The Layoff

March 12, 2024

Ian & Aaron discuss being laid off, what comes next for Aaron, why layoffs always go bad, good free tiers vs. bad free tiers, & more. Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com. Sent questions or feedback to mostlytechnicalpodcast@gmail.com.
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Transcript

Ian
00:00:00 – 00:00:01
Hello?
Aaron
00:00:02 – 00:00:07
Hello. The gifted takes men. Did you see that on Twitter? Somebody called you. I I know you saw it.
Aaron
00:00:07 – 00:00:08
You retweeted it.
Ian
00:00:09 – 00:00:09
So exciting.
Aaron
00:00:10 – 00:00:17
I knew as soon as as soon as he called you a gifted takes man, I was like, oh, no. This is gonna be Ian's new identity.
Ian
00:00:18 – 00:00:27
What a way with words. I was thinking, like, a neon sign, like, right up here behind me. Like, the gifted takes man just, like, maybe a arrow. Yeah. Something like that.
Ian
00:00:27 – 00:00:28
But keep it subtle, but, like
Aaron
00:00:29 – 00:00:31
I'm I'm totally I'm totally here for it.
Ian
00:00:33 – 00:00:38
Well, a lot's happened since, last recording just a week ago. A lot going on.
Aaron
00:00:38 – 00:00:45
Should we, should we bury the lead and and not talk about it for, like, 45 minutes and make people make people sit through? Socks?
Ian
00:00:45 – 00:00:46
Should we still talk
Aaron
00:00:46 – 00:00:51
about socks? Socks socks and diapers for 45 minutes.
Ian
00:00:51 – 00:00:56
Yeah. Maybe a little diet Coke segment. I actually do have a diet Coke segment in here, to be honest with you, but
Aaron
00:00:56 – 00:00:58
That's good. There's a lot of diet Coke content.
Ian
00:01:00 – 00:01:04
Alright. Well, maybe you wanna hit us up with, what's going on? It was a lot
Aaron
00:01:04 – 00:01:12
of laid off. So in in a way, Ian, you and I are the same because we don't have bosses. Right? So we're just like, you know, it's great. It's a good feeling.
Aaron
00:01:12 – 00:01:26
I love not having a boss. Awesome. So I got laid off from playing a scale last week, and I that's correct. I do not have a boss. However, I do not I also don't have any income, so I think that's maybe the biggest that's maybe
Ian
00:01:26 – 00:01:28
the biggest problem. Yeah. That's a bit of a problem.
Aaron
00:01:28 – 00:01:35
It I'm comfortable. So getting laid off, great for content. So great for con is yay. Yeah. Numbers
Ian
00:01:35 – 00:01:36
through the roof.
Aaron
00:01:36 – 00:01:37
Oh my god.
Ian
00:01:37 – 00:01:40
This is gonna be our biggest episode by far. It's gonna be crazy.
Aaron
00:01:40 – 00:01:50
Exactly. So listen. We'll do let's do it a little bit up at the top here. You should subscribe to this podcast. I know you're just here because I got laid off, and it's a juicy it's a juicy thing.
Aaron
00:01:50 – 00:01:57
Listen. I don't I don't care if you're here just here to hear the layoff story. That's great. Go ahead and subscribe. I don't have any I don't have any money.
Aaron
00:01:57 – 00:02:07
I got a 1000000 kids. We'll even do ads on this show, but maybe one day. But you know what would make me feel great? If you subscribed to your listener, that would be amazing. Or maybe even tweet at us.
Aaron
00:02:07 – 00:02:09
That would be awesome. We would love it.
Ian
00:02:09 – 00:02:12
Be awesome. You're gonna love it. Everybody loves it. You're gonna love it. Welcome.
Aaron
00:02:12 – 00:02:19
It's hysterical. We we barely talk about anything, but it's the funniest thing in the world, so stay a while.
Ian
00:02:19 – 00:02:24
Yes. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. So okay. You're laid off, but
Aaron
00:02:24 – 00:02:25
I'm laid off.
Ian
00:02:25 – 00:02:40
I guess we I would wanna say upfront that, you know, you're working out your severance agreement. That's all a little bit in flux, so there's gonna be some things you can't talk about. So I might have a little bit of Ian's corner here and there to talk about some things you might not be able to chime in on.
Aaron
00:02:40 – 00:02:45
You can have as many corners as you want, and I will just smile along.
Ian
00:02:45 – 00:03:10
For people who aren't aware too, even after, you know, very, literally like a 100% of the time, when you have a severance agreement, like you're gonna have various nondisclosure clauses and things. So there's gonna be some stuff you can just never talk about. The other employees at PlanetScale are never gonna be able to talk about, so or the former employees. So, that's just the way it goes, but we I think we'll be able to cover quite a bit here, and, I will See, this is why
Aaron
00:03:10 – 00:03:15
I'm glad you're you're business dad because you you're a reason you're the reasonable adult in the room. You know all of this stuff.
Ian
00:03:16 – 00:03:17
I've had to do them. So I I
Aaron
00:03:17 – 00:03:18
know it's
Ian
00:03:18 – 00:03:33
like, it's not it's not fun, but it is it is what it is. So, all right. So what happened? So last Monday, I mean, we were talking about the YouTube channel and how much you've grown it and I know. The studio you're building and I know.
Ian
00:03:33 – 00:03:38
We we were taught literally talking about this stuff last week. Tuesday, you're like, hey. Guess what? I got laid off.
Aaron
00:03:38 – 00:03:52
So Imagine imagine my my embarrassment. Yeah. Imagine coming on the show and being like, I'm ready to get back at it, baby. And then yeah.
Ian
00:03:52 – 00:03:57
But, honey, you're coming back off maternity leave. That's why you this was maternity leave was over last Friday or whatever it was. Like
Aaron
00:03:57 – 00:03:58
Yeah. I was just
Ian
00:03:59 – 00:03:59
my gosh.
Aaron
00:03:59 – 00:04:11
On Friday, and then on Wednesday, I got laid off. So yeah. A little bit a little bit of egg on my face there because I'm like, let's get back at it. Let's make some waves. I did make some waves.
Aaron
00:04:11 – 00:04:26
However, as You did. Made some sympathetic waves instead of impressive waves, but waves nonetheless. Yep. So, yeah, I, you know, I was finishing out the studio, which looks great, by the way. I know.
Aaron
00:04:26 – 00:04:26
I don't know if you
Ian
00:04:27 – 00:04:27
pictures look awesome.
Aaron
00:04:27 – 00:04:31
Pictures, but the Aaron Francis studio of light and Sound looks amazing.
Ian
00:04:31 – 00:04:37
Much better name, by the way. Yeah. Great. We already a big upside here is that the name is way, way better.
Aaron
00:04:37 – 00:04:46
So The name is awesome. It's it's kinda it's honestly, it was a placeholder name, but I kinda like the wordiness of it. The Aaron Francis Studio of Light and Sound. It's like, wow. That really hits.
Ian
00:04:46 – 00:04:53
It's like a Highlander, like, school for kids who can't read good kind of thing, but, like, yeah, more positive.
Aaron
00:04:54 – 00:05:15
I actually stole the the the ethos or the feeling from a bit on 30 Rock where Tracy Jordan's fake son opens a karate studio, and it's like the Tracy Jordan Karate Studio Institute of Learning or something. I was like, that's funny. I I kinda I kinda like that bit. I'm gonna steal it. All of my bits are stolen.
Aaron
00:05:15 – 00:05:17
So everything's dream
Ian
00:05:17 – 00:05:17
is got
Aaron
00:05:17 – 00:05:36
laid off on Wednesday. Fortunately, I had booked a midday showing of Dune 2, which you're such a no man because great movie. You're you're so you're just you and Matt Wintzing are just no men. You just gotta you gotta be a yes man. And I went and saw, so I got laid off and then immediately went and saw Dune 2.
Aaron
00:05:37 – 00:05:45
And It worked out. That worked out great. That was, like, my my last week of paternity. Like, hey. Let's do something you wouldn't normally be able to do.
Aaron
00:05:45 – 00:05:48
Right. Now I can normally do it every single day, so
Ian
00:05:48 – 00:05:49
it's like You could go to the movies every day.
Aaron
00:05:49 – 00:05:52
It's not quite special. Yeah. Get yourself more time.
Ian
00:05:52 – 00:05:53
So many times.
Aaron
00:05:53 – 00:05:56
I might as well go see it in 70 millimeter now. You know? I got
Ian
00:05:56 – 00:05:57
time. I wanna do that.
Aaron
00:05:57 – 00:06:03
Although it is expensive. And as we've discussed, I don't have the money, so we'll see. Gotta work. It was great. Good.
Aaron
00:06:03 – 00:06:12
Great movie. I went to, Alamo Drafthouse, which is at least a thing in the south. I don't know if it exists everywhere. Do you have this up there?
Ian
00:06:12 – 00:06:15
Like, in Yonkers, which is like an hour from here.
Aaron
00:06:15 – 00:06:16
Yonkers is not. I have I have I have I have I have I
Ian
00:06:16 – 00:06:23
have one time, but, like, it's like a special trip you have to go on. Like, I don't care about this movie enough to, like, drive an hour and change to go
Aaron
00:06:23 – 00:06:31
see it. So So just a little side tangent because you know what? What what else do I have to do? We started early. We're gonna go late.
Aaron
00:06:31 – 00:06:32
We go
Ian
00:06:32 – 00:06:34
4 hours. Yeah. We're gonna give it to talk.
