers that week, which is Mhmm.

Aaron

00:08:09 – 00:08:25

Still a lot to me. Yeah. The other thing is I think it can be incredibly valuable, maybe on a on a smaller scale. So I have a friend who replied to one of Bill Ackman's tweets. You know, the the investor what I don't know what he does.

Aaron

00:08:25 – 00:08:36

Investor guy. So Bill Ackman, you know, tweeted this kinda, like, pseudo conspiracy theory about, like, hey. This Blackhawk ran into this airplane. Doesn't this look planned? Can anyone describe this to me?

Aaron

00:08:36 – 00:08:40

Like, classic billionaire bait. Like, well, I don't know. Many people are saying.

Ian

00:08:40 – 00:08:41

Sure. Like, come

Aaron

00:08:41 – 00:08:47

on, dummy. And my friend, is an actual former Blackhawk, you know, pilot.

Ian

00:08:47 – 00:08:48

Pilot. So

Aaron

00:08:48 – 00:09:05

he's he's flew combat missions and is now out, and he, like, knows actually what's going on. Right. And so he replied to Bill Ackman and was like, sure. Like, former Blackhawk pilot here. I can describe, like, the situation and wrote, you know, like, a thousand words of very nuanced and considered stuff.

Aaron

00:09:05 – 00:09:11

And that tweet got as a reply to Bill Ackman, got, like, 6,000,000 impressions.

Ian

00:09:11 – 00:09:12

Oh.

Aaron

00:09:12 – 00:09:25

And he went from, like, a thousand to, like, five or 6,000 followers. And so whether those are valuable or not or they're just, like, you know, I, you know, I like this guy's take on Blackhawk helicopter. Who knows? Right. Still still pretty good.

Aaron

00:09:26 – 00:09:31

And then we got you got me on a hot topic. I got another one. On the other side, here's on the other side.

Ian

00:09:31 – 00:09:31

Okay.

Aaron

00:09:32 – 00:09:51

There's a guy named Isaac French who lives here in Texas. I'm friends with his brother, but his, he, Isaac, has blown up on Twitter recently. And he's doing the old school, like, thread style, but it's not like, hey. I read a Wikipedia article. Let me tell you 10 things you didn't know about Churchill.

Aaron

00:09:52 – 00:10:08

And he's also not like, hey. 10 chat GPT extensions. He is in the short term rental space, and he is basically highlighting, interesting and unique short term rentals where it's like, hey. We bought an old railroad car and turned it into an Airbnb. Mhmm.

Aaron

00:10:09 – 00:10:19

But he will, like, go on-site, take pictures, talk to the people, and he does these big threads. And he'll some of these threads will do, like, five or 10,000,000 views, and he'll get

Ian

00:10:20 – 00:10:20

and

Aaron

00:10:20 – 00:10:37

it's very relevant to his audience. And so he'll get, you know, 5,000 followers from a thread or something like that. So it's still doable. I think it's still random. And in my case, the content and the audience just doesn't really match my audience terribly much, but still worth it.

Aaron

00:10:38 – 00:10:40

That's the issue. Bargain for, Ian?

Ian

00:10:40 – 00:10:45

There we go. There we go. Well, that last guy, he's he's going extra mile. Right? Like, he really

Aaron

00:10:45 – 00:10:46

He's doing it right.

Ian

00:10:46 – 00:10:56

The work. Right? Like, he's like, I'm out there, and I'm taking a photo. You haven't seen this photo because I didn't grab this photo off Wikipedia and throw it on here. Like, I'm creating original works, and then I'm, you know Yes.

Ian

00:10:56 – 00:11:02

Exactly. Doing it all right then. So that's that's interesting. Yeah. I don't know.

Ian

00:11:02 – 00:11:09

I mean, I guess it all could also be, like, algorithmic play. Like, does it help you Mhmm. When you you know, who knows how the algorithm works. Right? Okay.

Ian

00:11:09 – 00:11:09

Yeah. So

Aaron

00:11:09 – 00:11:16

When you have a when you have a breakout hit, you get a little you get a little bonus on your next ones. I have 100% felt it. Yes.

Ian

00:11:16 – 00:11:19

Yeah. Yeah. So maybe you gotta leverage that here.

Aaron

00:11:19 – 00:11:38

I do. So, like, when it comes to oh, that one's already gone. But when it comes to, like, when it comes to launches, like, we're preparing a a, you know, a big course launch or something, I'm very careful in, like, the days leading up to it, like, what I'm tweeting. I love all this voodoo. It's like all of the, like,

Ian

00:11:38 – 00:11:42

oral oral history. Yeah. And it's down generation to generation.

Aaron

00:11:42 – 00:11:43

That's right.

Ian

00:11:43 – 00:11:43

And you gotta

Aaron

00:11:43 – 00:12:06

put peanut butter on the bottom of your feet before you tweet just to make sure. You know? So it's, like, especially on the day of, a launch, radio silence until I put out my launch tweet. Like, no replies, no, main timeline tweets. And then once I put out my launch tweet, radio silence on main tweets until I've let that one run.

Aaron

00:12:06 – 00:12:18

I will reply to people. But I see people that, like, do a big launch tweet and then immediately turn around, and they're, like, tweeting about their sandwich. And I'm like Right. What are you doing? Like, give the good one some time to breathe.

Aaron

00:12:18 – 00:12:21

So Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of voodoo there.

Ian

00:12:21 – 00:12:26

Interesting. Alright. Alright. Well, so you Elon tweeted at you. That was wild.

Aaron

00:12:28 – 00:12:35

Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit. Quote tweeted it. Husband to famous Serena Williams. That's probably what he's best known for.

Ian

00:12:36 – 00:12:39

I like Alex Ohanian way more than I like Reddit.

Aaron

00:12:40 – 00:12:41

Yeah. He seems like a really good

Ian

00:12:41 – 00:12:44

He seems like a good guy. Guy. Kind of. He seems like

Aaron

00:12:44 – 00:12:46

a totally normal guy, though.

Ian

00:12:46 – 00:12:48

Yeah. Yeah. I'm good with him.

Aaron

00:12:48 – 00:12:57

I saw him tweet something the other day about, like, you know, breaking taboos about dads and tech or something. And I was like, hey. Cool. Great. Good for you, man.

Aaron

00:12:57 – 00:13:08

That's awesome. He'd be like a normal guy. And then anytime you see him in the stands at one of Serena Williams' matches, he's always just, like, beaming and, like, just wearing a shirt that's, like, I love Serena or something like that.

Ian

00:13:08 – 00:13:08

And I'm

Aaron

00:13:08 – 00:13:21

like, that's the kinda energy I'm here for. Yeah. So he seems great. And then another person that I, have muted, I'm a fan of this person, but I've definitely muted them on Twitter, is Sean Curry, the My First Million cohost.

Ian

00:13:22 – 00:13:22

Okay. I don't

Aaron

00:13:23 – 00:13:31

I I like him. No. I like I listen to all of their podcasts, but I just he's just an I just can't stand his Twitter. It's, like, very over the phone. It's very optimized.

Aaron

00:13:31 – 00:13:45

Yeah. It's very, like, 10 things you didn't know about Warren Buffett's annual letters, and I'm like, I don't care about that. But he responded and said something. I don't know what he said, but it was another one I almost missed because I have him muted. So gotta be careful with these mutes, man.

Aaron

00:13:45 – 00:13:49

Yeah. Sheesh. Can't mute can't mute the wrong people.

Ian

00:13:49 – 00:13:58

I think you need to do the sequel to red alert. We got the code. So red alert one is in the code dump. Yep. We have red alert one.

Ian

00:13:59 – 00:14:08

We have AI. Right? You get in there and do us up a a prototype version three red alert. Okay.

Aaron

00:14:09 – 00:14:17

I I feel like I just had, like, an aneurysm. Did you tell me to do something else? Like, to to go far and do something crazy?

Ian

00:14:17 – 00:14:19

I need you in there with Elon. I need you Are you being you

Aaron

00:14:19 – 00:14:24

Are you being a free yes, man? I didn't even come up with the idea, and you're telling me to do it?

Ian

00:14:25 – 00:14:35

Listen. I want I want us doing a podcast from Elon's private jet. We were like, listen. This is we're working on Grok with you, me, and Grok are on doing red alert three. I don't

Aaron

00:14:35 – 00:14:39

wanna be on any billionaire's private jet. We can meet them in a public place. But yeah. Yeah. But that's

Ian

00:14:39 – 00:14:44

that's fine. We can we can watch them make child 15 and 16 along the way. I don't

Aaron

00:14:44 – 00:14:45

wanna I don't want any part

Ian

00:14:45 – 00:14:46

of that.

Aaron

00:14:46 – 00:14:52

This Elon flip is amazing to me. We got you we won you over on DHH because he's so

Ian

00:14:52 – 00:14:55

reasonable now. Again. Not DHH. It's back on the

Aaron

00:14:55 – 00:15:05

bottom. So reasonable. And now you're, like, a big Elon fan. You, like, surpassed me. I live in this comfortable middle place where I have neither friends nor enemies with billionaires, and you're

Ian

00:15:05 – 00:15:05

you're just

Aaron

00:15:05 – 00:15:08

flip flopping. So fun. You're all over the place.

Ian

00:15:08 – 00:15:10

No. I still don't like Elon. Don't get it. Don't get it twisted. I still

Aaron

00:15:10 – 00:15:13

I'm not gonna rebuild. I'm not gonna

Ian

00:15:13 – 00:15:14

rebuild. No.

Aaron

00:15:14 – 00:15:35

I don't have Okay. So if I if I was I think we might have talked about this at one point. When I get super rich, what am I gonna do? That's the kind of thing that I would do. I would a % dedicate six working months or a year of working days to, rebuilding red alert on stream just because it is fun.

Aaron

00:15:35 – 00:15:36

And I can't justify that.

Ian

00:15:37 – 00:15:41

That's we gotta justify it right now. Okay. Alright. So we red alert three. Right?

Ian

00:15:41 – 00:15:50

That's a humongous undertaking. Mhmm. Red alert one code is probably not that particularly useful to it, really, in the end. Right? But here's what we do.

Ian

00:15:50 – 00:15:52

We take the red alert one code. Right?

Aaron

00:15:52 – 00:15:54

Delete them is killing me.

Ian

00:15:54 – 00:15:54

Right.

Aaron

00:15:54 – 00:15:56

There's this has gotta be going somewhere good.

Ian

00:15:56 – 00:16:11

This is gonna be great. But it's it's a, like, a web development ecosystem game. Okay? Mhmm. And so you're you reskin with some some logic changes,

Aaron

00:16:11 – 00:16:11

but,

Ian

00:16:11 – 00:16:22

like, the JavaScript people are building their fortresses over there. Right? We're building our Laravel Fortress. Like, the top tier thing is a Taylor Otwell, right, that you could send over and destroy the other fortresses. Right?

Ian

00:16:22 – 00:16:39

You could, like, create your Laravel news zone and, like, send out this information to the other groups to win them over. You collect the resources via your tweets, and you you could run a conference. Right? Like, that kind of thing. So it's But instead of

Aaron

00:16:39 – 00:16:45

instead of remaking a game for which the source code is available, I'm I'm just making a brand new game.

Ian

00:16:45 – 00:16:54

No. If you use that source code, right, but you reskin it, and, obviously, there'll be some logic tweaks. But you can use most of the source code because we don't care we don't need better, like, blasting.

Aaron

00:16:55 – 00:16:55

Like Yeah.

Ian

00:16:56 – 00:16:57

The the skin is the thing.

Aaron

00:16:57 – 00:16:59

The novel the novelty is the

Ian

00:16:59 – 00:17:07

the kind of worst action. I wanna I wanna drop in an Adam Wathan who could be a wild card. Right? Because he can go in any camp. That's, like, the best thing.

Ian

00:17:07 – 00:17:13

Right? He's a free agent. Whoever gets the first Wathan, they just show up. Right? Somebody gets to develop the Wathan first.

Ian

00:17:13 – 00:17:16

So, like, that kind of thing. That'd be cool.

Aaron

00:17:16 – 00:17:17

And you can just scream in

Ian

00:17:17 – 00:17:17

that. Right?

Aaron

00:17:17 – 00:17:18

That'd be cool.

Ian

00:17:18 – 00:17:19

That ties in.