Aaron
00:06:34 – 00:06:50
Buckle up, people. So side tangent on Alamo Drafthouse. It's amazing. If you've ever been to a studio movie grill, and you think that it's Alamo Drafthouse, you're a 100% wrong. Studio movie grill is like is like the lowbrow version
Ian
00:06:51 – 00:06:52
of
Aaron
00:06:52 – 00:07:06
Alamo Drafthouse. At Alamo, especially especially the new ones, the ones built in the last, you know, 5, 10 years. At Alamo, every seat is a recliner. Every seat has a built in table like the, you know, 2 seats share a table in the middle. Yep.
Aaron
00:07:06 – 00:07:33
And the best part is so, like, you will get kicked out if you talk or you use your phone. They will kick you out of the theater immediately. You get one warning. And the way that they do it is, so you raise these or like you write down what your order is, and then you raise it up on a little card because there's no talking even even amongst the waitstaff. To be a movie girl, they'll walk in in the middle of a fight scene of the avengers, and they'll be like, hey.
Aaron
00:07:33 – 00:07:34
What do you want? I'm
Ian
00:07:34 – 00:07:35
like, I'm trying
Aaron
00:07:35 – 00:07:46
to watch a movie here. Right. But at Alamo, you have to write everything down, and it's a it's a snitches get riches situation. So if somebody's talking, you can write it down and be like, hey. This guy's talking, and they'll come in and be like, hey.
Aaron
00:07:46 – 00:07:58
We heard you were talking one more time, and you get kicked out. So saw Dune 2 at Alamo and then got out of the movie and was like, oh, shoot. I'm still laid off, aren't I? What what do I do? That was fun.
Aaron
00:07:58 – 00:08:10
What do I do now? Yeah. And so then, you know, kinda kinda went from there. But, yeah, the the whole the whole Monday come on the pod, get ready to get freaking pumped. Wednesday, oopsie doopsie.
Ian
00:08:12 – 00:08:12
So
Aaron
00:08:13 – 00:08:16
Not super great for the We you'll be go.
Ian
00:08:16 – 00:08:21
I don't wanna go past that. We we we're already on the side tangent. We gotta talk to you quickly about Dune 2.
Aaron
00:08:21 – 00:08:23
Oh, yeah. Tell me Dune 2.
Ian
00:08:23 – 00:08:26
So I agree. Like, I I like the movie overall. It's a good movie.
Aaron
00:08:26 – 00:08:27
You're gonna waffle.
Ian
00:08:27 – 00:08:35
You can't tell me that when Christopher Walken gets on there and he's like, we need more cowbell here, that that wasn't disheartening.
Aaron
00:08:35 – 00:08:36
Yeah.
Ian
00:08:36 – 00:08:40
Didn't that pull you out of the movie a little bit? Just his voice. Didn't it pull his
Aaron
00:08:40 – 00:08:44
out a little bit? His voice and his, like, his his facial expressions.
Ian
00:08:44 – 00:08:46
Yeah. Yeah. Acting was bad.
Aaron
00:08:46 – 00:08:50
It was a surprising casting choice. I'm not gonna lie.
Ian
00:08:51 – 00:08:52
Right. It's a little distracting.
Aaron
00:08:52 – 00:08:55
Knowing like, I knew ahead of time that he was in it because you
Ian
00:08:56 – 00:08:56
Right.
Aaron
00:08:56 – 00:09:05
You DM'd and they're like, that is sucks. Like, don't tell me that. Right. So part of me is just wanna be just wants to be the anti Ian and be like, oh, it's great. I loved it.
Aaron
00:09:05 – 00:09:07
We couldn't barely couldn't even tell it was him. They
Ian
00:09:07 – 00:09:10
didn't write that. Anymore. Why why why wasn't he in 2 thirds
Aaron
00:09:10 – 00:09:22
of movies? Justice for walking. Yeah. It was a little it was a little bit distracting. In the same way that in Interstellar, great movie, they end up on this planet and wake this guy up, and it's a cold Matt Damon.
Aaron
00:09:22 – 00:09:23
And you're like, what? Yeah.
Ian
00:09:23 – 00:09:26
Who do you think it's here? Yeah. Matt Damon. Yeah. Same guy.
Ian
00:09:26 – 00:09:27
Yeah.
Aaron
00:09:27 – 00:09:35
The SNL bit. There's no way that Matt Damon just woke up and is wrapped in foil right now. Right. So, yeah, it's distracting too. Yeah.
Aaron
00:09:35 – 00:09:39
Can you imagine being so famous that people are like, yeah. You can't be in that movie. It's
Ian
00:09:39 – 00:09:41
distracting. You
Aaron
00:09:41 – 00:09:41
have to
Ian
00:09:41 – 00:09:42
be a little bit more
Aaron
00:09:42 – 00:09:43
of nobody.
Ian
00:09:43 – 00:09:48
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I used Matt Damon. The acting was good once he woke up and you got past that.
Ian
00:09:48 – 00:09:50
Like, Chris Rock and the acting, the voice, the whole thing was
Aaron
00:09:51 – 00:09:53
You really think they cut a little bit out in in post?
Ian
00:09:54 – 00:10:05
Maybe. I mean, it was bad, don't you think? Like, I don't know. Like, he didn't the whole last scene, he didn't even talk. It's like he's just standing there weirdly and, like, I'm like, it seems like he's supposed to say something, but then he doesn't.
Ian
00:10:05 – 00:10:07
Like Yeah. That was it was weird.
Aaron
00:10:07 – 00:10:17
Surprise you since I'm such a connoisseur of the Fast and Furious films, but my bar for movies is not very high. Interesting. So, yeah, there's a little bit
Ian
00:10:17 – 00:10:18
You're not dialing that by me.
Aaron
00:10:18 – 00:10:23
Yeah. So I was like, yeah. Hell, yeah. That makes ton of sense. Let's do it, baby.
Aaron
00:10:24 – 00:10:26
The cars are in outer space? Of course, they are.
Ian
00:10:26 – 00:10:27
Of course, sir.
Aaron
00:10:27 – 00:10:33
Why not? Alright. So I was I was a little I was a little distracted throughout the movie. Right. You know?
Ian
00:10:33 – 00:10:35
Just in general, obviously.
Aaron
00:10:35 – 00:10:44
Yeah. Just in general. So I will go see it again, because what do I have to do? And I'll probably honestly see it in 70 millimeter Imax. I think that's not the one I'm in.
Aaron
00:10:44 – 00:10:46
In 70 millimeter. I would love about that.
Ian
00:10:46 – 00:10:58
Yeah. So I wanted to do that, but I was like, I can't, like, go all the way. I just wasn't in the mood to go all the way to New York City, which do I have to go for the 70 millimeter? But I do think that would be an awesome movie. Like, the big sandworms and stuff.
Aaron
00:10:58 – 00:10:59
Oh, man.
Ian
00:10:59 – 00:11:01
Yeah. As big as a building, that'd be
Aaron
00:11:01 – 00:11:04
very cool. Yeah. No spoilers, but the sandworms are big. Yeah.
Ian
00:11:04 – 00:11:09
Yeah. Big sandworms. They're awesome. Big sandworms. And I like how most people are, like, in this yeah.
Ian
00:11:09 – 00:11:09
Go ahead.
Aaron
00:11:09 – 00:11:18
Also, the guy that plays Elvis, the the Harkonnen son or nephew or whatever, I think he's the same actor that played Elvis.
Ian
00:11:18 – 00:11:21
Oh, yeah. Boston Butler or something
Aaron
00:11:21 – 00:11:22
like that. Yeah. That one. Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron
00:11:22 – 00:11:23
He's good.
Ian
00:11:23 – 00:11:24
He was really good.
Aaron
00:11:24 – 00:11:25
Yeah. He was really good.
Ian
00:11:25 – 00:11:27
And I love all the black and white scenes.
Aaron
00:11:27 – 00:11:28
Yeah.
Ian
00:11:28 – 00:11:44
Like the black and white scenes. Like they used to use more black and white. I love movies in black and white. And I just think like the modern BMLs, like make them really sharp. Like, you think of a black and white movie, it's obviously, like, usually grainy and old and fuzzy a little bit, but, like, obviously, with modern technology, it's, like, super crisp and sharp, but in the black and white
Aaron
00:11:44 – 00:11:52
with the high contrast and Yeah. So good. It almost felt like, like it was shot in infrared. You know? It kinda has like that.
Aaron
00:11:52 – 00:11:56
Yeah. It's super sharp, but it's also kinda, like, glowy. And
Ian
00:11:56 – 00:11:56
Right.
Aaron
00:11:57 – 00:11:58
The contrast is so high.
Ian
00:11:59 – 00:12:01
Heavy in there into a high contrast. Yeah.
Aaron
00:12:01 – 00:12:03
It was it was really awesome.
Ian
00:12:03 – 00:12:05
That stadium, I thought, was awesome. I thought
Aaron
00:12:05 – 00:12:06
it was one of
Ian
00:12:06 – 00:12:11
the best scenes in the whole that show of the triangular stadium in black and white, and, like, the sand is just, like,
Aaron
00:12:11 – 00:12:12
Uh-huh.
Ian
00:12:12 – 00:12:20
Blazing white. Like, yeah, that was excellent. I love all that stuff. I love the Jenny Bezarette who comes and, like, seduces him or whatever. Like, I love the whole thing.
Ian
00:12:20 – 00:12:21
The whole thing was good.
Aaron
00:12:21 – 00:12:27
The The the not Jenny Best. That's an. That's an Ian ism.
Ian
00:12:29 – 00:12:29
The jerry better.