Aaron

00:17:20 – 00:17:23

Yeah. You haven't yet mentioned how to make money off of that because Why do

Ian

00:17:23 – 00:17:25

you care about that? You don't care about that.

Aaron

00:17:25 – 00:17:34

I never care about that. That's why you're the smartest kid. Steve is listening. Steve cares about that. But here's here's the thing.

Aaron

00:17:34 – 00:17:37

I don't I've never done game development in my life except You

Ian

00:17:37 – 00:17:38

never did terminal development in your life.

Aaron

00:17:38 – 00:17:44

That's true. I did create snake in Microsoft Excel when I was working at the accounting firm.

Ian

00:17:44 – 00:17:46

So you did already do a game

Aaron

00:17:46 – 00:17:53

actually in the cells with the key controls, and it would fly around the cells eating apples. Crazy. It was fun. Yeah. It was a lot of fun.

Ian

00:17:53 – 00:17:54

Oh, before AI too. So you actually, like

Aaron

00:17:54 – 00:18:02

Oh, yeah. No. I actually, yeah, I actually had to the VBA. I had to open, like, workbook.xlsm or whatever it was. Yeah.

Aaron

00:18:02 – 00:18:06

So, yeah, I'm not doing that. I'm not remaking the game. I know. I'm sorry.

Ian

00:18:07 – 00:18:08

I know.

Aaron

00:18:08 – 00:18:16

It'd be fun. I would love that, and I would love for someone to do it. Everybody's like, open RA already exists. And I'm like, yeah. I want red alert two, though.

Aaron

00:18:16 – 00:18:17

Red alert two.

Ian

00:18:18 – 00:18:25

The red alert people I played red alert. I wasn't, like, a super red alert guy, but the red alert two people are very into, like, this Yes.

Aaron

00:18:26 – 00:18:26

Thing. It was like

Ian

00:18:26 – 00:18:28

two is the pinnacle or something.

Aaron

00:18:28 – 00:18:48

It's it's like how it's like how some millennials still have, like, Harry Potter stickers on their cars or something. Like, my other car is a Nimbus 2,000, and I'm like, that's that's kind of embarrassing, my friend. That's how that's kinda how I feel about Red Alert two. It's like, there's a deep part of me that still feels like I'm a kid, and I could go play Red Alert two right now. Right.

Aaron

00:18:48 – 00:18:51

So that's my millennial cringe instead of,

Ian

00:18:51 – 00:18:51

like,

Aaron

00:18:52 – 00:18:57

Deathly Hallows stickers on my car. I think it was, like, February.

Ian

00:18:57 – 00:18:57

'1? It

Aaron

00:18:57 – 00:19:00

was February even? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's about right.

Ian

00:19:00 – 00:19:04

So that's why. That's like, I just got out of college. I was busy doing other stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

00:19:04 – 00:19:08

And I was 11. Too. Yeah. You were not yeah. You're in the sweet spot there.

Aaron

00:19:08 – 00:19:14

It was perfect. Yeah. I was 11. My brother was 13. It was I think that I don't think I had the original Red Alert.

Aaron

00:19:14 – 00:19:21

I think Red Alert two was my entry point into the Command and Conquer franchise, and it was just, oh, glory days.

Ian

00:19:21 – 00:19:25

Good old days. Alright. Well, you're Twitter famous now.

Aaron

00:19:25 – 00:19:27

I'm Twitter famous. Alright. Cool. Feels good. Alright.

Aaron

00:19:27 – 00:19:49

We've got a we've got a a good tweet here from from Jesse Hanley. I wanna get a business dad take on. So let's do let's do a little business dad. But before that, this podcast is brought to you by one Jesse Hanley of Bento. Bento now dot com is marketing automation and, email platform, and we use that at TryHard Studios.

Aaron

00:19:49 – 00:20:13

So if you need an email platform, check out Bentonow.com. Thanks to Bento for sponsoring and brought to you by PHP Tech twenty twenty five. PHP Tech is the conference for continuing education and community building for PHP developers. It is May in Chicago, so check out PHPTech.io. Alright.

Aaron

00:20:13 – 00:20:19

Business dad tweet. Did you see this tweet when it came out? I will I'll read it for the audience, but did you see it when it came out?

Ian

00:20:19 – 00:20:22

I I know what I thought right the moment it came out, but I did see it. Yes.

Aaron

00:20:22 – 00:20:38

Okay. So Jesse, friend of the show, tweeted something about, it's so fun to listen to mostly technical ads because, by the way, Jesse didn't give us anything to say. So if you're gonna buy ads on the show, give us something to say. But Jesse's like, ah, say whatever you want. It's a risky business.

Aaron

00:20:38 – 00:21:00

And somebody responded and said, I'm curious. Do you get good traffic from that? And Jesse, being the minch that he is, did a whole tweet and gave a great great, lesson on marketing, and I wanted business dad's take on it. So here's what Jesse says. Very hard to find SaaS growth, especially in my category thinking of advertising like this, good sources versus bad sources.

Aaron

00:21:01 – 00:21:24

So his category is obviously email. Engineers engineers rarely buy ad spots because everything needs to be trackable and have a positive ROI. Unfortunately, it takes a large amount of consistent propaganda in the form of tweets, ads, interviews, involvement, etcetera, compounds over twelve to eighteen months. People need to be reminded that Bento exists. So when the day comes, they think about us over the competitors.

Aaron

00:21:25 – 00:21:51

It's the aggregate of all this activity that creates growth growth. Just buying an ad spot on a podcast will likely do nothing unless it's our podcast. It needs a lot of additional support to, get it to convert and be beneficial. TLDR, know your audience, figure out ways to remind them of your existence, and price in a way that only one or two conversions over a long time period to make it all work out for your business. So my TLDR is, it's hard to track things.

Aaron

00:21:51 – 00:21:56

Jesse wants to be top of mind. What was your what was your business dad takeaway on that?

Ian

00:21:56 – 00:22:15

I think it's right. I mean, basically, just talk about brand advertising, right, which is, like, what you see all over the place with bigcom like, there's Coke ads everywhere. Not because, like, when you see the Coke ad, you're going to go buy a Coke at that moment. But it's because when you're in the grocery store and you on that aisle and it's Pepsi and the Coke, you've seen 4,000 Coke ads. Right?

Ian

00:22:15 – 00:22:18

You're like, oh, Coke. Yeah. That's what I drink. And you just get the Coke. Right.

Ian

00:22:18 – 00:22:42

So, but I think the thing his kinda point, right, too, is that, like, well, I think I don't know if he's he didn't say this exactly right, but I think to me, the idea is, like, as a bootstrapper sized company, oftentimes brand advertising isn't Mhmm. Considered very much because it's like, yeah, I can't advertise on the Super Bowl. I can't advertise in newspaper. Like, I don't have the budget to do brand advertising. Mhmm.

Ian

00:22:42 – 00:23:10

So I think kind of that interesting nugget that I take away from this, is the idea of like, even a small company can brand advertise. But you just have to be really dialed in on like who your market is and where they go hang out. Right. So like this podcast, right, like, he he's in the circles of people who listen to this podcast, like Laravel developers and, I assume maybe the rails world a bit too. I don't know.

Ian

00:23:10 – 00:23:12

Because I think he might be a rails app.

Aaron

00:23:12 – 00:23:18

Am I I'm pretty sure. Yeah. It's a rails app. He's a rails guy. Matt Swanson listens to the show.

Aaron

00:23:18 – 00:23:19

He's a rails developer, so

Ian

00:23:19 – 00:23:26

come on. We got rails people in the audience. Rails people. Right. So it's like that world, And it's like, how do you reach those people?

Ian

00:23:26 – 00:23:30

Like, okay. You can tweet. So he does that. Right? But then, like, how do you find other places?

Ian

00:23:30 – 00:23:50

And there's only so many other places where it really makes sense, and you have to find those. Because even if you get up to, like, the bigger podcast, like, they're gonna be too much money, and they're more general. Right? Like, if you just try to get on the general tech podcast, like, now you're hitting a whole bunch of you're gonna pay $5,000 for that for one spot. You're reaching, like, 98% of the audience doesn't even care about you.

Ian

00:23:50 – 00:24:05

Like, that that's gonna be really money losing. So in his case here, it's like he's hitting a large percentage of this audience is a potentially good customer for him at some point. So that's that's his point to this tweet. Right? It's like, they keep hearing about Bento.

Ian

00:24:05 – 00:24:11

They keep hearing about Bento. And eventually, when they need something like that, they remember Bento is the

Aaron

00:24:11 – 00:24:19

Well, how was what was your feeling on the, engineers love it love for things to be trackable, but you gotta get over that.

Ian

00:24:19 – 00:24:29

Yeah. I think you gotta get over that. I think here I think I mean, this is, like, the whole thing of the Internet. Like, in the last five years, it's, like, it's actually all kinda bullshit. Like, you kinda can't track things that well.

Ian

00:24:29 – 00:24:51

Now you could have, like, direct affiliate tracking and stuff like that. Although, even that isn't, like, a %. But this, like, in terms of advertising, like, everything's moving away from direct tracking. Like, once Apple killed, like, the, whatever tracking thing they changed with their iOS apps, everybody's gone away from tracking, and they're just they're, like, algorithmically estimating now. Yeah.

Ian

00:24:51 – 00:25:22

So, but part of it is also part of it is because Apple, but part of it is just because it never really worked that well, and people were missing a lot of value by pretending that they should only advertise places that they could track to the dollar, but then that wasn't actually that effective because there's so much other stuff you can't track very easily. And so people are trying to guess going back more to brand advertising and things like that. So, yeah, I definitely think trying to just only do things that are trackable is the fools, Aaron, for the most part. Again

Aaron

00:25:22 – 00:25:43

I think Google originally killed a lot of the trackability with their not provided thing. Like because didn't they at one point many, many years ago, yeah, change it to not provided? It it was, like, some privacy thing. And then Apple So it's ask app not to track. Is that what you're talking about where it's like you can basically hide yourself from the trackers on Apple?

Ian

00:25:44 – 00:25:57

Yeah. It's even it's even deeper than that. Like, you basically just can't even really track it all. Like, the Facebook used to be able to, like, just pay people to insert tracking code in all these apps and, like, just literally track everywhere. And now you can't even I think even with that They

Aaron

00:25:57 – 00:26:00

removed, like, access to the fingerprint. That's right.

Ian

00:26:00 – 00:26:13

Fingerprint stuff. So that's really the thing that killed that. And then the Google stuff, yeah, the earlier Google stuff was more like, that didn't didn't hurt it, but it's like, that hurt, like, SEO and stuff like that a fair amount because you couldn't now directly attribute

Aaron

00:26:14 – 00:26:15

what people searched for.

Ian

00:26:15 – 00:26:22

Things like that. Yeah. YouTube. You don't get that anymore. Now you get it in aggregate because you can go to, the web console Mhmm.

Ian

00:26:22 – 00:26:47

And see, like, in aggregate what terms are searching because Google collects it and gives you that. But then but you're still not then able to, like, connect it to, like, oh, this blog post I did over here led to access number. Like, like, yeah, between the referral mess ups and the keyword from the searches mess ups. That's kind of all shot. So, I mean, obviously, some so tractable, but I still think, yes.

Ian

00:26:47 – 00:27:01

Like, he's saying, I think branding can be important. I've never done a ton of brand stuff myself, I would say, with HubSpot. But, yeah. So I think he's I think he's got when you saw the devs, the upside of devs is they're on the Internet, and you can find them. Right?

Ian

00:27:01 – 00:27:05

Like, that's this is the the upside of that. There's downsides as long as the to devs.

Aaron

00:27:05 – 00:27:07

That may be the only upside of that.

Ian

00:27:07 – 00:27:25

One of the biggest upsides is that they are available. It's not that hard to figure out where they are, and you can be where they are Yep. Fairly easily. Whereas, like, when you're trying to find, like, in my case, like, you're trying to find the support man support manager at manufacturing company. Well, like, there's not the, like, such a clear cut.

Ian

00:27:26 – 00:27:29

Yeah. Yeah. They're on Facebook sort of, but they don't necessarily they're

Aaron

00:27:29 – 00:27:34

But only only to consume AI Slack. Is that the work thing. Yeah.

Ian

00:27:34 – 00:27:51

Right. So, like, when the devs have this nice overlap, like, yeah, I'm on Twitter to hang out, but I'm also on Twitter because that's where, like, I find out about new packages and new stuff that's released. And when Taylor does something cool and, like, whatever. Like, so I'm sort of there for work too. And so you could kinda leverage that pretty nice.

Ian

00:27:52 – 00:27:55

There are some cool tools out there now. Like, have you ever seen SparkToro?

Aaron

00:27:56 – 00:28:03

I have heard about SparkToro. Is that a a Rand Fishkin thing? Yeah. Rand Fishkin. That's the only reason I've heard about it.

Aaron

00:28:03 – 00:28:04

I've never used it.

Ian

00:28:04 – 00:28:25

Yeah. I I I played with it a little bit, but I didn't feel like I had anything to do with it. But it is kind of interesting because it's, like, basically, like, they've crawled every social media profile and whatever. So you can try to be like, hey. Who's who are all the, like, support engineers at manufacturing companies and bring them up and then see what podcast they listen to people in that

Aaron

00:28:25 – 00:28:34

group. Really? And maybe You use it to find where your avatar is hanging out, or you use it to find your avatar or, like, the people that are actually

Ian

00:28:34 – 00:28:48

Both. You could find the people, but then it's also like it's doing it's doing the cross referencing of, like, well, what do so all the people in this group, what who do they follow? Okay. They all interesting. A high percentage of them follow this podcast and Yeah.

Ian

00:28:48 – 00:29:07

Mention this TV show in tweets or whatever. It's kind of like a big data thing. So it is kind of interesting. I, like I've said, I think before, I'm kinda one of my goals this year is to be more marketing oriented. And so I do plan on giving it another look and seeing if it could be something interesting there to, dig out of it.

Ian

00:29:07 – 00:29:16

Yeah. Again, it's still tricky because you're gonna get obviously a lot of, like, oh, they all listen to the just take example from our world. Like, they're all listen to the all in podcast. Well, okay. That's great.

Ian

00:29:16 – 00:29:17

Well, yeah.

Aaron

00:29:17 – 00:29:20

So do millions of other people. I can't advertise. Yeah.

Ian

00:29:20 – 00:29:27

Right. I don't even know if they do it. I don't know if they even do advertising, but even if they do, it's gonna be very expensive. Like, it's not gonna be useful for a small software company. Okay.

Ian

00:29:27 – 00:29:31

Hot take from you since you're a AI guy. Got a little tangent there. Am

Aaron

00:29:31 – 00:29:31

I? Yeah.

Ian

00:29:31 – 00:29:58

You're the AI guy. What do you think about this idea? Cause I saw a few posts about this recently and I'm, I'm kind of really torn on it. The idea of like AI destroying SaaS and especially, I think, smaller SaaS, but but potentially even larger SaaS. Like, the idea, I guess, I'm not even sure I I totally get this, but I think the idea is that, like, you'll be able to just eventually say, like, hey, Build me a help desk application for our help desk needs.

Ian

00:29:58 – 00:30:21

Here's a list of bullet points, and it'll just be able to go out, build the whole thing in a reasonable UI, and then you just have it yourself, and you don't need to pay anybody to build it. I'm not really sure that's what people are buying when they buy it. But but let's just say for argument's sake, that's the idea. I don't know. What do you think about the death of SaaS, at the hands of AI?

Ian

00:30:21 – 00:30:21

Well, if you want

Aaron

00:30:21 – 00:30:40

a hot take, I think my hot take is that the people tweeting that are engagement baiters and should be muted. That that's my hot take. I think that's completely disingenuous and Yeah. Only there to stir up controversy. To the extent that there's any part of it that is true, I think I still think it's overrated.

Aaron

00:30:40 – 00:31:17

Even beyond being engaged engagement bait, I don't think it's true. I think they're maybe at the margin, some of that is true. So I think, I think the thing that is on the chopping block first is no code tools. I think, like, that kind of stuff, like Bubble and I don't know what all the other ones are, but those platforms where it's like, you can do no code, but turns out you're just, like, opening 50 different settings panels and, like, entering a bunch of parameters anyway. I think those are gonna go away pretty quickly if they're not already pivoted to AI because at that level of, like, let me become an expert in something.

Aaron

00:31:17 – 00:31:46

You might as well just become an expert in being a prompt guy. Like, just just prompt the thing to make it for you instead of, like, what panel do I need to open in bubble. So I think that's gonna go away for sure. I think there's some reality to, like, one off tools, like, single purpose tools could be prompted away. Like, you may see you may see the death of, like, like, indie niche desktop apps and stuff like that, which has been dying for a long time anyway.

Aaron

00:31:46 – 00:31:46

But

Ian

00:31:47 – 00:31:47

Right.

Aaron

00:31:47 – 00:32:08

I think those kinds of things go away. For a help desk or, like, a Laravel cloud or something like that, I I I it's just beyond me how you could prompt that into existence. And I know that everybody's breathlessly saying it's possible. I just don't believe it. I I really don't.

Aaron

00:32:08 – 00:32:33

Like, the act like, you just I don't know. You have to describe it. You have to have a vision and taste and be able to describe that succinctly. And then you've got the execution risk of the AI, like, actually doing the thing to say nothing of, like, having the the wherewithal to, like, be able to describe it all to somebody. And then you're gonna host it, and then you're gonna support it, and then you're gonna secure it.

Aaron

00:32:33 – 00:32:34

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

Ian

00:32:34 – 00:32:54

Yeah. I'm kind of in that camp, I think. I don't really buy not in the way they mean it of, like, all these individual companies will go out there, and they will build their own apps via the AI. And then they will be responsible for the apps. Whether or not it even means, like, they host them literally or, like, there's some AI platform that, like, hosts their apps to generate.

Ian

00:32:54 – 00:33:23

Right? So, like, yeah, they don't have to worry about the servers. But, like, yeah, there's just so much subtleties in there. I do wonder if there's, like, will be this more middle ground. Like, I could conceptually see the idea of, like, a dedicated platform that has the concept of, like, customers and communication and, like, has a certain level of base primitives that are pretty advanced and handle a lot of the subtleties, and then lets you put those things together with the prompts to be like, okay.

Ian

00:33:23 – 00:33:35

Like, you could make a CRM out of this. You can get your help desk out of this. You can make, an email marketing tool because they're kind of, like, have these core elements that are similar. Yeah. But then, I don't know.

Ian

00:33:35 – 00:33:53

There's still yeah. There's just so many weird thing. When you get down into the details of these things, that is where it's like every help desk app is 85% exactly identical. But the other 15% is is, like, just worldview difference type stuff. So that and then once you get into that, there's, like, just all these, you know, whatever.

Ian

00:33:53 – 00:34:08

There's a million if statements in there. Right? And, like, subtle code about, like Yes. Oh, when you hit this weirdo scenario, what are you gonna do? And, like, just the person who's, like, a manager in a company, are they gonna know even what to prompt or how to fix it or what the thing should be?

Ian

00:34:08 – 00:34:17

Like, there is still that part of it that that feels like I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna get anywhere you wanna be, especially when those things aren't that expensive anyway. Like, I don't know.

Aaron

00:34:17 – 00:34:30

Yeah. That's that's the thing. Are you gonna spend like, I I don't think if you're talking internal, you don't have the you don't have the, like, the rails to host it on. Right? So you build this thing, and then you go to IT, and you're like, hey.

Aaron

00:34:30 – 00:34:35

I built a help desk app. And they're like, the f you did. Like, we're not hosting that. I what are you talking about?

Ian

00:34:35 – 00:34:37

And so many companies don't even have IT. Right? So, like,

Aaron

00:34:37 – 00:34:38

you're you're

Ian

00:34:38 – 00:34:44

or are moving away from that or have IT only for, like, the really core, like, security stuff, but they don't wanna host the

Aaron

00:34:44 – 00:34:45

printers. Yeah.

Ian

00:34:45 – 00:34:58

Right. Yeah. So, like, so yeah. So I'm still gonna pay some right. So I could pay HelpSpot three grand a year, or I'm gonna end up paying this AI platform that lets me host the thing I prompted into existence, presumably, at least $3 a year.

Ian

00:34:58 – 00:35:07

Right? And we've I mean, most tech people think much of it. Like, I don't know if there's, like, oh, the big savings is what's gonna drive. Like, it's already kinda cheap. You know?

Ian

00:35:07 – 00:35:07

No.

Aaron

00:35:07 – 00:35:25

I'm I'm not I'm not an AI doomer, but I Yeah. I think this makes me not an AI maxi because I just don't think I don't think you can get there right now. I'm Yeah. I'm open to being wrong two years from now, but right now, I feel pretty confident in in that statement that you just you just can't get there right now.

Ian

00:35:25 – 00:35:27

No. Or very long, to be fair.

Aaron

00:35:27 – 00:35:28

No. It's not very

Ian

00:35:28 – 00:35:29

long. And these, you know,

Aaron

00:35:29 – 00:35:58

these things are moving fast enough that that feels like a reasonable time frame. But, like, if maybe the other thing is if the, if it is possible to build that sort of, SaaS just by prompting, then that leads me to believe that there is some other limiting reagent to successfully having a SaaS company. Because because, like, again, if it can do that, one, where are they? Where are all

Ian

00:35:58 – 00:35:58

Aaron

00:35:58 – 00:36:14

these tools? And if all of these tools do exist out there somewhere, well, that means there's some other limiting factor because I haven't heard about any of these runaway, you know, AI successes except for the AI tools that are, you know, helping people build other stuff.

Ian

00:36:14 – 00:36:14

All of

Aaron

00:36:14 – 00:36:31

those are runaway success. But I don't know. Even if you get there, I still think there's more to SaaS than just code. And that's that's maybe the hard part, which is, like, not comforting for a developer to believe, but maybe everything besides the code is hard. I don't know.

Ian

00:36:31 – 00:36:42

Yeah. And, like, also, I mean, the other way I think about this is, hasn't this sort of already been true for, like, ten years? We're like Mhmm. Okay. I need a bunch of code to my spec.

Ian

00:36:42 – 00:37:00

Like, it's been possible to just go hire a bunch of humans at a fairly reasonable rate. You know, if you're in America and you want a cheap help that's got built. Like, that's been possible for a long time now to go spend 10 or $20,000 and have it built. And, like Right. Yeah.

Ian

00:37:00 – 00:37:12

You're not gonna be able to do it with US Devs, but okay. Like, the world's connected. We know how to acquire cheap labor if that's, like, the main driving factor. So I don't know. Like, that's the other thing.

Ian

00:37:12 – 00:37:29

It's like companies could be doing this and some do. Right? There are some people some companies that build their own solutions to different problems. But I don't know if this changes that dynamic that much of, like, you could already do this just with actual humans instead of AI. At the end of the day, it's similar.

Aaron

00:37:29 – 00:37:35

I don't know if it fundamentally changes it, but it is, like, two orders of magnitude cheaper. Right?

Ian

00:37:36 – 00:37:36

So, you

Aaron

00:37:36 – 00:38:03

know, if you're if you're an 18 year old kid, you can't spend $10,000 for an Upwork person to create a help desk for you. But you can spend $20 in a month Right. To, you know, prompt the heck out of it. So I don't I agree that it's still directionally the same, but when the cost changes by two orders of magnitude, then that in in all industries, that opens up, like, well, what can we do now? Like, imagine if energy were free.

Aaron

00:38:03 – 00:38:14

Well, I would change a bunch of stuff. So I think it changes that part, but I agree. Maybe the value being in the code has been diminishing for the past decade or more.

Ian

00:38:14 – 00:38:16

And that's also more like this.

Aaron

00:38:16 – 00:38:24

It used to be you could just throw crappy v one up there, and it was like it made news and you made a bunch of money. And that those days are over, unfortunately.

Ian

00:38:24 – 00:38:33

Way over. Well, that's even more getting at the start up end, though. You know? Like, I think from, like, big company perspective, it's like spending $2,050,000 dollars is, like, true, almost zero. Right?

Ian

00:38:33 – 00:38:39

Like, it's very close to zero. Whereas, like, yes. I'm a 18 year old kid. I wanna build software. Yeah.

Ian

00:38:39 – 00:38:58

I can't go higher Yes. A bunch of, Ukrainians to do it, right, or whatever. But I can pay chat g p t so I could get started in a way I couldn't before even if I don't know how to code. Now, yes, the downside now is that it was already very crowded. It's gonna be way more crowded because anybody can do that, like, first layer very easily and cheaply.