Aaron
00:12:29 – 00:12:32
Chipotle or whatever however you say it. Yeah. The Benny
Ian
00:12:33 – 00:12:34
Benny Jeter.
Aaron
00:12:35 – 00:12:40
Jenny Bezzer. It's a friend of mine who lives down the street The you're think you're thinking of the Benny Jezeret. Yeah.
Ian
00:12:40 – 00:12:41
Benny Jezeret.
Aaron
00:12:41 – 00:12:45
Yeah. Great. Love love the Benny Jezeret. They're so freaking awesome.
Ian
00:12:45 – 00:12:48
We got more of them in this one, which was awesome. I love all that
Aaron
00:12:48 – 00:12:48
stuff.
Ian
00:12:48 – 00:12:50
I love what's her name with the tattooed face and, like Yeah.
Aaron
00:12:50 – 00:12:52
Tattoo face. Becoming the motherfucker.
Ian
00:12:52 – 00:12:56
I love a good tattoo face. Yeah. Same. Yeah. I want a tattoo cool.
Ian
00:12:56 – 00:12:57
Yeah.
Aaron
00:12:58 – 00:13:00
Yeah. Great movie. Great movie. Great movie. Great theater.
Aaron
00:13:00 – 00:13:02
Highly recommend. Most people,
Ian
00:13:02 – 00:13:06
if they got laid off, went to Alamo Drafthouse, they would drown their sorrows in alcohol.
Aaron
00:13:06 – 00:13:07
Yeah.
Ian
00:13:07 – 00:13:08
You stuck with the you stuck with the diet Coke.
Aaron
00:13:09 – 00:13:14
Well, Ian, you know, it's a little bit about what what can you not have. And so it's like, I'm having
Ian
00:13:14 – 00:13:15
a the alcohol. Hog.
Aaron
00:13:15 – 00:13:21
Yeah. Yeah. I will say, I also had a Negroni. You know, I'm not a I'm not a teetotaler. Is that the right word?
Aaron
00:13:21 – 00:13:22
Teetotaler? I think
Ian
00:13:23 – 00:13:24
so. T
Aaron
00:13:24 – 00:13:31
to t toller. How do you say that? Someone who abstains from drinking alcohol. Man, I love it when I nail 1 just like on the fly.
Ian
00:13:31 – 00:13:33
Look at you.
Aaron
00:13:33 – 00:13:38
A t tiller. T t tiller. I don't know how to say it. I've only ever read it. Yeah.
Aaron
00:13:38 – 00:13:46
So I had a Negroni, and the guy came back and was like, hey. They can't find Negroni back there. And I'm like, well, that's because it's a mixed drink. It's a cocktail. You're gonna have to make it.
Aaron
00:13:46 – 00:13:52
It's not you're not gonna find it. So my confidence has gone down quite a bit, I'll be honest, but
Ian
00:13:52 – 00:13:54
I'll tell you how to make
Aaron
00:13:54 – 00:14:04
it. Yeah. Right. But, you know, it was noon, so I didn't wanna have, like, 4 cocktails. So I had literally 3 sodas and a and a plate of chicken tenders and felt like, this is it.
Aaron
00:14:04 – 00:14:06
I'm truly living. Yeah.
Ian
00:14:06 – 00:14:15
We got a little live photo from the, from the movie. That was great on Twitter. We appreciated that. So, yeah, so let's get into that. I think that's the next logical step.
Ian
00:14:15 – 00:14:26
It's like you announced you're laid off. Yep. Obviously, like, posted on Twitter, just kinda let people know. And I mean, what happened? I it was really pretty unbelievable to have it.
Ian
00:14:26 – 00:14:40
I mean, like, just for a full day or more. I mean, still kind of ongoing, but that first, like, 24, 36 hours was just like Aaron Francis was the main character on Twitter, which is normally a terrible
Aaron
00:14:40 – 00:14:42
thing. I was the main good guy character.
Ian
00:14:42 – 00:14:54
You were the main good guy. Like, that's such a rare thing. Like, to be the main good guy character on Twitter, just unbelievable. So so how did you feel about that? What cool things did you see in there?
Ian
00:14:54 – 00:14:57
But it was quite just an outpouring of love that was really awesome.
Aaron
00:14:57 – 00:15:33
It was it was an outpouring of love beyond my wildest expectations, and I felt really cared for. I felt like, oh, this is like this. This feels awesome. Like, I have a I have not only a lot of people on my team, but it feels like a lot of, like, really sincere, genuine people that want to see me succeed and are, like, rooting for me, like, as an individual person. And I was like, man, this is this is really cool.
Ian
00:15:33 – 00:15:33
Yeah. I
Aaron
00:15:33 – 00:15:58
should get laid off more often. Like, this is this this feels really great. Like and I think it's, I think it's a result of, you know, many things. My whole my whole thing is, like, I'm gonna be very sincere and kind and generous where I can, and it seems like everyone has come back and given me the same thing, which is super, super nice. Yeah.
Aaron
00:15:59 – 00:16:40
So, yeah, I got out of dune and was just, like, shocked by the number of responses and retweets and supportive comments and DMs and emails and was just like, this is going way better than I ever expected, honestly. Because, you know, like, I I came to so I was at a property tax company for, like, 5 years, just kinda like work in the local business, kinda dorking around on Twitter. Nobody knew who I was. I went to Tupelo. I went to 2 people after that for, like, 7 or 8 months, had a great time there.
Aaron
00:16:40 – 00:16:55
And we both, you know, Ben and I both just kind of realized like, this isn't really what tuple needs. And this isn't really what Aaron needs. So that's okay. And I knew that going in. So I like, came out of this property tax company for 5 years, went to Tuple for a second, and then went to PlanetScale.
Aaron
00:16:55 – 00:17:17
And that's when I kinda started, like, being more and more public, especially with kind of the work I was doing at PlanetScale. And I didn't I don't think it, like, my brain had adapted to, oh, there are a lot of people that are, like, super on your side now. Yeah. But this inciting incident where it's like, hey, guys. I kinda need somebody to be on my team, and everybody's like, f that.
Aaron
00:17:17 – 00:17:22
We got you, man. We're on your team. This is great. It's so wild. I was, you know, showing my wife.
Aaron
00:17:22 – 00:17:27
I was, look look at all this. Look at all this. And she's like, you don't have a job. I'm like, yeah. But look at all these people.
Ian
00:17:27 – 00:17:29
She's like, but we're broke. Oh, great.
Aaron
00:17:30 – 00:17:34
How much is each one of those people paying you individually? It's like, nothing, but it's awesome.
Ian
00:17:34 – 00:17:36
They just started GoFundMe. Like,
Aaron
00:17:37 – 00:17:40
I'm making literally tens of dollars on these impressions, babe.
Ian
00:17:41 – 00:17:56
I just think it's sort of a the timing is, like, super played into it really well, I guess, too, in a sense. Right? Like, you've had you've had these babies. People were in the loop on, like, you could have a 2nd set of twins, which is an interesting story right there. You're having some health stuff.
Ian
00:17:56 – 00:17:59
Like, you know, there's just a lot going on. People know your
Aaron
00:17:59 – 00:18:01
story a little bit. Like Doesn't it?
Ian
00:18:01 – 00:18:07
And it's like, yeah. It's very much like a movie script. And then, like, oh, like, he's having this hard time. But then you gotta go lower then. Right?
Ian
00:18:07 – 00:18:25
It's like right before the rise, it's like, no. It's hard. He's grinding. It's hard. But now something something's gotta happen to go down that next level that you just don't expect or that's Exactly.
Ian
00:18:25 – 00:18:29
The story only works if you go you gotta hit bottom for it to make it rise up.
Aaron
00:18:29 – 00:18:33
Bottom. And listen, folks. We're there. We found We're there. This is it.
Aaron
00:18:33 – 00:18:34
Oh
Ian
00:18:34 – 00:18:34
my god.
Aaron
00:18:34 – 00:18:40
This is the bottom. We're we bottomed out completely. So here's the story. Let's recap the story a little bit. Mhmm.
Aaron
00:18:40 – 00:18:43
Yeah. Found out we were having a second set of twins.
Ian
00:18:44 – 00:18:44
Right.
Aaron
00:18:44 – 00:18:52
Terrifying. Freak that this is all within the past year. Right? These twins aren't even these twins aren't even 4 months old to say nothing of being a year old. Right?
Aaron
00:18:52 – 00:18:58
Yeah. We've got 2 year old twin. We've got these we've got don't be confused. We have a first set of twins. Right?
Ian
00:18:58 – 00:18:58
So we
Aaron
00:18:58 – 00:19:06
have 2 year old twins. We find out we're having twins freak out. Like, what are we gonna do? We can't do this again. We gotta sell our house.
Aaron
00:19:06 – 00:19:19
Boom. Immediately sold our house because it's a 2 bedroom, and we're about to have a 1,000,000 kids instead of just 2. Yep. Sold the house, moved into this rental where we're at right now. So we're renting a house, and I'm thinking you'll be proud of me.
Aaron
00:19:19 – 00:19:30
I'm thinking all the while while renting, we've gotta buy a house because if I get laid off, I I there's no way I can buy a house. Right? They want that w they want that sweet, sweet w 2.
Ian
00:19:30 – 00:19:31
They'd be like a w 2.
Aaron
00:19:33 – 00:19:37
So, unbeknownst to many, we bought a house. Like, we're still in the rental
Ian
00:19:37 – 00:19:40
right now, but we bought a house.
Aaron
00:19:40 – 00:19:43
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It gets worse.
Aaron
00:19:43 – 00:19:48
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ian loves it. Yeah.