Ian

00:38:59 – 00:39:11

Then again, you get back to, like, what are people actually buying and, like, maybe there's other differentiation besides just code. But yeah. Okay. I'll get you to take one record.

Aaron

00:39:11 – 00:39:11

That's my take.

Ian

00:39:11 – 00:39:14

Yep. There you go. Alright. And I can spike. Alright.

Ian

00:39:14 – 00:39:29

Let's do another sponsor here. Oh, this is a good one. Our friends over at Laravel Cloud sponsoring the show. The best way to ship and scale Laravel applications is cloud.Laravel.com. Awesome stuff.

Ian

00:39:29 – 00:39:42

And I've already started using it. It's really great, of course, as we all know. So, and stream. Stream scalable APIs for chat, video, voice, feeds, and moderation. Get stream.io.

Ian

00:39:43 – 00:39:47

So thanks to them for sponsoring the show. I will cloud. You like it?

Aaron

00:39:47 – 00:39:49

Like it? You're using it?

Ian

00:39:49 – 00:39:51

Using it. Good stuff.

Aaron

00:39:51 – 00:39:55

They did it. They pulled it off. Also, we've got a follow-up in the YouTube comments.

Ian

00:39:55 – 00:39:55

Uh-oh.

Aaron

00:39:55 – 00:39:59

All that stuff we made up about databases and VPCs last week

Ian

00:39:59 – 00:39:59

We make

Aaron

00:39:59 – 00:40:07

We got it right. We got it right. We freaking nailed it. So, yeah, I don't remember what I said. I'm just

Ian

00:40:07 – 00:40:09

gonna say I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm glad we got

Aaron

00:40:09 – 00:40:19

it right. Idea. But y'all go back and listen with the, with knowing Aaron got this exactly right. So who knows what I said because I made it all up, but it feels good to me.

Ian

00:40:19 – 00:40:23

This was on the Laravel cloud, running their own MySQL server.

Aaron

00:40:23 – 00:40:27

Running their own MySQL, VPC peering, all that stuff. Yeah.

Ian

00:40:27 – 00:40:27

Okay. So then

Aaron

00:40:28 – 00:40:39

Florian Florian chimed in, said we got it right. Yeah. I think the the big thing that I postulated on was that they're running it instead of running RDS. I think that was the big

Ian

00:40:39 – 00:40:42

That's serverless. Yeah. MySQL or any of that

Aaron

00:40:42 – 00:40:43

stuff. Yeah. So Which

Ian

00:40:43 – 00:40:49

is interesting, though, because, like, why Postgres serverless? But then why MySQL is putting it

Aaron

00:40:49 – 00:41:01

up Serverful? Yeah. I have I saw someone tweeted at me. I don't know if it is in the UI of Laravel Cloud or not, but I saw someone tweeted at me and said, hey, Aaron. What do you think about this?

Aaron

00:41:01 – 00:41:38

And it was a screenshot of, like I can't find it right now. It's a screenshot of, I think, Laravel Cloud UI Postgres serverless 17. Underneath it, it said powered by Neon. And so that is my understanding from the outside of why Postgres is able to be serverless and MySQL is not because they're using a third party provider that has a lot of those primitives already built up. And so there is no serverless MySQL offering, that I am aware of besides, like, the internal, you know, whatever AWS pretends is is serverless.

Aaron

00:41:38 – 00:41:43

But Right. There's no third party that offers a serverless MySQL, at least to my knowledge.

Ian

00:41:43 – 00:41:47

They could have offered the AWS one, Presumably.

Aaron

00:41:47 – 00:41:58

Presumably. Yeah. So why why the cloud team chose to build their own versus use one of the AWS primitives is, beyond me. Again, I don't work there. A lot of people think I work there.

Aaron

00:41:58 – 00:41:59

I don't work there.

Ian

00:42:00 – 00:42:00

And

Aaron

00:42:00 – 00:42:11

Not yet. My guess is, oof, well, try hard is always for acquisition. Acquisition. I just wanna go on the record to say we are always for sale. If you're listening and you think I wanna do a fight, yes, you could.

Aaron

00:42:11 – 00:42:13

You could buy us 100%.

Ian

00:42:13 – 00:42:18

You know what you need? You and Steve need this. My brother and my cousin have a company consultancy.

Aaron

00:42:18 – 00:42:19

Ian

00:42:19 – 00:42:31

They have a standing rule where they have a number. And if they ever offered this number, either one of them, they're just automatically allowed to accept. They don't even have to ask the other one. Hell, yeah. You just you just take the deal on the spot.

Ian

00:42:31 – 00:42:37

Don't even let any time pass. You don't want anybody changing their mind. You just take that. It's not a toll it's a it's a nice number, but it's not like

Aaron

00:42:37 – 00:42:41

What's their number? They don't listen they don't listen to the show. We don't know what they do.

Ian

00:42:41 – 00:42:43

I think that's what I was gonna say.

Aaron

00:42:43 – 00:42:45

I was gonna say I was gonna say 10,000,000.

Ian

00:42:45 – 00:42:45

Yeah. $8.50.

Aaron

00:42:45 – 00:42:49

To talk to Steve. For 10,000,000, I'm shaking the hand. I don't care.

Ian

00:42:49 – 00:42:50

Right. Yeah. So you should have

Aaron

00:42:51 – 00:42:53

I got ideas. I got tons of ideas. I got stuff I could do.

Ian

00:42:54 – 00:42:55

Where where what do I need what do

Aaron

00:42:55 – 00:42:56

I need more than $5,000,000

Ian

00:42:56 – 00:42:58

right now for? Good. Yeah. You're good.

Aaron

00:42:58 – 00:43:04

That seems awesome. Yeah. So I think they didn't do serverless because of cost. That's my guess. Yeah.

Aaron

00:43:04 – 00:43:05

That's what I was gonna end with.

Ian

00:43:05 – 00:43:26

Probably went with the the third party makes some sense in terms of, like well, I mean, I don't know about the AWS for third party, but in terms of like not building your own in order to ship it, like you have something that you can have day one a database because you need some kind of database, obviously. And then, Obviously from there they could build on top of that and it sounds like you know, they got my SQL in under the wire when maybe they didn't install it into that all. Yep.

Aaron

00:43:26 – 00:43:31

Yep. I still wanna be on record as saying they're gonna become a database company. I just want that.

Ian

00:43:31 – 00:43:32

I don't know I don't

Aaron

00:43:32 – 00:43:36

know what I don't know what Polymarket is, but I just wanna be on record as having that bet on on the books.

Ian

00:43:37 – 00:43:39

So We should we should get you on Polymarket.

Aaron

00:43:40 – 00:43:42

I think it's illegal, isn't it, in The US?

Ian

00:43:42 – 00:43:45

Nothing's illegal anymore. Nothing with crypto is illegal.

Aaron

00:43:45 – 00:43:46

That's right. There are no rules.

Ian

00:43:46 – 00:43:47

There's no rules.

Aaron

00:43:47 – 00:43:48

It's the purge.

Ian

00:43:49 – 00:43:54

Isn't it? I think there is some loss. I don't know. I got around it with the VPN. You know, it's a problem.

Aaron

00:43:55 – 00:43:57

Allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah. You

Ian

00:43:57 – 00:43:58

could. Other people

Aaron

00:43:59 – 00:43:59

One one could.

Ian

00:43:59 – 00:44:02

Yes. One could. Yes. Yeah.

Aaron

00:44:03 – 00:44:09

I don't know I don't know if saying allegedly after confessing makes a difference, but I'm I'm working for you, Ian. I'm doing my best here.

Ian

00:44:09 – 00:44:18

This is entertainment. This is like an opinion show. It's like how they call, like, you know, Hannity is news. Right? Like, it's news, but it's opinion.

Ian

00:44:18 – 00:44:20

This is opinion. It's opinion. We could say anything here.

Aaron

00:44:20 – 00:44:33

It is opinion. Also, we got some good feedback on the news last time. We got some good some people wrote in and said, like, here's some slow news. Here's some investigative journalism. So thank you all for sending those, sending those links and emails.

Aaron

00:44:33 – 00:44:34

That was very thoughtful of you.

Ian

00:44:34 – 00:44:35

Slow news.

Aaron

00:44:35 – 00:44:39

Slow news. Big fan. Like the idea. Alright. We got a we got we got a couple more.

Aaron

00:44:39 – 00:44:45

We've got we've got an HVAC update or we've got a business we've got a business topic. So where do you wanna go next?

Ian

00:44:46 – 00:44:48

Let's do let's give let's take a little breather. Let's do the HVAC.

Aaron

00:44:49 – 00:44:57

Let's do some HVAC. So not great. Not great. This house, dude, with the house people.

Ian

00:44:57 – 00:45:09

You had this house Let's just say in secret. You had, like, a whole secret house that we didn't even know about that you were, like, working on behind the scenes Mhmm. For months and months and months and months and months. Secret house. Found out about the house.

Ian

00:45:09 – 00:45:21

Yeah. And then you're, like, you're moving into this new house, and they're still working on it. And then you move in and then there's problems and they're fixing stuff. So this house, it feels like for the amount of work put into it. Well, first of all, you could have just built a new house for sure.

Ian

00:45:21 – 00:45:22

But second of all,

Aaron

00:45:22 – 00:45:22

doubt that,

Ian

00:45:23 – 00:45:31

it's been a lot of work. It's still not where you, where you want it to be. We had a whole thing with the HVAC. You were gonna do the push and replace all the events and all that stuff.

Aaron

00:45:31 – 00:45:32

That was a good idea. That was a good idea.

Ian

00:45:32 – 00:45:37

So where are we at with HVAC now? Not not working at all? Hot. Something else?

Aaron

00:45:37 – 00:45:53

It's not great. So one one two two things. One is I wrote a kind but firm email to the contractor Mhmm. And said, here's a list of the the problems. I believe that you are a man of integrity, and you have always held up your end of the bargain.

Aaron

00:45:53 – 00:46:12

I also believe that your subcontractors let you down in a terrible way, and we are not pleased with the quality of the work that has been done. And we would like to make this right and also go our separate ways. What do you propose? So that's basically my email to him saying, give us a bunch of money, and we'll never talk to you again. Because, like, I'm That's a hot tired.

Aaron

00:46:12 – 00:46:16

Yeah. We'll see. I sent it, you know, four days ago. I haven't heard a word. I'm tired of

Ian

00:46:16 – 00:46:17

No. You're right.

Aaron

00:46:17 – 00:46:31

I'm tired of his guys coming back and fixing things, and then it's like, my brother, this is still broken. Like, what are we doing here? So we're moving on from him. We're just gonna bite the bullet. And Wait.

Ian

00:46:31 – 00:46:35

Wait. So what was his choice? His choice was to give you money or fix it or no? You're just asking

Aaron

00:46:35 – 00:46:41

for money. That has been his choice many times so far. And so far, he's always chosen fix it.

Ian

00:46:41 – 00:46:42

Of course.

Aaron

00:46:42 – 00:46:59

And now I'm telling him, I don't want you to fix it anymore because he's just for example, you fixed the floors. You've come back and redone parts of the floors twice, and they are still bowed and cracked. Like, what are you doing? Like, what have you done? You're very bad at this.

Aaron

00:46:59 – 00:47:08

So, so I sent him that email and was like, let's move on. Let's, like, shake hands, go our separate ways. To do so, I need you to write me a check. We'll see.

Ian

00:47:08 – 00:47:15

That's never happened. I'll be very interested to hear this follow-up. The Aaron in court. I'm very excited about Aaron in court. This is gonna be great.

Aaron

00:47:15 – 00:47:25

Do not do not cross me. Do not cross me. Just to to my enemies. Do not cross me. So the HVAC.

Aaron

00:47:26 – 00:47:34

Had a few companies come out. One, we've been working with on just random stuff. Really trust these people. Got him. Got the owner to come out.

Aaron

00:47:35 – 00:47:41

Give it to me straight. He went down and he was like, bad news, my friend. He was like, first

Ian

00:47:41 – 00:47:42

of all screwed. First of

Aaron

00:47:42 – 00:47:51

all, you return not properly sized, so you're not getting enough air to the actual units. That's bad. You're gonna burn them out. Okay. Well, shoot.

Aaron

00:47:51 – 00:47:59

That sucks. Yeah. Under the house, the ducting is all wrong. It's all wrong. It's broken.

Aaron

00:47:59 – 00:48:00

It's leaky. It's not

Ian

00:48:00 – 00:48:01

new. Right?

Aaron

00:48:01 – 00:48:02

No. Not all of it.

Ian

00:48:02 – 00:48:03

Oh, okay. Okay.

Aaron

00:48:03 – 00:48:15

Got it. This is a lot of a lot of this is stuff that they didn't touch, the contractors. The return, they moved the unit, so they should have routed returns better. Under, he's like, yeah. You're not getting enough airflow to the backroom.

Aaron

00:48:15 – 00:48:17

And I'm like, I know. I have these vents I was thinking about, and I didn't

Ian

00:48:17 – 00:48:20

tell him that. He's like, dude.

Aaron

00:48:20 – 00:48:30

Yeah. He's got another another homeowner. So gotta do that. Gotta gotta add some returns. The laundry room has no airflow whatsoever in or out.

Aaron

00:48:30 – 00:48:31

And so

Ian

00:48:31 – 00:48:32

the ghost? Is that a problem?

Aaron

00:48:33 – 00:48:55

We're getting a lot of, like, humidity back there. Yeah. And so it's, like, it's not great. And then, you know, other other, like well, they chose, you know, they chose these corrugated ducks and then didn't wrap them, and so you're losing, you know, three CFM. I'm like, I don't know what any it's like underground in Texas, you need rigid ducks or the mice will eat through them to get warm.

Aaron

00:48:55 – 00:49:02

Like, oh, yeah. That checks out. And I've had I've had that before, actually. Right. So they're coming out.

Aaron

00:49:02 – 00:49:13

We signed we you know, I hemmed and hawed and then finally signed it. I was like, yeah. Let's do it. So they're gonna come out and redo all of that under there, and it's add add a return. And it's just like

Ian

00:49:13 – 00:49:14

Oh my goodness.

Aaron

00:49:14 – 00:49:25

It's just it's just brutal. It's just every day is every day I come home and there's a new bill on the counter, and this time I came home and there was a $15,000 bill on the counter.

Ian

00:49:25 – 00:49:27

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

Aaron

00:49:27 – 00:49:28

one. Just like And

Ian

00:49:28 – 00:49:29

that's in the ducts and stuff.

Aaron

00:49:29 – 00:49:30

I don't mind.

Ian

00:49:30 – 00:49:32

The air handlers or anything, or is that an air

Aaron

00:49:32 – 00:49:33

handler? Fix it all. That's for everything.

Ian

00:49:34 – 00:49:34

Okay. For new

Aaron

00:49:34 – 00:49:51

air handlers? For, like, routing routing a new return. That's for adding some flow to the laundry room so that it doesn't get all musty. That's for fixing all the ducts underneath, adding a new vent in our bedroom because we have one that doesn't push enough. And so it's just, like, balancing everything.

Ian

00:49:51 – 00:49:52

Oh my goodness.

Aaron

00:49:53 – 00:49:53

Yeah.

Ian

00:49:54 – 00:50:02

Your mud your, laundry room, What's the door situation? Sliding pocket door. With, like, slats or solid door?

Aaron

00:50:03 – 00:50:04

Solid door.

Ian

00:50:04 – 00:50:07

We have slats on ours, and we never had any trouble. Could be something to consider.

Aaron

00:50:07 – 00:50:08

Yeah. The problem is

Ian

00:50:08 – 00:50:09

be there.

Aaron

00:50:09 – 00:50:27

The problem is, like, the the kitchen and the mudroom are right next to each other. Mhmm. And, when the washer and dryer are going, it's relatively loud, and the living room is right next to the kitchen. And so it's nice to just be able to shut all of that off. Also, babies wander back there, and we have many of those.

Aaron

00:50:27 – 00:50:31

And so keeping that fully shut is pretty important. So Oh.

Ian

00:50:31 – 00:50:35

Yeah. Oh, man. Alright. So $15,000 HVAC bill. Those HVAC Houses.

Ian

00:50:36 – 00:50:40

House Home ownership is so overrated. It's so overrated.

Aaron

00:50:40 – 00:50:41

What a scam.

Ian

00:50:41 – 00:50:53

The only benefit is it's great, of course, having you are fully in control of your space. You do what you do in your backyard ostensibly. You want under your house. Whatever. You want to do a layer, you can do a layer or whatever in theory.

Ian

00:50:54 – 00:51:04

But everything else terrible. Like, you're definitely earning money. Like, no matter how much it appreciates, unless you happen to buy in Silicon Valley in 1960, like, you are losing money on your house. So Yes. Yeah.

Ian

00:51:04 – 00:51:05

I don't

Aaron

00:51:06 – 00:51:06

know. You know, the only You

Ian

00:51:06 – 00:51:07

got the way there.

Aaron

00:51:08 – 00:51:32

The the only, like, with this house, the only thing that I'm like, wow, we got super lucky is that I bought it before I got laid off. Because if I had gotten laid off and which I did. And then then tried to buy a house, I would have had to go get a w two job. There's just no there's just no way around it. Because you can't buy a house in their first year of being self employed with no history.

Aaron

00:51:32 – 00:51:42

Yeah. It's like, that's not gonna work. So I feel very fortunate that I pulled that trigger when we did. Even though it ended up sucking, I'm I'm still glad we did it.

Ian

00:51:42 – 00:51:56

It's kinda weird that, like, I I don't a fair number of people who complain about this scenario where, like, they're self employed and they can't get mortgages and stuff like that. And I've never ever had this problem. It's so weird to me. Like, I don't know. I don't know if it's a New York thing

Aaron

00:51:56 – 00:52:09

or something. Did you not have that did you, did you have the opportunity to experience the problem in the first, like, one, two, or three years? Because after that, I feel like it's pretty you're fine. It's just like a regular job.

Ian

00:52:09 – 00:52:15

Yeah. We built yeah. Like, yes. In the first year, we bought a house. So it was really expensive.

Ian

00:52:15 – 00:52:16

Yeah. And

Aaron

00:52:17 – 00:52:18

On self employment earnings.

Ian

00:52:18 – 00:52:27

Yeah. Yeah. Was arcing. All we have was the business income. I mean, the business was doing pretty well from the beginning, but it was and we had less employees and stuff.

Ian

00:52:27 – 00:52:35

But I mean, I can't like, I've known people who are making more money than I make, and they're like, yeah. I can't, like, get a mortgage. And I'm like, weird. Like, I don't know. I've never had that problem.

Ian

00:52:35 – 00:52:48

But, yes, it's still better, of course, to, like, be under the wire and you didn't have to worry about it. Jump through hoops. So okay. So then what you want the money back from the other guy. How much money are you looking for?

Ian

00:52:48 – 00:52:52

You don't have to give us exactly. Like, what percentage of his total is it, like and then what is that

Aaron

00:52:52 – 00:52:54

I'll take whatever you got. Whatever you got.

Ian

00:52:54 – 00:53:00

I don't know if I like the open ended, to be honest with you. I feel like maybe there should have been, like, some constraints on this, but Nah.

Aaron

00:53:00 – 00:53:03

I didn't wanna give him an anchor. You know? I didn't wanna say

Ian

00:53:03 – 00:53:07

Anything you can fix with it. Like, what what's

Aaron

00:53:07 – 00:53:15

still broken? Some of the HVAC is his fault. Okay. The wood floors are definitely his fault because he put those in. Yep.

Aaron

00:53:15 – 00:53:21

So that's, like, a % his fault, and he knows it, which is why he's come back twice to fix it and still gotten it wrong. So, like What

Ian

00:53:21 – 00:53:23

kind of wood? What kind of wood do we have on these floors?

Aaron

00:53:25 – 00:53:28

Brown. I don't know. What what what's what are you looking for?

Ian

00:53:28 – 00:53:33

You gotta you gotta have you can't have the wood that like, you gotta want you want a wood that doesn't have do a lot of expansion and contraction. So

Aaron

00:53:33 – 00:53:45

you Well, that's a good note. I'll write that down because we're having a lot of problems with this foot. So maybe we maybe we picked expando wood instead of, normal wood. So wood floors is one. He's had to come back to fix the plumbing.

Aaron

00:53:45 – 00:53:53

It's still unclear if the drain pan is correctly installed or not. So just like a lot of stuff where I'm like, dude, I don't want to continue to deal with you.

Ian

00:53:53 – 00:53:53

Yeah.

Aaron

00:53:53 – 00:54:08

Honestly, if you wrote me a check for any amount of money, I'd be like, great. See you. Because the truth is I'm gonna not invite him back to fix anything. So I'm paying for everything he's done. I would love on the way out if he gave me a little, you know, gave me a little five spot and was like, here you go.

Ian

00:54:08 – 00:54:09

Yeah.

Aaron

00:54:09 – 00:54:12

There's there's money, so I'll take whatever you got, man.

Ian

00:54:12 – 00:54:16

You know, I wonder this HVAC stuff could be also impacting your flooring situation. If it's not

Aaron

00:54:16 – 00:54:17

It could be.

Ian

00:54:17 – 00:54:26

Cooling correctly, that's going to be and not and you seem to have a humidity situation in general, potentially, which is very bad for the floors. So that that could all

Aaron

00:54:26 – 00:54:30

What do you think I'm on about, man? I'm just everything sucks. It's all bad.

Ian

00:54:30 – 00:54:36

You gotta get the floor underneath the underneath the flooring. Did it have the grooves cut in it? You need

Aaron

00:54:36 – 00:54:43

the grooves? I'm I'm a be honest. I don't know. I have no idea. It's kind of a kind of a stressful time in life, and I wasn't looking at the grooves and the underlayment.

Ian

00:54:43 – 00:54:49

We gotta get you researching here, man. You gotta do the research on on these things. Yeah. Because if you're gonna hit flat boards, they're

Aaron

00:54:49 – 00:54:50

gonna come.

Ian

00:54:50 – 00:54:53

Yeah. Like, always. Okay. You know what? Maybe I'll come down there.

Ian

00:54:53 – 00:54:57

When you're ready, I'll come down. I'll be I'll let you handle that kind

Aaron

00:54:57 – 00:54:59

of scrutiny. Oh, you're gonna you're gonna GC

Ian

00:54:59 – 00:55:00

the whole thing.

Aaron

00:55:00 – 00:55:00

That's fine.

Ian

00:55:00 – 00:55:01

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron

00:55:01 – 00:55:04

Yeah. Bring your brother. Bring your cousin. You can all come down. Make it a family affair.

Aaron

00:55:04 – 00:55:12

That sounds great. I love that. Get a little New York muscle down here to push push around the southern contractors. I like that.

Ian

00:55:12 – 00:55:14

We're not gonna let them screw you. We do all

Aaron

00:55:14 – 00:55:14

of those

Ian

00:55:14 – 00:55:21

physical houses. Some of us multiple times. So if the three of us come down there, you got a lot of home construction experience.

Aaron

00:55:21 – 00:55:22

Stuff's getting done.

Ian

00:55:22 – 00:55:25

Yes. We know what to talk. We know what to look for.

Aaron

00:55:25 – 00:55:35

I I like the narrative of, man, that guy Aaron, our neighbor, he brought down some muscle from New York to get this to get this house done. Like, wow. That was perfect. That was cool.

Ian

00:55:35 – 00:55:36

It was crazy.

Aaron

00:55:36 – 00:55:39

Also heard he had a big tweet about red alert. So I'm building the horror. You know?

Ian

00:55:39 – 00:55:41

Heard he's friends with Elon. It's crazy.

Aaron

00:55:41 – 00:55:45

It's really good. New York muscle's kinda awesome, so I'll think about that.

Ian

00:55:45 – 00:55:46

The way to go. Yeah.

Aaron

00:55:46 – 00:55:47

Yeah. I like that.

Ian

00:55:47 – 00:55:51

Alright. So I guess that's that's it. That's all I got for me. So when did they come in and do this?

Aaron

00:55:51 – 00:55:52

Wednesday.

Ian

00:55:52 – 00:55:53

Okay.

Aaron

00:55:53 – 00:55:54

Not great. Yeah.

Ian

00:55:54 – 00:55:56

Now you got a lot going on. I hate You got

Aaron

00:55:56 – 00:55:59

a lot going on. I got too much going on always.

Ian

00:55:59 – 00:56:04

Yeah. So this is why you end up in the escapism of the open source work.