Aaron
00:19:49 – 00:19:49
A little
Ian
00:19:49 – 00:19:50
bit of hair.
Aaron
00:19:50 – 00:19:50
Hold on.
Ian
00:19:50 – 00:19:51
So you bought a house.
Aaron
00:19:51 – 00:19:53
I'm telling you. We bought a house. Yeah.
Ian
00:19:53 – 00:19:55
Near near this is very recently? Like
Aaron
00:19:56 – 00:20:01
This is this is in September.
Ian
00:20:02 – 00:20:04
Okay. And it's closed now? You own it, and you're paying
Aaron
00:20:04 – 00:20:10
We own it. We own it fully. Interesting. We are remodeling it. So
Ian
00:20:10 – 00:20:13
Okay. Oh, wow. There's a whole side quest that no
Aaron
00:20:13 – 00:20:15
one can do about. Okay. I know. I know.
Ian
00:20:15 – 00:20:17
I know. K.
Aaron
00:20:17 – 00:20:24
So you can imagine we're paying rent in this house. We have a house we're paying a mortgage on.
Ian
00:20:24 – 00:20:31
Right. Hey, guys. And we're just modeling. Are you just making stuff up now? Maybe you're just making stuff up.
Ian
00:20:31 – 00:20:31
No.
Aaron
00:20:31 – 00:20:32
Yeah. No. No. No. No.
Aaron
00:20:32 – 00:20:32
No.
Ian
00:20:32 – 00:20:32
Okay.
Aaron
00:20:32 – 00:20:34
This is the bit this is the grand reveal.
Ian
00:20:42 – 00:20:45
Right. Those Currently have currently has studio properties
Aaron
00:20:45 – 00:20:49
in the empire. Okay. 2 of which were just renting. So we're
Ian
00:20:49 – 00:20:52
just throwing Remain empty and, like Oh, yeah.
Aaron
00:20:52 – 00:20:57
And remain empty. Okay. So we bought a house. Okay. We're because we're, like, freaking out.
Aaron
00:20:57 – 00:20:59
We gotta buy we gotta buy a house.
Ian
00:20:59 – 00:20:59
Even more space.
Aaron
00:20:59 – 00:21:05
So we're in this rental. We got time. We're, like, okay. Let's take our time, find the house. We found a great house, bought it.
Aaron
00:21:05 – 00:21:16
We're starting a remodel. The au pair comes. So Jasmine from Germany arrives. So she, you know, lives with us now, and we pay for everything that she does. Then we have another set of twins.
Aaron
00:21:17 – 00:21:24
Right? So then we have 2 more babies. It's like, why do one when you could do 2? Lots of baby. So at this point, we're in we're in November.
Aaron
00:21:24 – 00:21:35
We're at Thanksgiving. We've got, 2 houses, 4 kids, one one job that will that will come back. That's The one job will come back. Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron
00:21:35 – 00:21:36
Right?
Ian
00:21:36 – 00:21:36
So don't don't lose that number. And Seems
Aaron
00:21:36 – 00:21:54
like a sing single point of failure issue. It's a single point of failure. Gotcha. In fact, it it it has failed. And so then as a treat, as a bonus, Aaron gets rheumatoid arthritis.
Aaron
00:21:55 – 00:21:55
Can't do it.
Ian
00:21:55 – 00:21:57
Little extra. Little flavor.
Aaron
00:21:57 – 00:22:06
Just a little treat. Just a little treat. Can't can't can't sit on the floor and get back up off the floor. My fingers don't straighten out. So I've got these fingers that are all wonky.
Aaron
00:22:06 – 00:22:20
Get a little get a little rheumatoid arthritis, but it's okay. Know, I'm on paternity leave, like I can, I can practice de stressing? I can crush this in my mind vice. So I'm like, I'm doing the whole we're up all night. We're up all day.
Aaron
00:22:20 – 00:22:32
We've got 2 newborns. We're barely making it. I'm on paternity leave with this disease that's just crippling my body, and then I'm like, you know what? We're back, baby. Like, kids are starting to sleep through the night.
Aaron
00:22:32 – 00:22:42
Like, I'm I have some medicine that makes me feel okay, but it still hurts. But I'm like, I'm ready. I'm ready to get back in the game. Boom. Laid off.
Aaron
00:22:42 – 00:22:49
That's it. Game over. Kids the kids stay at 4. The the adults in the household stay at 3. Yeah.
Aaron
00:22:49 – 00:23:06
The properties under management actually increase from the 2 houses to an apartment studio. And then, unfortunately, the jobs go from 1 to 0. So, yeah, it's a it's a whole it's a whole like, this is a this is a storyline. What happens next? I'm excited to see because we can't dig any deeper.
Aaron
00:23:07 – 00:23:10
There's this is the bottom. So we'll see what happens.
Ian
00:23:10 – 00:23:12
I love having a front row seat to this whole thing.
Aaron
00:23:12 – 00:23:13
It's fantastic.
Ian
00:23:14 – 00:23:29
Yeah. So I mean, one one element here is that, I mean, first of all, you just have a great attitude about it, which I think is good. You seem like you seem the little perturbed when you got laid off is probably the most perturbed that you sent to you and talk.
Aaron
00:23:29 – 00:23:30
Right? Over text.
Ian
00:23:30 – 00:23:35
But, like, you know, you rarely get perturbed. So you you were a little perturbed, I think. But
Aaron
00:23:35 – 00:23:41
Perturbed is perturbed is a good word. You know, even yeah. There's a there there's a there's a verse in the bible. You know the bible. You heard of the bible.
Aaron
00:23:41 – 00:23:43
Right? Bestseller book of all time. Great.
Ian
00:23:43 – 00:23:43
Yeah.
Aaron
00:23:43 – 00:23:52
Right in front of or behind Harry Potter series. There's a verse in there about being gentle gentle as doves. I love to be gentle. Love to be gentle. Yeah.
Aaron
00:23:52 – 00:23:55
The second half of that verse is be shrewd as serpents. And you know what?
Ian
00:23:55 – 00:23:56
Just love
Aaron
00:23:56 – 00:23:57
love to be shrewd.
Ian
00:23:57 – 00:23:58
We're moving to the shrewd
Aaron
00:23:58 – 00:24:07
as servants to be shrewd. Yeah. We're in the shrewd as servants phase. You may mistake me for a gentle dove, which I am. I'm also a shrewd serpent.
Aaron
00:24:07 – 00:24:08
So carry on.
Ian
00:24:08 – 00:24:17
I was a little perturbed. Yes. So you were perturbed. But, like, I mean, I think this conversation even shows you bounce back. You have a great attitude.
Ian
00:24:18 – 00:24:45
You're ready to to kind of figure out what's next, which I'm excited to talk about. I do think, one of the things we have to touch on in the kind of outpouring of love is I I've never seen anything like this in terms of the number of just straight up legit job offers you received on Twitter is insane, which I think, you know, I am assuming that that at least puts you at some ease. That's like like
Aaron
00:24:45 – 00:24:45
It does.
Ian
00:24:45 – 00:25:02
Listen. Like, you know, right now you can reply to one of literally probably like 30 or 40 tweets that offer you a job and get a job. So that gives you a lot of flexibility. You could take your time, maybe a little bit, figure out what you wanna do. But, yeah, but I, I don't know.
Ian
00:25:02 – 00:25:18
That was just amazing to see and just wild, but these are like people in the position, not just like, Hey, I'm some low man totem pole. I watch him and play this and I'm like, Hey, you should come work at XYZ. It's like, no. Yeah. The CEO, the, you know, lead person on marketing or whatever.
Ian
00:25:18 – 00:25:38
Like all the like right people are like, Hey, come work with us. So like, yep. An amazing spot to be, kind of an, a whole, I don't know if I wanna get into this just yet, but there's a, we gotta come back to that point a little bit about YouTube and you and PlanetScale and how these things all work. There's some interesting stuff there, but
Aaron
00:25:38 – 00:25:40
That might be in Ian's corner, but I'm excited
Ian
00:25:40 – 00:25:47
to see what we're doing. Yeah. That's Ian's corner. But alright. So you've set the stage very nicely.
Ian
00:25:49 – 00:25:57
That's kind of where we're at. So I guess where do we wanna go from here? Should we talk maybe a little bit about the planet scale end of things?
Aaron
00:25:59 – 00:26:02
What are our options? We could talk about the plan scale, end of things. We could
Ian
00:26:02 – 00:26:18
talk about it. We could go, kind of some of the businessy end of things. We could go just on, we could get into the YouTube and you and how this all works with the outpouring of job offers. I mean, that's sort of an interesting angle. I don't know.
Aaron
00:26:19 – 00:26:21
Man, there's there's a lot of there
Ian
00:26:21 – 00:26:22
are a lot of ways to go here. List though.
Aaron
00:26:22 – 00:26:35
Yeah. We do. We got so much stuff on the list. Goodness gracious. Oh, let's talk about, yeah, Let's talk about the planet scale end of things.
Aaron
00:26:35 – 00:26:38
This might be more of an Ian's Corner, but tell me yeah.
Ian
00:26:39 – 00:27:12
Okay. Well, I don't think right like, they obviously let you know, and the other people, because it was, you know, so it was more than just you and more than just marketing. It was apparently sales and marketing is kinda what they said. It sounds like from other posts on Reddit and Twitter and other places that it was some engineers and some other people too, which I'm not super surprised about. Just because once you're gonna start laying people off, presumably, you're gonna just look around for everybody you might wanna lay off and lay off everybody you can all at once, which is not surprising.