Aaron

00:56:05 – 00:56:08

That's interesting. Mhmm. Mhmm. That's interesting. Like

Ian

00:56:08 – 00:56:14

your little zone where it's like, I'm not really responsible for anything in this zone. Like, I'm just doing it. It's fun. Mhmm. It's interesting.

Aaron

00:56:15 – 00:56:18

This may also explain why I wanna dig a garage by hand.

Ian

00:56:18 – 00:56:20

It might explain that.

Aaron

00:56:21 – 00:56:30

Is there Escapism is an interesting idea, isn't it? I'll have to mull on that because you might be on to something there. Like So What if I just dug for weeks? Like,

Ian

00:56:31 – 00:56:32

you should interrogate

Aaron

00:56:32 – 00:56:34

that, my friend. That might not be healthy.

Ian

00:56:34 – 00:56:41

Live cam. I want, like, three or four cameras that people can you gotta build a website for this where people can switch between the cameras and

Aaron

00:56:42 – 00:56:43

Boom. Just you're out

Ian

00:56:43 – 00:56:45

there digging. You're just, like, you're just going.

Aaron

00:56:45 – 00:56:57

I told some friends I I had talked about digging, and they're like, didn't you kinda, like, do a project like this with the shed quarters, and it was fun for a little bit, and then you got super depressed and overwhelmed? And I was like, yeah. But what if I did it again?

Ian

00:56:57 – 00:56:59

What if we took it and we made it way bigger?

Aaron

00:57:00 – 00:57:01

What if we made it way riskier?

Ian

00:57:01 – 00:57:02

Yeah. Right.

Aaron

00:57:02 – 00:57:02

What if

Ian

00:57:02 – 00:57:07

my house could collapse as a result of it? Yeah. That's a good idea.

Aaron

00:57:07 – 00:57:08

It'll be fun.

Ian

00:57:08 – 00:57:13

Sounds like it's a shackle anyway. What's the difference? If it all collapses, who cares? You get the insurance.

Aaron

00:57:13 – 00:57:20

Easier to fix stuff while I'm under there. Yeah. Well Jeez. Everything's fine. We're doing great.

Aaron

00:57:20 – 00:57:20

We're doing great.

Ian

00:57:20 – 00:57:26

Good. Everything's good. You know, we're watching Survivor. We're not even Survivor again.

Aaron

00:57:27 – 00:57:27

No.

Ian

00:57:27 – 00:57:29

It's been good because, like, we've been with my daughter.

Aaron

00:57:29 – 00:57:30

Six seasons. Right?

Ian

00:57:30 – 00:57:35

Yeah. We just watched season forty seven. And Oh my. We watched Survivor back in the day,

Aaron

00:57:35 – 00:57:35

and then

Ian

00:57:35 – 00:57:48

we had, like, a eighteen year gap where we haven't watched it. Right? And we'd never watched any shows with the kids ever because they never watched shows. We watched Seinfeld a little bit. The oldest would watch Seinfeld and the younger two would somewhat somewhat watch Seinfeld, but that was it.

Ian

00:57:48 – 00:58:00

So now we're watching survivor with my daughter and it's been great. Like, it's like, this is what it's supposed to be like. People together having interactions. Not everybody just in their iPads, like, when they watch television television, quote, unquote. Been great.

Ian

00:58:00 – 00:58:08

So we watch all 47. It's hard to go back. It's a little weird to go back to the new season starting. We're watching that. And we did go back.

Ian

00:58:08 – 00:58:12

We're we're gonna watch, like, the best of the previous season. We can't go through forty eight other seasons, but

Aaron

00:58:12 – 00:58:13

Good lord.

Ian

00:58:13 – 00:58:27

We're on David and Goliath for those following along out there. We're trying now David and Goliath. But that was a totally different editing style because, like, the new ones are much, like, quicker paced than it's, like, thing to thing to thing, like, for the kids. Right? For the YouTubers who are watching YouTube.

Ian

00:58:27 – 00:58:30

Right? So it's like the Oh, sometimes you sound

Aaron

00:58:30 – 00:58:32

so old. 10 years old.

Ian

00:58:33 – 00:58:52

I get, like, all my TV watching is YouTube to be fair, but, you know, people like the faster editing now. They get enough time, but ten year, not even ten years ago, seven, eight years ago, whenever this was, it's so different. It's like sad in the beginning and it's like slowly paced and kinda hanging out with the people. Very different. I cannot believe

Aaron

00:58:53 – 00:58:59

I no. Not at all. I can't believe that it's been going for forty seven seasons. I know.

Ian

00:58:59 – 00:59:00

It's crazy.

Aaron

00:59:00 – 00:59:08

That we're still I I presume it's the same it's the same setup, the same shtick. Right? For forty seven seasons?

Ian

00:59:08 – 00:59:16

Yeah. Twenty five years or twenty four years or something. And, Jeff Broad. The the same host, And I could totally see

Aaron

00:59:16 – 00:59:16

you in

Ian

00:59:16 – 00:59:19

this job. You should be a game show host, dude. That is

Aaron

00:59:19 – 00:59:23

so funny. Crush as a game show host. I would love it.

Ian

00:59:23 – 00:59:28

You basically are Jeff Prost, basically. Like, you could just drop they when he retires, we drop you in there, man.

Aaron

00:59:28 – 00:59:29

Sign me up.

Ian

00:59:29 – 00:59:29

They'll be like

Aaron

00:59:29 – 00:59:34

We'll have to go back and scrub this episode and add a bunch of me talking about how awesome Survivor is, but sign

Ian

00:59:34 – 00:59:36

me up. I would does.

Aaron

00:59:36 – 00:59:38

Kill as a game show host. It'd be so fun.

Ian

00:59:38 – 00:59:42

So kill. Yeah. So, anyway, so yes. It's all the same. Now they made a big change.

Ian

00:59:42 – 01:00:00

Like, I think for COVID, I didn't think I liked this change. So we only watched season forty seven, and a big change they made is it went to, like, twenty six days the the survivors are out there. K. Before that, before COVID, they were they're thirty nine days, which is a pretty substantial difference. Like, thirty nine days is a pretty long time.

Aaron

01:00:00 – 01:00:01

That's a long time.

Ian

01:00:01 – 01:00:15

So now it's twenty six days. And I was kinda like, this is, like, this is all wimpy now. Twenty six days, you're, like, done instantly. What but I have to say with the the it helps some edit. It's I can see why they did it because, like, this other third nine day one.

Ian

01:00:15 – 01:00:24

I mean, it the pacing is crazy slow. My daughter was like, this is, like, so slow. So we'll see. We're only in the first episode of the day of the live, so I have to give a update. But so yeah.

Ian

01:00:24 – 01:00:32

But, otherwise but, essentially, it's the same. Like, there's some different game mechanics and stuff like that, but it's effectively the same. Pretty crazy. Man. Long run.

Aaron

01:00:32 – 01:00:34

Find a formula that works, I guess.

Ian

01:00:34 – 01:00:35

You know? Just run with it.

Aaron

01:00:35 – 01:00:37

Write it all the way down.

Ian

01:00:37 – 01:00:45

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure they it's a much, like, you know, way back in February or whatever. It's a huge show. Like, millions of people watching it.

Ian

01:00:45 – 01:00:51

Like, you know, now television's all changed, so I'm sure it has much less viewership than it had back then. But

Aaron

01:00:51 – 01:00:53

So what could it cost to make?

Ian

01:00:53 – 01:01:04

That's the thing. These things are so cheap. It's like, yeah, you have some production crew out there on island. Now they always do the same island, I think, too. So I think they just have, like, the same home base, so they just have everything there.

Ian

01:01:04 – 01:01:11

Whereas, like, in the past, they would go between different locations and stuff. But now it's like I'm sure they just have, like, a permanent housing setup for the crew and Yeah.

Aaron

01:01:11 – 01:01:19

You film for twenty six days. You edit for two or three months, and you do that twice a year, and that's it. Like, that seems pretty easy.

Ian

01:01:19 – 01:01:33

Yeah. That's why Jamie's like, she wants a gig on there. Like, just on the I'm trying to get her to go on the show. But, short of that, she's like, did she get a job working on the construction crew and just, like, building the challenges and stuff?

Aaron

01:01:34 – 01:01:36

Get some of that New York muscle down there. Yeah.

Ian

01:01:36 – 01:01:42

She's she's very strong and tough. Yeah. She's lit she's, like, little, but tough and strong. You know? So

Aaron

01:01:42 – 01:01:45

Yeah. I can't I can't do survivor. Can't do it.

Ian

01:01:45 – 01:01:48

I would love to see you on survivor too. That would be awesome.

Aaron

01:01:48 – 01:01:56

I would maybe be good. I feel like I could I could I could strategize correctly. I think I feel like I could do that.

Ian

01:01:56 – 01:02:00

You gotta do what you gotta do to get the followers. It's all coming full circle on this episode.

Aaron

01:02:00 – 01:02:03

And you think going on Survivor is what I got.

Ian

01:02:03 – 01:02:08

Oh, come on. You build up the following. I love this idea. No. No.

Ian

01:02:08 – 01:02:08

No.

Aaron

01:02:08 – 01:02:17

This is a terrible idea because I'm gonna build up a following from Survivor and then come back and tweet about Postgres, and they're all like, alright. Well, we gotta follow that guy. Out there.

Ian

01:02:17 – 01:02:18

Come on. He was good

Aaron

01:02:18 – 01:02:31

on Survivor, but what the hell is he talking about? No. I can't do that. My my current strategy my current breakout strategy is to write a New York Times bestseller. So that that feels a little bit more more adjacent than going on survivor.

Aaron

01:02:31 – 01:02:37

But maybe after that, I can go on celebrity survivor if the book goes well. Is that a thing? Order a new look

Ian

01:02:37 – 01:02:45

these in. See, I don't know. See, you build up the survivor following, and you sell them a book, which is your book is not gonna be code oriented. So No. No.

Ian

01:02:45 – 01:02:48

No. Great. It's totally for the masses.

Aaron

01:02:48 – 01:02:49

Now you could reverse

Ian

01:02:49 – 01:02:58

it. Do the book, then you go on as an author. Right? And then you go back into finding out what your book is all about. Blah blah blah blah.

Aaron

01:02:58 – 01:03:00

Yeah. I think I wanna do that. Because if you know

Ian

01:03:00 – 01:03:00

what that

Aaron

01:03:01 – 01:03:05

Survivor winner launches book is like I don't know. Is it about, like Yeah.

Ian

01:03:05 – 01:03:06

You want you want

Aaron

01:03:06 – 01:03:10

the other one? On survivor? Like, I don't like that. So no.

Ian

01:03:10 – 01:03:24

But the great thing about the topic of your book, which I don't think you've totally revealed, but, like, the general vibe of it, I think would work really well on survivor for you as a character on the show. Because I think you could, like Mhmm. Be leaning into that vibe.

Aaron

01:03:24 – 01:03:27

I could embody the book on the show.

Ian

01:03:27 – 01:03:27

It's

Aaron

01:03:27 – 01:03:29

a shtick. You gotta have a shtick.

Ian

01:03:29 – 01:03:32

Love this idea. This is great. This is one of the best things we ever come up with.

Aaron

01:03:32 – 01:03:35

This is. The ads were good, but this is better. I like this.

Ian

01:03:35 – 01:03:42

This is better. You want survive your amazing race, whatever, all the shows. Mhmm. Get you on Mhmm. Reality TV.

Ian

01:03:43 – 01:03:43

God.

Aaron

01:03:44 – 01:03:45

I'd be so good on reality TV.

Ian

01:03:45 – 01:03:46

I know.

Aaron

01:03:46 – 01:03:55

I've watched I've watched so much Seinfeld. I could keep the dialogue going. I could do a little bit. I could I would crush on reality TV.

Ian

01:03:56 – 01:03:58

Okay. Well Alright. Last topic.

Aaron

01:03:59 – 01:04:22

Last topic. More. Here's the deal. It's very I have found it very difficult recently to balance the, like, talk about the thing, do the thing. And one of the one of the realities of parts of our business, this is changing slightly, but one of the realities of parts of our business is I am both the producer and the marketer.

Aaron

01:04:23 – 01:04:45

And so, like, I will I do the thing that we sell, but I also have to be the one that talks about the thing that we sell. Mhmm. And so I found it very difficult to strike the correct balance on that. Feel like I overdo one and then feel, like, stress pressure about the other and then kind of pendulum back and forth. And that's an interesting thing.