Ian
00:27:14 – 00:27:43
But I think so part of the outpouring of love was also matched by an outpouring of, hate and dislike and anger towards planet scale. And, you know, a lot of it to me so first of all, these things always go bad, right? Like you've never heard ever of like, all those layoffs went great. The company came off smelling like a rose. Like it always is gonna go poorly for the company at some level.
Ian
00:27:43 – 00:28:07
Right? Like that's just what you're signing up for when you decide you're gonna do these layoffs, you know, that that's what's gonna happen. So there's always gonna be like a baseline amount of that. But it does seem like it was more than the baseline amount, I would say. And to me, a lot of it was just how I feel like they handled it very poorly, which a lot of people have pointed out.
Ian
00:28:08 – 00:28:35
And I don't, I know it's be a little tricky for you to talk about, but I mean, they have like this announcement post and to me like a lot of people are caught up in the like That they laid people off at all which to me I'm not as bothered by that I can understand like on a personal level, like, obviously, I feel bad for the people. I obviously know you, but I can understand from a business perspective. It's like, listen. Like, we have to do something for whatever reason. We're not making enough money.
Ian
00:28:35 – 00:28:39
We're whatever. Right. And so we have to make an adjustment. Sometimes that happens. Okay.
Ian
00:28:39 – 00:28:43
I can I can deal with that? But to me, I guess what it
Aaron
00:28:43 – 00:28:45
I can too. Yeah. Right. Makes makes
Ian
00:28:46 – 00:28:49
sense. Understand on the, like, certain level. Right?
Aaron
00:28:49 – 00:29:01
I can, I can mentally ascent to the fact that, you know what? Sometimes sometimes the, revenue and the expenses don't match up quite like you want, and we gotta make the expenses go down.
Ian
00:29:01 – 00:29:11
Sure. And this is a start up. I feel like the people who took jobs here understood the level of risk they were taking on some level. Right? And so they know they're not going to work at Google.
Ian
00:29:12 – 00:29:17
Right, where it's like, but you can also get laid off from. Right? So but you're you're likely to
Aaron
00:29:17 – 00:29:18
hire people have. Yes.
Ian
00:29:18 – 00:29:32
People have recently, so nowhere is totally safe. But, you know, obviously, generally speaking, if you go somewhere big and established, it's probably a little less likely than if you go to a startup where it's more likely the things doesn't even work and it goes to 0 and everybody's fired. Right?
Aaron
00:29:32 – 00:29:33
So Yep.
Ian
00:29:33 – 00:29:52
You know, everybody's signed up for that. So I feel like there's, that's okay. But to me, what I really thought is the whole thing seemed like incredibly rushed. That's the overall impression I have is that it was rushed. And in the rushing, they made some big errors and like that post is like the biggest error.
Ian
00:29:52 – 00:30:12
So people are like, they should have a PR firm and also I don't even think they need a PR firm. I think they needed to take their time a little bit and step back and be like, is this post conveying what we wanna convey? And I can't imagine that it does. I mean, it's titled PlanetScale Forever, which is like a very bizarre just the title is bizarre. It was like, I just fired all these people.
Ian
00:30:12 – 00:30:22
I'll play a scale forever. Like, that seems like not forever. That seems like you just fired half your staff. That's the opposite of forever. Like so right there, it's very bizarre, and it just gets more bizarre as it gets into it.
Ian
00:30:22 – 00:30:42
Like, they they basically doesn't mention that they laid people off. Doesn't there's no empathy or anything like that there. Because they're trying to, I guess, I mean, it seemed mostly a post for customers. I feel like it probably should be 2 posts. Obviously like thanking the people who got them this far and like you could go that whole thing.
Ian
00:30:42 – 00:31:15
I think there's a way to do that, and be sincere about it. I would think and then, and then even the business post of it, the business side of it was somewhat bizarre and just like how it lays everything out. So, yeah, I think that that really what kicked it off is, like, the combination of, like, you're letting go people who are beloved in the community, which is always gonna be hard, and then this post that is just bad, on a couple levels there. And, again, to me, it just felt, like, really rushed. It's like, okay.
Ian
00:31:15 – 00:31:37
Like and I can even understand that. It's been so like, if I was laying a bunch of people off, like, I would just be like, I wanna get through this. I just wanna rip the Band Aid off and move on. But if you just don't take that little bit of extra time there, I feel like you rush it and then then it's it's spirals out of your control, something like very quickly. And it's definitely spiraled out of their control very, very quickly.
Ian
00:31:37 – 00:31:40
So I don't know if you have anything on the announcement post
Aaron
00:31:40 – 00:31:42
or what you're talking about. That's an interesting analysis.
Ian
00:31:44 – 00:32:07
So I will, we'll we'll go we'll move on for that. You know, I think kind of related to that, I don't know. You know? It's like, I I don't, myself, even wanna go too too far down into, negativity. But I guess to me, it's like the learning opportunity potential of it all for, like, the listeners.
Ian
00:32:07 – 00:32:33
It's like, I think it's informative to think about these things and like, you never know if you're gonna be in that spot. And it's like the other kind of main takeaway for me personally, as a business owner is like, if you're going to be the one doing this, like, you just gotta stay off Twitter. Like you just gotta stay off Twitter. Like, you can't be the CEO out there tweeting during the layoffs. You just can't be because there's not literally nothing you can say is gonna do any good, and it's only gonna do bad.
Ian
00:32:34 – 00:33:03
And the CEO of PlanetScale has had some crazy tweets that are very also bizarre and just, like, feed into this whole, like, are things spiraling in a negative way out of control? So, yeah, I don't know. Like, they got like, he had a tweet about that the average customer of Plan Scale is $270,000 in revenue, I guess, a year. Seems very unlikely to me that that would be the case. I can't imagine, like, the amount of they're just not big enough organization.
Ian
00:33:04 – 00:33:14
This is the whole thing. It doesn't make any sense. So a lot of weird stuff going on out there. So, yeah, I think that's all I really have to say about that. We should let's move on to some other stuff.
Ian
00:33:14 – 00:33:33
I think the business, the angle of it, the other kind of big thing is, they eliminated the premium tier as part of this, which I think is pretty interesting. I don't know. What are your, what is maybe just generally, what are your thoughts on the freemiums here? Like, obviously, you can't give us any details about, like Yeah. How well it did.
Ian
00:33:33 – 00:33:36
Obviously, it wasn't doing that well financially. They didn't think it was positive.
Aaron
00:33:36 – 00:33:37
They would still
Ian
00:33:37 – 00:33:44
have it. Right. So, but I don't know. What did you think about it? Like, was that something you heard a lot about or relied on?
Aaron
00:33:44 – 00:33:48
Unfortunately, unfortunately, I've been on paternity for
Ian
00:33:48 – 00:33:48
Right.
Aaron
00:33:48 – 00:33:55
You know, 3 months. And so I truly don't have any inside information because I I was logged off.
Ian
00:33:55 – 00:33:55
Right.
Aaron
00:33:55 – 00:34:28
So, yeah, anything I say is gonna be, is gonna be my own opinion. Yeah, I don't. I honestly don't have a problem with like, rolling back the free tier, like, stuff costs money. And I know from, you know, many, many public statements and the, you know, the marketing page, like, there's a lot that goes on behind the PlanetScale database. Like, it's not just a MySQL instance running on an EC 2 box.
Aaron
00:34:28 – 00:34:35
Right? It's a, you know, it's it's my SQL. It's the test. It's a couple of replicas. It's the entire like, it's the whole shebang.
Aaron
00:34:36 – 00:34:51
And so giving that away for $0 is like, oh, man, how do how do we make this work? And so should the free tier have ever existed? Man, I don't know. Moot at this point. Interesting interesting, like, philosophical question, but moot at this point.
Aaron
00:34:51 – 00:35:13
Should it exist now? Apparently not. And, like, I I just I honestly don't have a super problem with that at all. I think, you know, if there's any if there's anything to to modify, you know, at the margins, maybe it's communication, but I just don't like getting rid of the free tier makes a lot of sense to me. Getting rid of me, however, what in the world?
Ian
00:35:13 – 00:35:14
Makes less sense. Yeah.
Aaron
00:35:15 – 00:35:18
I got a little more vested interest there, but the free tier, I'm like, cool.
Ian
00:35:18 – 00:35:41
I wanna get to that. I wanna get to that in a second. So but, yeah, on the free tier, I think, we're getting, like, just pulling out learnings from this whole situation. I think when you have a a free tier, that's not zero marginal cost. So where every new customer costs you some and probably substantial amount of money
Aaron
00:35:41 – 00:35:41
in a
Ian
00:35:41 – 00:35:57
case like this. Probably. Even if it's it might be $5 Right? But $5 times a lot of free users is a lot of money. Whereas, like, in a more pure software environment, all you're costing yourself is rows in a database, and those in a database are incredibly cheap.
Ian
00:35:58 – 00:36:40
But here to provide somebody with a free service that also is like a good free service that like, yes, it's fast and is reliable and all those things is gonna cost money so yeah, should it ever have existed? Is it a good idea? Maybe not. I mean, this is sort of interesting One of the things we talked about early on in the podcast that the CEO of PlanetScale chimed in on was how I thought that the pricing page was bad and that the pricing was too low and it was odd because like the whole point of this service to me is that, like, if you aren't gonna use the thing that comes with your hosting provider, if you're not gonna use AWS RDS, if you're not gonna use Google's my SQL thing, like there has to be like a compelling reason that presumably means, so either free is a compelling reason. Right?