Aaron

01:04:45 – 01:04:53

I feel maybe perhaps, I feel that I I I oscillate or, more violently, I vacillate between two things. That's good. Right? That's

Ian

01:04:53 – 01:04:53

pretty good. Yeah.

Aaron

01:04:53 – 01:04:54

Other than

Ian

01:04:54 – 01:04:55

the big word.

Aaron

01:04:55 – 01:05:07

Yeah. I vacillate between two things, whether that's building and marketing or project a and project b or I wanna be public. I wanna be private. Like, I vacillate between two extremes. That's interesting.

Aaron

01:05:08 – 01:05:45

Much to consider there. But the, the inciting incident is more like, kinda like working on the open source quietly versus live streaming where I get less done, but it's more, like, marketing and brandy and people see a lot of motion or, you know, working on, like, producing a new course versus making YouTube videos that are relevant to an old course. And so all of these things just kinda swirling of, like, there's a lot to do. I'm responsible for a lot of it. And I say that that is changing because screen casting will be more heavily Steve weighted, in the future, which is gonna be awesome.

Aaron

01:05:45 – 01:06:05

Yep. But, yeah, just like I'm sure that you have felt the many, competing needs of running a business, but I am certainly in that zone where it's like, oh, we're we're running a successful business, and there are too many things to be done. And of the things that I am responsible for, I have trouble balancing all of them.

Ian

01:06:06 – 01:06:19

I think for you, it's definitely different than me. I think this is part of the difference of, like, software versus, like, the content type Mhmm. Things. Is that, like, the payoff is just longer in the SaaS. Right?

Ian

01:06:19 – 01:06:26

Like, if you can get up to on the hill, then it's like, hey. You cannot market for years. Not that you shouldn't market for years, but you could not market for years.

Aaron

01:06:26 – 01:06:27

Good.

Ian

01:06:27 – 01:06:49

And you're pretty much gonna be okay as long as you're, like, running the service and Mhmm. Customers are happy and that kind of thing. And so I'm in the same boat as you, and I wanna get better at this. So one of the ways I've been thinking about it, and I think for you, you almost you, like, have to do this is, like, it's like Sanderson. I feel like you need to be our favorite guy every week.

Ian

01:06:49 – 01:06:53

Like, I like, Sanderson does it with, like, he has a daily writing quota.

Aaron

01:06:53 – 01:06:53

Uh-huh.

Ian

01:06:53 – 01:07:12

And he hits that quota every day. Uh-huh. And for you, it might be like, I'm gonna do one marketing YouTube video a week, no matter what. And I'm gonna do, eight hours on new content production a week, no matter what. And then you still have twenty four hours a week to do other stuff, right?

Ian

01:07:12 – 01:07:22

Like right streams and whatever. But like this way, you just always have that little bit of forward at the very least you have a little bit of forward motion. Right. So that you don't because you do like to throw yourself into things. I do.

Ian

01:07:22 – 01:07:32

But then obviously that like, then that saps the energy kind of, and you come back, and it's hard to do the other thing. So that's the positive thing. That's kind of the thing.

Aaron

01:07:32 – 01:07:43

Pause there for one second because that note, you like to throw yourself into things. That is very true. And I find that to be very profitable for the thing that I have thrown myself into.

Ian

01:07:43 – 01:07:45

Gets the attention right at that time.

Aaron

01:07:45 – 01:07:55

That is the thing where, like, I can go, it's almost it's it's not a medical manic, but I can go manic on a thing and be like, I am going to figure this out.

Ian

01:07:55 – 01:07:56

Yeah. And

Aaron

01:07:56 – 01:08:11

that has led to a lot of, great things for me. Yep. But then then you come out of it and you're like, half. I have neglected a bunch of the stuff that I have to now, like, feel guilty about and go back and, like, fix. And so, yes, I agree with that.

Aaron

01:08:13 – 01:08:25

The Sanderson thing. I listened to another I listened you you got me on a Sanderson thing. He's so good. And somebody I wanna find I wanna say his name correctly. Somebody sent me a Connor.

Aaron

01:08:25 – 01:08:35

What's your last name? Connor. Connor. What's your last name? Lindsey sent me a YouTube video of Sanderson giving a lecture at this guy, like, a lecture series at some school where he talks about.

Aaron

01:08:35 – 01:08:36

Right.

Ian

01:08:36 – 01:08:38

Yeah. Oh, it's so good. The whole thing.

Aaron

01:08:38 – 01:08:48

So good. I listened to the first one so far. Amazing. Wonderful. And I am so glad you turned Rhianda Sanderson because he thinks he thinks

Ian

01:08:48 – 01:08:50

It's so good. He think

Aaron

01:08:50 – 01:09:05

I feel like we think the same way. Like, he's talking about, how hard it is to do it, but you just have to, like, set your schedule and do it. And then after you've done the hard thing, you can do literally whatever you want. And I'm like, oh, that that I totally buy that. That makes a ton of sense to me.

Aaron

01:09:05 – 01:09:43

And so I think modeling it maybe more after him is is modern modeling my, work life more after him is correct because I do believe that, like, what I am doing is a very creative act. And so I find I take a lot of inspiration from creatives more than, like, more than, like coders or Yeah. Other coders or, like, business just general business advice. And so I like the idea of being a little bit more rigid about it. I think I've been I've been a little precious with, like, no.

Aaron

01:09:43 – 01:10:00

We have to let the the madness flow. Right. Like, some part some part of that is true, but some part of it needs, like, guardrails. And I'm trying to figure out where those where I can draw those guardrails without, like, losing the magic of the mania. You know?

Ian

01:10:00 – 01:10:09

Yeah. Yeah. That's why I love Sanderson's whole thing there, and I I'm trying to make it work for me too. I haven't found, like, the right metric, I guess. But, like, like, this is just words a day.

Ian

01:10:09 – 01:10:22

It's like, he's like, this is what I do. I wanna be creative, and I wanna produce these stories. And I have a lot of things I wanna do in my career. And I know the only way I'm gonna actually do them is to, like, sit down and do them. And so I have this metric.

Aaron

01:10:22 – 01:10:23

Right? That's like

Ian

01:10:23 – 01:10:37

I can judge myself against and know. And then after I've accomplished my daily goal, I can go I might be playing video games. It might be right for other books because that's what I was inspired to do in the extra time. Right? It's like that's with the you aspect.

Ian

01:10:37 – 01:10:42

Right? Yeah. And the extra time, you go do an open source terminal app or whatever. Right? Like, great.

Ian

01:10:42 – 01:10:48

That's fine. But but the core part is on some type of structured

Aaron

01:10:49 – 01:10:49

Right.

Ian

01:10:49 – 01:11:06

Rails so that you're producing the stuff you wanna produce and do, and then but still with the time to be out there. Because otherwise, you also put yourself in hard spots. Like, when you had your post at the start of the year, then you're like, you're gonna do a hundred YouTube videos. I was like, I don't I don't like that for you. That's a lot of pressure.

Ian

01:11:06 – 01:11:10

Like, a hundred is a lot of pressure. Is a tremendous number of videos. That's, like, one

Aaron

01:11:10 – 01:11:10

every day.

Ian

01:11:10 – 01:11:21

All year long. Mhmm. So that's like an unrealistic goal. But if it's like, hey, I'm gonna work eight hours a week on YouTube videos as marketing. Like, you could totally do that.

Ian

01:11:21 – 01:11:33

And like, who, whatever number comes out at the end of that, maybe sometimes it's two a week. Maybe sometimes it's one in two weeks. So it doesn't really matter. Like Mhmm. It's just that every, every month you are progressing, right, towards the goals.

Ian

01:11:34 – 01:11:35

So it's kinda like that.

Aaron

01:11:35 – 01:11:46

That's an interesting, that's an interesting way to, to divvy it up. The things that, like, need to be done that I don't wanna do need to go on the schedule. Right.

Ian

01:11:46 – 01:11:49

Yeah. Just on the calendar. Literally on the

Aaron

01:11:49 – 01:12:06

calendar. The things that are, like, make a YouTube video about some basic Postgres thing, some basic SQLite thing. I'm un I'm uninspired by that. Like, I'm I don't sit down and think, oh, I should do a video about how, you know, gen indexes work. It's like, I don't really care.

Aaron

01:12:06 – 01:12:28

Like but that would be good. That would sell postgres courses, and then that would put food on our families. And so that, like, that needs to go on a schedule. And I've always been I've always known rather input goals are better than output goals. Like input goal being spend eight hours, output goal being produce a hundred videos.

Aaron

01:12:28 – 01:12:35

And so I think that is probably I've known that. I've not always, like, internalized that.

Ian

01:12:35 – 01:12:46

Yeah. Definitely not my specialty either. And, like, maybe even, like, literally on the calendar. Like, I've definitely known people who had a lot of success with that. I've been trying it in a few spots, and it's been okay.

Ian

01:12:47 – 01:12:54

But, yeah, like, you know, then you just know it's like, hey. It's Tuesday. Tuesday is YouTube video day. Right? Like and, like, you know, you have to think about the other stuff.

Ian

01:12:54 – 01:13:08

It's, like, it's just automatic. But, you know, it's a little different than the Sanders away, but that same general idea of, like, some structure to the to the inputs. But, yeah, I like the way I haven't ever thought about that way. That's that's interesting. Yeah.

Ian

01:13:08 – 01:13:10

Input input goals versus output goals. Yeah.

Aaron

01:13:10 – 01:13:12

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

01:13:12 – 01:13:12

I like that.

Aaron

01:13:12 – 01:13:25

It's interesting. I I don't know that I have always viewed my work as, like, a creative act, and I don't know that it always has been, to be fair. I mean, there was a time where I was a marketing data analyst, and it was like, boy,

Ian

01:13:25 – 01:13:25

this is

Aaron

01:13:25 – 01:13:40

not a creative act. Yeah. But I think in the in the recent years, it has become more of, like, a creative act. And with that comes the stuff that, like, plagues all creatives, which is the blank page. Like, it's just like, what am I gonna create here?

Aaron

01:13:40 – 01:13:46

This is really daunting. And Yeah. Yeah. That needs to be, addressed head on, probably. So

Ian

01:13:46 – 01:14:02

Well, some of that stuff, I could imagine you systemizing, you know, and, like, then maybe other people can do it. Parts of it. Yeah. You know? Like, if you really get a cadence with the YouTube videos, like, maybe there's just somebody else who does some of those, like, gin index explainers, you know, or whatever.

Ian

01:14:02 – 01:14:12

Yeah. Yeah. Potentially, once you get, like, really dialed in on, like, the format and, like, we talked about this before, but, like, the mister beast. Like, you just have Aaron's rules of YouTube video creation. Right?

Ian

01:14:12 – 01:14:24

This is how we do it, and this is the formula. And, you know, it obviously has to be tweaked over time, but probably would make it easier to fold than other people, potentially, at least. It's hard because you are the face of it. But Right.

Aaron

01:14:24 – 01:14:45

And that's also what I'm trying to Steve and I both are. I think Steve probably knows and is trying to convince me, and I'm trying to come come by it, like, from first principles, like an idiot. But I'm trying to figure out, like, where is the value in what I do. Right? So because if I can figure out where the value is, I know where the stuff that doesn't matter is, and I can have other people do that.

Ian

01:14:45 – 01:14:46

Right.

Aaron

01:14:46 – 01:15:05

I have long been of the idea that a lot of the value in what I do is the behind the scenes, like, research, learning, discovery, all of that. And then the value is in communicating that to the public. And there's an argument to be made that the value is just in communicating that to the public. So Right. Right.

Aaron

01:15:05 – 01:15:29

Maybe I'm not responsible for learning everything about the internals of Postgres and then compressing it into something that is, like, meaningful. Maybe someone else does that, and I just deliver it. That feels weird to me. And so I'm trying to figure out, like, where in this whole chain of things that we do as a company, where do I add value and where's my, labor undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know?