Ian
00:36:40 – 00:36:54
But then that's hard to make business around. Or the other direction is it's premium. Like, we're giving you something you can't get at RDS. We're giving you more reliability, more speed. We're giving you the cool emails that tell you you're missing an index or whatever.
Ian
00:36:54 – 00:36:57
Like, these are the premium features you're getting that you don't get
Aaron
00:37:00 – 00:37:00
from RDS, which is why you should go through the pain in the butt
Ian
00:37:00 – 00:37:13
of not just using RDS and use Planet c instead. And all that to me then implies that you should be charging more money. It should be a higher price. It should be not focused on people who wanna spend $29 a month because that's kind of the low end of the market there. So
Aaron
00:37:13 – 00:37:17
So what I'm what I'm realizing now is that you got me laid off.
Ian
00:37:18 – 00:37:19
Oh, well, this
Aaron
00:37:19 – 00:37:23
is the whole You, Ian. Invented a bug. You invented a bug.
Ian
00:37:23 – 00:37:24
Let me tell you.
Aaron
00:37:24 – 00:37:26
And it it exploded in my face.
Ian
00:37:27 – 00:37:39
First of all, I don't think that's totally the it might not be totally incorrect, first of all. In that way, pointing out that this is like an enterprise product and not a product that's a free meal. Lot of premium. A lot
Aaron
00:37:39 – 00:37:39
of fun.
Ian
00:37:41 – 00:37:53
I hope I'm not the one who actually pointed out to them, but they didn't realize it before then, but maybe maybe it did. Man. But then the other thing that got me feeling very bad. So when you first sent me a message, it got laid off. Like, I didn't know the rest of it.
Ian
00:37:53 – 00:38:00
So I thought just you got laid off. I was like, Like, we're always talking on the podcast about, like, all these ways Aaron can make some more money.
Aaron
00:38:00 – 00:38:01
Like, it's
Ian
00:38:01 – 00:38:05
probably not optimal for his career, like, in in house there. It's probably not the
Aaron
00:38:06 – 00:38:06
Maybe not.
Ian
00:38:06 – 00:38:17
Boss wants to hear all the time. But they fired everybody in marketing, basically, it sounds like, or the majority of the people. So it wasn't wasn't just you. So I was like, alright. It wasn't totally my fault.
Aaron
00:38:17 – 00:38:22
Not totally. But now I'm thinking it's it's no less than 40%. You're right.
Ian
00:38:22 – 00:38:27
Yeah. Something in that in that realm. For sure. Okay. So,
Aaron
00:38:29 – 00:38:29
where
Ian
00:38:29 – 00:38:32
are we gonna go? We had a sidetrack, and now I lost it. Let's see.
Aaron
00:38:32 – 00:38:37
What were you just doing? You were just doing free tier marginal cost Yeah. Premium.
Ian
00:38:37 – 00:38:39
Well, let's talk about maybe
Aaron
00:38:40 – 00:38:44
Oh, one thing I wanted to say, you were talking about the index emails.
Ian
00:38:45 – 00:38:45
Like,
Aaron
00:38:45 – 00:39:00
you know, plant scale will email email you when you miss an index. So I was gone when they shipped that, and I'm super bummed because I think that is that is super awesome. The the schema recommendation thing is, like, this is really cool. And that's
Ian
00:39:00 – 00:39:11
a real differentiator. Real differentiator. One time different. It's, like, one of those things that you're not gonna always use, but at the same time, it is very cool and something that nobody else has that Very cool.
Aaron
00:39:11 – 00:39:30
Very, like, very sticky, I think, because it will continue to email you as you, like, as you continue to do migrations and your database is gonna be like, hey. You you have that one up. Right. That is that is a super cool feature and one that would make great videos. Like, you can go through each other, like, hey.
Aaron
00:39:30 – 00:39:41
Here's why we're recommending this because, you know, look, you have a duplicate index. What's a duplicate index? Let me give you a video, make some jokes, and be folksy. And so pity. Great feature.
Aaron
00:39:41 – 00:39:41
But
Ian
00:39:42 – 00:39:47
Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean, well, this is sort of interesting. Like, this is some of the other stuff I thought would be cool to talk about.
Ian
00:39:47 – 00:40:29
Like, well, I guess, kind of to cover this, the planet scale end of it specifically. I think it's sort of interesting to think about what their business model actually is because when you fire the marketers and you fire the salespeople, and you get rid of the free tier, that's kind of a lot of the ways people normally get business. And so, like, obviously they're out there saying, like, this way we have infinite runway, which is a weird thing to say. And they, you know, presumably they're implying that now they're gonna be profitable. But like, in most subscription businesses, you have to continue to replace the customers who churn out and, like, without any of those functions, that seems difficult.
Ian
00:40:29 – 00:41:09
So I guess I guess my assumption is that they're going to rebuild parts of those functions, is my guess as, like, enter I would think with, like, enterprise salespeople, like, we're gonna go hard into enterprise. And so we don't view some of these other functions and probably the existing salespeople as the right fit for that strategy change. But they haven't said, but that would be my assumption. But, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if you have any thoughts in general about the idea of, like, obviously, it's tricky for you to talk about to some degree, but just in general, this, kind of what their business might be like going forward or what they were thinking.
Aaron
00:41:10 – 00:41:25
I'm not sure, and I'll have to tread lightly. I will say I think it makes if you're eliminating the free tier, which they've done, I think it makes sense to eliminate me. Just just me singularly. Mhmm. I don't know what you do.
Aaron
00:41:26 – 00:41:47
I don't know what you do for enterprise accounts without sales. So I'm like and that's not my world, and so it's not really even useful for me to opine on. I think the only thing I can I can say is, like, if you don't have a free tier, you don't really want YouTube videos blowing up and bringing a bunch of indie hackers to your free tier? Like
Ian
00:41:48 – 00:41:48
Right.
Aaron
00:41:49 – 00:41:56
And so, yeah. That sucks, but I kinda it kinda makes perfect sense to me. The rest of it, I can't really say too much on.
Ian
00:41:57 – 00:42:24
I think well, so that was kinda the other thing I wanna talk about because I think it's really interesting when you talk about content marketing and we can definitely, I think, talk about this and not there's not now PlanetScale specific. Because there's kind of 2 types of content marketing. There's like very keyword focused and Mhmm. Really even if it's like a video, like really focused in on like a customer's pain point or problems, something they're they're focusing on the customers who are ready to buy. So like Yep.
Ian
00:42:24 – 00:42:47
This is why Google is super rich, right? Is that it's like you type in what what's some good help desk software, and they're gonna give you a bunch of help desk software. And you are the, just that question that you asked that question means you are looking to buy help desk software. And so that's incredibly valuable. But then you have the tier, a different tier of content marketing, right.
Ian
00:42:47 – 00:42:57
Which is like the softer kind of element of like, well, how do I answer a customer service request nicely? Like that's not necessarily somebody who's looking to buy help desk software.
Aaron
00:42:57 – 00:42:59
It's like awareness marketing.
Ian
00:42:59 – 00:43:15
Right. And so, like, that was a lot of stuff obviously on YouTube that you guys were doing was like hot improving your MySQL indexes. Well, that's an interesting video. That's not necessarily people who want to buy Right. Are looking to move platforms or buy these kind of services that plan It's not
Aaron
00:43:15 – 00:43:18
CTOs looking to find a new database, and they're searching on
Ian
00:43:18 – 00:43:24
my signature 5%, not those people and 5%. 98%. Yeah. Right. 98.
Ian
00:43:24 – 00:43:49
Not those people. Right? So, so then it becomes the long game of that, which is like over time, like you're building up a cheap tier or free tier and they move up or just you get to a scale where it's just so many people that it doesn't matter if it's only 2% are relevant and actually purchased because 2% is a lot of if you have 500,000 YouTube followers or a million or whatever. Right?
Aaron
00:43:49 – 00:43:54
And And if we can, if we can bring up Cloudflare, do you know anything about Cloudflare?
Ian
00:43:55 – 00:44:00
I've heard of them. Maybe you can tell me a bit about them. They're a startup investor and Cloudflare. Hello, Cloudflare.
Aaron
00:44:00 – 00:44:03
Through the public markets. Unfortunately, through
Ian
00:44:03 – 00:44:05
the public markets. It's so ridiculous.
Aaron
00:44:05 – 00:44:07
A like a plebe, like the rest of us. Yeah.
Ian
00:44:07 – 00:44:08
Why don't you let me in early?
Aaron
00:44:08 – 00:44:35
Cloudflare has a great free tier to paid progression. And so the more free people they get, which at this point is 30 per 40% of the world, the more that people are gonna be like, alright. You know, this site is now a business site, and I'm gonna pay $20 a month or whatever it is. Yeah. But, yeah, they have a great they've got a great free to paid conversion, apparently, because they're free tier is very generous and Well, and there's also continue to do well.
Ian
00:44:35 – 00:44:48
A couple of ways to think about free tier, and I think people get there's a couple angles to a free tier, right? There's the direct, like people sign up for free and then they grow and you grow with them
Aaron
00:44:48 – 00:44:48
Mhmm.
Ian
00:44:48 – 00:45:28
And that is part of it. But I think the real value and this doesn't necessarily apply to CloudFlare, which is very interesting. CloudFlare is very similar to PlanetScale, but, in a not in a different type of company, like a more just pure software b to b type company, the free tier, the best free tiers are just pure advertising. Like the trade off you're making with the consumer is you could use this for free, but what you're going to get, give me is advertising. So like, think of like a newsletter service, like, convert kit And ConvertKit gives you the little widget that you can embed in your page to, like, how people sign up.
Ian
00:45:28 – 00:45:33
And if you're on the free tier, the widget says powered by ConvertKit or whatever it says. Right?
Aaron
00:45:33 – 00:45:34
So this is the loop.
Ian
00:45:35 – 00:45:49
Right. So this is the loop. Now you're not even necessarily worried about the free people. Like, you want more free people because the more free people is more advertising and exposes you to more people. And some percentage of those people are gonna be people who are looking for newsletter themselves.
Aaron
00:45:49 – 00:45:49
Smart.
Ian
00:45:49 – 00:46:34
And so on and so forth. So then the growing the free into paid is one avenue of making the free tier valuable, but also the free tier is in and of itself potentially valuable as advertising that you didn't pay essentially anything for as long as you are running a zero marginal cost business where it's not actually costing you money right. To host the free people or not a significant amount of money, whereas, so that's not true of plant scale, because it's costing them a significant amount of money for the free tier. And to some degree, the same was true of CloudFlare, because you're not really exposing people. It's again, like the you're generating word-of-mouth, but it still takes somebody to, like, tell you as opposed to just people being able to see it organically.
Ian
00:46:34 – 00:47:03
Yeah. But Cloudflare has done it very effectively. And I think they've also been really smart about one of the reasons I loved CloudFlare from the beginning but they actually went out and made all these deals with the network, with like the service providers in the data centers and stuff, the backbones directly. And so they have basically all this unlimited bandwidth, which is why they could do things like no egress costs where AWS charge you egress. And like we could provide all these network services because we have basically unlimited network bandwidth.
Ian
00:47:03 – 00:47:10
And so the marginal cost is close to 0, and we can absorb a bunch of free people, and still make that work.
Aaron
00:47:11 – 00:47:27
Slightly different, but somewhat the same. Cloudflare gets better the more customer the more sites they have on Cloudflare. And so to them, there is a little bit of a benefit of the free tier just having people on it because the more Yeah. Traffic that flows through their network, the better the better they are.
Ian
00:47:27 – 00:47:32
Yeah. And I know the CEO, if you listen to the, investors calls, which I do, most of
Aaron
00:47:32 – 00:47:33
them,
Ian
00:47:34 – 00:47:35
they, yeah.
Aaron
00:47:35 – 00:47:37
You're so in. You're so in.
Ian
00:47:38 – 00:48:07
Tier 2 because they, you know, they can roll things out to the free tier because they're very, like, developer oriented. They want people to build on top, and they're also basically building out their own cloud, essentially, of, like, a little bit edge cloud as opposed to, like, a traditional cloud. And so they wanna have a lot of developers and stuff so they can utilize the 3 tier also as a way to, like, just have people using these APIs and things like that, getting feedback and having those kind of loops in place before necessarily these big companies that are gonna spend 10, $20,000,000 with them.
Aaron
00:48:07 – 00:48:11
I think I think they called out the free tier in their s one and how important Yeah.
Ian
00:48:11 – 00:48:28
They've been all in on the free tier from the beginning. Yeah. So they've optimized a lot of their business around being able to support a free tier as opposed to being like, not like just a marketing thing. That's like, well, we should have a free tier and we'll have people sign up and then move up. It's like more ingrained.
Ian
00:48:29 – 00:48:30
So yeah. So
Aaron
00:48:30 – 00:48:37
That's interesting. So put a put a bow on it. What's the good free tier and what's a bad free tier? So to
Ian
00:48:37 – 00:49:01
me, the optimal free tier. I think there's other ways that may work, but the optimal free tier is has some type of advertising element where you're exposing just peep you're being exposed to your customer's customers. Like that is ideal. Love it. And then of course the free people, some of them will convert up and become paid and that's great, But you're driving value from them regardless of if they ever move up or not.
Ian
00:49:01 – 00:49:21
That if if some percentage of them ever send you additional business, you know, by people clicking those powered by links, then you're gonna be able to make that a plus, situation. Okay. And bad free tier. Yeah. It's like a business that doesn't can't derive those benefits is gonna be much harder because it's, just harder to make that flywheel work.
Ian
00:49:21 – 00:49:33
You're just giving away more and more resources and money and, you know, word's gonna get out that you can get this thing for free, which is great, but then if you can't make money off those free people, then that's bad. Like, so
Aaron
00:49:33 – 00:49:36
Bad tier high marginal cost. No no viral loop.
Ian
00:49:36 – 00:49:38
Yeah. Without the viral loop, it's tricky.
Aaron
00:49:39 – 00:49:39
Yeah.
Ian
00:49:39 – 00:49:40
In my opinion.
Aaron
00:49:41 – 00:49:42
I like that. Good take.
Ian
00:49:43 – 00:50:04
Alright. So so yeah. So what do you so what are your thoughts about the content stuff, though? Like, in terms of, the sort of, like, broad content marketing and the stuff you've kind of traditionally been doing at PlanetScale for the most part, I would say, verse more focused, the different types of company that are looking for those different things. Like, I guess, where is your mind at with that stuff?
Ian
00:50:04 – 00:50:12
So you've obviously thought about this a little bit and like, well, what I was doing maybe isn't that valuable without a free tier. So how do you feel about that?
Aaron
00:50:15 – 00:50:17
Just like Bradley across the industry.
Ian
00:50:17 – 00:50:18
Sure.
Aaron
00:50:18 – 00:50:37
I think so. I think I have good, I think I have good evidence that I did an amazing job at PlanetScale. Yeah. And I think, you know, I've got tweets from lots of very smart people. I've got, you know, performance reviews and stuff like that.
Aaron
00:50:37 – 00:51:01
I think I did a very good job. Yep. I think we have decided here, and maybe this is what, precipitated my being let go. It didn't make sense for the business, which is fine. Like, that doesn't, you know, that's not a strike against me, which is something I've had to remind myself of that, like, I executed faithfully on my duty, and it turns out my duty was not needed.
Aaron
00:51:01 – 00:51:06
It's like, that sucks, but I'm I'm proud of myself for doing a good job. Tell me.
Ian
00:51:06 – 00:51:07
I wanna do a little Ian's corner here just for a sec.
Aaron
00:51:07 – 00:51:09
Alright. Tell me in Ian's corner. I love Ian's corner.
Ian
00:51:09 – 00:51:42
A little Ian's corner is that, I guess it would make me a little bit worried on the Planet's Gulf front, because you are clearly doing an excellent job. If we just go by the raw numbers, that just public numbers of like last summer, they had a 1,000 subscribers on YouTube and now they have 40 or whatever. I don't know what the current number is, but it's some, some 40, 50 X times what they had last summer. Right. And so, so to me, it's like, okay, well, that's even in the world where like, you're going more enterprise.
Ian
00:51:42 – 00:52:06
Like if you get this channel up to 500,000, a million, which is the trajectory it's on, that's going to be valuable because you only need to close 1 or 2 or 3 or 10 customers a year from it. And it's going to be valuable enough, right. If you're at that kind of scale. So, so it's like, okay, so they did the math and we're like, well, we can't afford to let it go that long, essentially, is what they're saying. Right?
Ian
00:52:06 – 00:52:16
Like we can't keep paying Aaron, because there's even other places that could have cut. Like, I know it's like, let go the video editor, Steve, who seems like a great guy who you work with.
Aaron
00:52:16 – 00:52:16
Let's see.
Ian
00:52:16 – 00:52:43
But I could I could see that. It's like, okay, it's a little tight. We can't have a full time video editor. So we're gonna outsource that, but we're still gonna have Aaron do the videos and maybe we're gonna cut in some other places or whatever. But once you're like, no, we can't ride it out for the year or 2 years, it's gonna take to get to that half a 1000000, subscribers to then definitely make it a plus e b situation as you'd say.
Aaron
00:52:44 – 00:52:46
As you would say, you'd poke the degenerate. Yeah.
Ian
00:52:46 – 00:52:48
See? No. It's a poker term.
Aaron
00:52:48 – 00:52:52
I know it's a poker thing. No one knows the world is gonna say a plus EV thing.
Ian
00:52:52 – 00:52:52
Plus EV.
Aaron
00:52:52 – 00:52:54
You're not you're not a man of people when you
Ian
00:52:54 – 00:53:01
say plus EV. Positive, revenue expected value generating profit generating. Don't don't
Aaron
00:53:01 – 00:53:07
say that like we're all degens. Well, you know, it's a bus EV. I gotta throw are good at that point.
Ian
00:53:07 – 00:53:12
I gotta throw out some stuff for the people out there, for my people who are just like, they're out there, the poker player.
Aaron
00:53:12 – 00:53:15
Yeah. All 4 of the poker players that listen to us.
Ian
00:53:15 – 00:53:43
So I guess I'd be a little concerned on that front that it's like, it feels like, Hey, we, I mean, it's so hard. I mean, in 20 years in business, I've never had anything work as well as that was working for PlanetScale. Right? Like marketing wise. So you have something that's just clearly super working and to say, listen, we can't afford to let it ride out for the year or 2 that to become a full on juggernaut at any level, like forget the pre it doesn't matter.
Ian
00:53:43 – 00:53:54
Like they still have a base tier that's $39. It's not like the base tier is now $80,000 and, like, it's just pure, pure enterprise. It's like, no. You're gonna get some $50 signups along the way. Right.
Ian
00:53:54 – 00:54:11
And then, you could even even tweaked it a little bit. Like maybe you do do more videos that are like, let me tell you how awesome PlanetScale is specifically. And, like Right. So there's other things that could have been done, and you could have mixed that up a little bit besides just the more general type, videos. So there's a lot that could have been done there.