Ian

01:15:29 – 01:15:55

I I could also see something if if you wanted to, like, play with how you're more naturally inclined, another route to this might be like, alright. Let's say you were gonna do eight hours a week. But instead of the it being eight hours every week, you do these chunks. And it's like like how, like, how you built the courses, but for, like, the marketing videos. Hey, I'm gonna spend a month or three weeks doing, so

Aaron

01:15:55 – 01:15:58

like a manic episode, but on marketing videos

Ian

01:15:58 – 01:16:17

I could do. Right. And now you're having the can 20 marketing videos and you just drip them out. And then six months later, okay, this is marketing month where I go manic on marketing angles and videos and research and making the videos. And then you put that aside for another six months or whatever the cadence needs to be.

Ian

01:16:17 – 01:16:18

You know, three months, six months, whatever.

Aaron

01:16:19 – 01:16:20

That is interesting. Yeah.

Ian

01:16:20 – 01:16:27

Could be another way to approach it. Like you still could math it out. Right. And do like, what are the hour I wanna do eight hours a week, but if I just do it all in two big chunks,

Aaron

01:16:27 – 01:16:27

right.

Ian

01:16:27 – 01:16:37

Three big chunks. Right. Okay. I'm gonna spend this many weeks just working on that. Just get totally in the zone, do it, be done with it, Move on to other stuff.

Ian

01:16:37 – 01:16:38

Let's do it again.

Aaron

01:16:39 – 01:16:49

I like that. I do like that. Yeah. I need to think about this because I do like I do like, you know, getting super deep into something. Yeah.

Aaron

01:16:49 – 01:17:06

And that that's hard to do if you're like, I'm gonna do it eight hours a week. Right. But I I don't also don't think the marketing videos require the super deep, like, like, get inside the machine that, like, Solo has required. So, maybe it doesn't matter. Yeah.

Aaron

01:17:06 – 01:17:16

I don't know. It's interesting to think about, but I do need to come up with some sort of, structure that will, not hamper my output, but but boost it.

Ian

01:17:16 – 01:17:41

So Well, the marketing videos, all unlike unlike Elon tweets, at the end of the day, YouTube database videos are the thing that's going to bring you closer to a SaaS like business where there is regular income Yep. Consistently. And that the floor is high enough that, like Right. You don't have so much pressure to make new videos and big launches and all that stuff. Right?

Ian

01:17:41 – 01:17:57

So, like, one way or the other, you need the floor to be reasonable amount of money so that there's just not the constant launch launch pressure. And, I mean, there's probably other ways to this too, but the marketing videos seem like the most direct connection, I think.

Aaron

01:17:57 – 01:17:58

Oh, they definitely are.

Ian

01:17:58 – 01:18:16

Yeah. So that would make sense, obviously, to just get consistent with whether it's who cares how you produce them? Whichever way ends up working best for that. But for them to be released consistently seems like the play to help sassify the revenue stream a little bit. Mhmm.

Ian

01:18:16 – 01:18:17

Mhmm.

Aaron

01:18:17 – 01:18:21

Yep. Yeah. That's easy. That's the easiest lever to pull for sure. Right.

Aaron

01:18:21 – 01:18:27

I think if we if we make YouTube videos, money comes out the other side. So it seems relatively obvious to me.

Ian

01:18:27 – 01:18:37

What about, like, I don't know. Wes Wes seems to have, like does he have, like, a show or something too? Like, does he just I guess syntax.

Aaron

01:18:37 – 01:18:38

Yeah. West He's got syntax.

Ian

01:18:38 – 01:18:43

Yeah. I guess it's just syntax. I don't know if he did other stuff, though. And he does I don't,

Aaron

01:18:43 – 01:18:47

yeah, I don't know his financial arrangement. I know Syntax, I think, was purchased by Century.

Ian

01:18:47 – 01:18:49

So I guess he's just getting

Aaron

01:18:49 – 01:18:55

paid for that. I guess I guess he's maybe Century and thought for sale. Yeah. % for sale.

Ian

01:18:55 – 01:18:57

We already have an agreement. If the right people We

Aaron

01:18:57 – 01:19:00

have an agreement. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it is, we'll take it.

Ian

01:19:00 – 01:19:01

Yeah. Century wants to buy us

Aaron

01:19:01 – 01:19:02

and Please.

Ian

01:19:02 – 01:19:04

In the Laravel Circle. Come on, Century. We're we're

Aaron

01:19:04 – 01:19:13

Yeah. Century, CloudFlare, whoever whoever wants to buy CloudFlare. Fly dot I o, if you wanna buy a podcast, we're for sale. Yeah. Come on.

Aaron

01:19:14 – 01:19:15

Whatever you got.

Ian

01:19:15 – 01:19:20

Oh, yeah. But yes. Okay. So yeah. I don't know.

Aaron

01:19:20 – 01:19:29

Much to consider. It's it's a tale it's a tale as old as time, but it is now, at my doorstep, and I'm trying to figure it out. You know?

Ian

01:19:30 – 01:19:34

Yeah. You gotta let the people know you're out there. That's the thing. Yeah. It's the eternal power.

Aaron

01:19:34 – 01:19:36

Get you. That is how they get

Ian

01:19:36 – 01:19:36

know about it.

Aaron

01:19:36 – 01:19:53

Fortunately fortunately, I do think marketing and making a spectacle comes easy to me and comes naturally to me. Mhmm. But it's the whole, like, I wanna be in a cave for three weeks working on stuff. And then I pop up, and I'm like, ah, let's do marketing. It's easy.

Aaron

01:19:53 – 01:19:57

It's fun. But I just it needs to be more consistent. You know?

Ian

01:19:57 – 01:20:04

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I think you got some angles here to maybe look at. I think it's possible. I think you're gonna do it.

Ian

01:20:05 – 01:20:06

It's gonna happen. I think so.

Aaron

01:20:07 – 01:20:13

I am I am continually growing as a, both a business owner and a person, and we're getting closer to, I think, what is optimal.

Ian

01:20:13 – 01:20:31

So Well, no. These things are super hard. I definitely find that, like, all these type of, like, business y just kinda have to grind them out a little bit. Things are just so incredibly hard when you have the other real life stuff going on. Like, that is the stuff that just gets injected because it's just like, oh, the HVAC's still broken.

Ian

01:20:31 – 01:20:39

It's broken again. I'm sending threatening emails. Like, these are not like, that is taking up your, like, grind it out, grind it just through it.

Aaron

01:20:39 – 01:20:44

Back to Germany. We're finding a nanny. It's like, It's all it's all happening.

Ian

01:20:44 – 01:20:53

All that stuff eats up the grind it out energy, so you don't really have the grind it out energy. And so you can still come up with the exciting fun stuff that you

Aaron

01:20:53 – 01:20:56

just get ground down. Yes.

Ian

01:20:56 – 01:21:04

And, oh, you you could do, like, hey. I'll go work on this open source thing that I just I'm I'm literally making why not a terminal app? Right? It's fun. You're interested in it.

Ian

01:21:04 – 01:21:12

Right? And that you could build the energy for. But the building energy for, like, okay. Like, do these 10 marketing videos, like, that energy is already being used.

Aaron

01:21:12 – 01:21:15

That is Yes. All of this other stuff. Point. Yes. Yeah.

Aaron

01:21:15 – 01:21:16

Fantastic distinction.

Ian

01:21:16 – 01:21:22

I don't I don't really have, like, great advice on how to I feel like some of it just has to, like, work for

Aaron

01:21:22 – 01:21:24

you. Rented a house. Yeah. Yeah. Like, at the

Ian

01:21:24 – 01:21:32

end of the day, you have four kids. Stuff's gonna come up. You got a house. Stuff's gonna come up, like and you're just gonna go through those waves a little bit. Health stuff comes up, whatever.

Ian

01:21:32 – 01:21:49

Like, I felt like this a lot in the last year with, like, health stuff. Like, oh, like, by the time you, like, get through going to the doctor and doing whatever, you're, like, don't have, like, a ton of energy for the grinded out parts. Yeah. I don't know. But it's trickier because you're kind of at the beginning here, so it's a little it's a little risky for you.

Aaron

01:21:49 – 01:21:51

At the beginning of all of it. Yeah.

Ian

01:21:51 – 01:22:00

So that is where I do like the idea. The Sanderson approach of, accountability might be if you can make To thyself. That way too. Right. To yourself.

Ian

01:22:00 – 01:22:11

Yeah. He doesn't publish. He doesn't I mean, you know what he's doing because he does say, I think I think he guys said the number, but it's like, it's not like every day he's published. Although he does do this thing. Have you watched any of his daily or weekly updates?

Ian

01:22:12 – 01:22:24

No. Might be worth going watching some of his weekly updates. He does this, like, two to seven minute little videos once a week. And this is his public accountability, which is sort of interesting because he does this whole thing. He was like, he's like, ping.

Ian

01:22:24 – 01:22:37

And he does this little, this little graphic come up. That's like whatever projects he's working on, he gives the percentage complete. Cool. So since he knows how many words it takes to write the book, or he has a target number, it's not like precise. Yeah.

Ian

01:22:37 – 01:22:50

Totally, but you know, he knows it's gonna be 400,000 words and he knows he writes 2,500 words a day. So he knows how, when it's gonna be about done. So he says, okay, I'm at 200,000 words. So that's 50% done. And he gives us little update and it's like, the number's always going up.

Ian

01:22:51 – 01:23:02

And, I mean, he's sort of a machine and totally insane. So I don't know. I don't know if this is totally realistic, but there he does have this little public accountability aspect too, which could I see a Aaron Francis monthly update? I could see something

Aaron

01:23:02 – 01:23:02

like that.

Ian

01:23:02 – 01:23:14

Like You bet. Okay. Where you do, like, a little ten minute video that's like Yeah. Okay. Like, did, like, marketing did this on production of the new course where, like, 25% on that and, like, I don't know.

Ian

01:23:14 – 01:23:18

I could see something like that. Like, not like we're trying to do that everyday thing. Like, that'll be too much. Put the

Aaron

01:23:18 – 01:23:18

Alright.

Ian

01:23:19 – 01:23:22

Once a month or some whatever cadence makes sense.

Aaron

01:23:22 – 01:23:26

Yeah. That would help that would help, that would help structure things.

Ian

01:23:26 – 01:23:28

Yeah. Might be adding to the structure.

Aaron

01:23:28 – 01:23:29

Yeah.

Ian

01:23:29 – 01:23:33

Yeah. A little bit. It's like, oh, I know. I wanna get some percentage. Even on a slow month, it's like, hey.

Ian

01:23:33 – 01:23:43

If I can get a little bit chipped away so I can report it's 27% instead of 22%. Like, great. Whatever. So yeah. I don't know.

Ian

01:23:43 – 01:23:50

Not everything maps from his world to our world exactly, but there's something there too. Yeah. I would I would watch a few of those. It's pretty cool.

Aaron

01:23:50 – 01:23:52

It's close enough. It's directional.

Ian

01:23:52 – 01:23:57

Gives his empire update, which since you have your empire of the different worlds, he he has, like,

Aaron

01:23:57 – 01:23:58

that same thing.

Ian

01:23:58 – 01:24:06

Here's the books we're selling and what's going on with them. Here's the percentage of the new product projects. What's going on with them? Oh, we got this conference. Here's what's up with that.

Ian

01:24:06 – 01:24:13

So he just has this little five minute video of, like, what's going on in the Sanderson empire. It's pretty cool.

Aaron

01:24:13 – 01:24:19

I like it. Okay. I like it. I'll watch some of those. I'll come up with a structure, and we'll report back.

Ian

01:24:19 – 01:24:22

Cool. There we go. Getting good stuff done on the pod today.

Aaron

01:24:22 – 01:24:25

The Sanderson pod. Great pod. You know?

Ian

01:24:25 – 01:24:28

We I'm gonna get you out there to fully and learn to a Sanderson pod.

Aaron

01:24:28 – 01:24:31

I love it. You learn things. I'm mostly technical. It's crazy.

Ian

01:24:32 – 01:24:39

He's so good. That's a he's such a inspiration as, like, on the business end. It's crazy. And, yeah, I like the books, so it's win win. Alright, man.

Ian

01:24:39 – 01:24:44

I think that was a good up. We're good. Alright. People Beat us out so far. Worth.

Ian

01:24:45 – 01:24:59

Alright. If you wanna find the old episodes, if you wanna sponsor the show, get your ad read. Mostly technical.com has everything you need. Go check it out. It's mostly technical.com.

Ian

01:24:59 – 01:25:05

Old episodes, sponsor information, contact this information, all that stuff. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

Aaron

01:25:05 – 01:25:06

See you.

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