Ian
00:54:11 – 00:54:36
And to say, like, listen, we can't keep paying Aaron to do that because so, I mean, because there's not enough money would be the logical outcome you would think there of what you're thinking. So, so, anyway, that's kinda like a little, like, oh, I don't know. That's like it's a little tricky that you have this thing that's really on fire working, and you don't think that's worth keeping is is a little bizarre to me, a little concerning. But, anyway, considering that It's
Aaron
00:54:36 – 00:54:37
an interesting thought, Ian.
Ian
00:54:37 – 00:54:41
Yes. Exact that's why I was at Ian's corner.
Aaron
00:54:41 – 00:54:49
That is Ian's corner. I love Ian's corner. We gotta we gotta make that a regular thing. Ian talks about where I respond with, that's an interesting thought, Ian. You need
Ian
00:54:49 – 00:54:50
to keep that going.
Aaron
00:54:50 – 00:55:13
Yeah. I love that. It's a good bit. We love a bit. So broadly across the industry, I think well, I will say one is I have been very, very, like, encouraged to be, of course, recognized by all of our friends and, you know, people that that are online, super online.
Aaron
00:55:13 – 00:55:37
Like, that has been a super encouragement. Another thing specifically that has been a super encouragement is 2 giant YouTubers have called me out by name. So Theo, the JavaScript prime primarily JavaScript guy, t 3, and then the primogen, who's coming to Laracon, which if you haven't gotten your Laracon tickets and you wanna see an unemployed Aaron Francis on stage alongside the primogen and Adam Wadden and Taylor Osborne
Ian
00:55:37 – 00:55:49
not Yeah. Unemployed. That's a long that's a long way away. Then Primogen also did a very nice breakdown of the situation. So if you want a a nice little breakdown You can there, we can link to that in the show notes.
Ian
00:55:49 – 00:55:50
He
Aaron
00:55:50 – 00:56:22
did a nice job. I was I was pleased surprised and pleased to hear Theo and Prime both say specifically, Aaron Francis did a great job over there. And Theo I think Theo said, like, PlanetScale is one of the only companies to have figured out b to b YouTube. And so I think, you know, I I definitely learned a lot while I was at PlanetScale, and I think one of the things that I I noticed is a lot of companies try to do b to b YouTube, and it's just, like, it's just lame. Like, nobody watches it, and it just Right.
Aaron
00:56:22 – 00:56:31
Boring, and it sucks. And so I think across, like, the the entire industry, I think it can work. I think I've proven it can work.
Ian
00:56:31 – 00:56:31
Yeah.
Aaron
00:56:31 – 00:57:16
But it has to be done a little bit differently than I think, you know, taking a webinar and slap it in on YouTube. And so yeah. I don't know I don't know that this says much about the industry, you know, as a whole because I don't know exactly I don't know anything about, you know, plant skills, economics or, like, what their next plans are. So I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush. But I think if you have maybe if you have a free tier that works super well and is is viable, then being on YouTube, I think specifically being on YouTube, if you can crack it, it is, like, the ultimate the ultimate hack because YouTube's distribution is unbelievably large.
Aaron
00:57:16 – 00:57:31
And even, like, I was even surprised that people on YouTube, like, stumbled across it and, like, it's not it's not my audience. It's YouTube bringing people in. Yeah. And that was the thing that was surprising to me. I thought, okay.
Aaron
00:57:31 – 00:57:44
I could drive, you know, some of my friends over to YouTube, and we could get views. But that's not what happened. It was, like, an entirely separate and discreet audience altogether that YouTube delivered to us. And so I think it can totally still work. I really do.
Ian
00:57:44 – 00:57:54
Yeah. So she yeah. Like you said, the gut the way the algorithm there works is, like, if you if you hit the marks, like, it can just drive an insane amount of subscribers and
Aaron
00:57:54 – 00:58:01
views and everything. One of my plant scale videos has, like, 375,000 views. Right. Which is crazy for this type of thing. Yeah.
Aaron
00:58:01 – 00:58:05
And, like, 2 or 3 of 2 or 3 of them have a 100,000. It's like, man.
Ian
00:58:06 – 00:58:21
So that's wild. This is an interesting thing to talk about too. I think the idea that in this situation, and I think you'll be able to talk about this because it's not really about PlanetScale at all. It's about when you have somebody become the face of the organization.
Aaron
00:58:21 – 00:58:22
Interesting.
Ian
00:58:22 – 00:58:33
It's a very it's a weird spot for the business. Right? Because, like, the Aaron Francis is the face of Plan Scale, but Aaron Francis was was was the face
Aaron
00:58:33 – 00:58:33
of PlanetScale.
Ian
00:58:34 – 00:58:36
This is all where it gets weird. Right? It's like Yeah.
Aaron
00:58:36 – 00:58:37
It does. It does get weird.
Ian
00:58:37 – 00:58:49
It it gives, you know, that person has an outsized amount of influence potentially. If something happens to them, forget, like, they go, they could obviously get another job, but just anything happens them. Right? Like, they're gone. I was like,
Aaron
00:58:49 – 00:58:49
your marketing is highly dependent on this one person who Yep.
Ian
00:58:49 – 00:59:04
Is really good at what they do. So it's just a very complicated situation. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, in general.
Aaron
00:59:05 – 00:59:25
I do have a few thoughts in general, and I think, I I I knew that all along that, like, I was the face of PlanetScale, and I think the public response has proven that out. Like, there there are, like, 6 people that tweeted at me, and they're, like, I thought you were the owner of PlanetScale?
Ian
00:59:28 – 00:59:29
Yep. Exactly.
Aaron
00:59:29 – 00:59:34
Like, no. Fortunately, I was just another just another pawn.
Ian
00:59:34 – 00:59:35
I fired myself.
Aaron
00:59:36 – 00:59:50
Yeah. So I I don't know. I think it's I think it's interesting. You know, to some extent, it is a little bit risky. In this case, you know, the risk wasn't that I would leave because I was very happy there.
Aaron
00:59:50 – 01:00:19
The risk was that it they decided, you know, from a business perspective, it doesn't make sense, and, they let me go. And so, like, you know, do I feel do I feel super bad? No. Because I, like, again, feel like I did my duty and was faithful to execute on my role. But it is kind of, you know, it is kind of a risk to, like, give someone those reins, I guess, unless you know they're super gonna stay or you're super gonna keep them.
Aaron
01:00:19 – 01:00:19
Like
Ian
01:00:19 – 01:00:35
Right. Yeah. Well, that's, yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Like, I mean, I guess I wonder how much of letting you go is just there is this risk out there that, like, we're gonna have to really pay this guy a lot of money. Right.
Ian
01:00:35 – 01:00:45
One way or the other at some point. Yes. To keep him because it's just gonna be obvious that, like, if he's bringing in all the people, then, like, he's going to need an outsize.
Aaron
01:00:45 – 01:00:47
At some point, he's gonna wise up, and he's gonna
Ian
01:00:47 – 01:00:48
ask for a lot of money.
Aaron
01:00:48 – 01:00:49
He's gonna ask for a lot of money. Rude instead
Ian
01:00:49 – 01:00:56
of gentle, and he will ask for money. So that's I mean, obviously, you don't you don't know the answer to that,
Aaron
01:00:56 – 01:00:57
but, I mean, that's something I thought about.
Ian
01:00:57 – 01:01:18
I think the other thing is I mean, I saw this a long time ago with one of our competitors called Help Scout, and they had been, like, really killing the content marketing back in the beginning. And as far as I'm aware, they took the guy who was doing all that. This was all written. And I'm pretty sure they like made him a part owner. Like he wasn't originally an owner and they like gave him, like, more than just options.
Ian
01:01:18 – 01:01:23
Like, they gave him, like, a a piece and, like, wrote it out. And it's like You
Aaron
01:01:23 – 01:01:24
should tell me that 6 months ago, man.
Ian
01:01:24 – 01:01:26
Kind of the thing you have to do sometimes.
Aaron
01:01:26 – 01:01:27
Where are you now?
Ian
01:01:28 – 01:01:28
Come on.
Aaron
01:01:28 – 01:01:30
Should've let you know now.
Ian
01:01:30 – 01:01:32
Apparently, it might not gone that well for you. I don't
Aaron
01:01:32 – 01:01:34
know. Well, I think if I was part owner, I wouldn't mind.
Ian
01:01:34 – 01:01:39
Yeah. Well, no. I know. But, I mean, like, maybe they would have wised up then and been like, hey. This guy wants money.
Ian
01:01:39 – 01:01:46
Get rid of this guy. Interesting. But, yeah, it is a it is a interesting dynamic.
Aaron
01:01:47 – 01:01:55
Yeah. You brought this up you brought this up several episodes ago, and I think I I think I turned it into a impromptu Ian's corner and said, that's interesting.
Ian
01:01:57 – 01:01:58
Well, I guess we'll
Aaron
01:01:58 – 01:01:58
see it.
Ian
01:01:58 – 01:02:00
We're seeing one way that it could play out.
Aaron
01:02:00 – 01:02:01
We are.
Ian
01:02:01 – 01:02:22
It has to it's pretty much I don't think it could ever go go down the middle. I think it's kind of like it's gonna if it's if you have it successfully working, it's either gonna go towards we're gonna lavish lavish this person and they're gonna be like our spokesman or that it's not gonna work because, like, we're too dependent on them and we don't want that dependency. Yeah. But I think it would be hard to be in the middle.
Aaron
01:02:23 – 01:02:39
Yeah. I feel like, in some regards, Scott Hanselman is this way at Microsoft. I know Microsoft doesn't need him, but it does feel like he's he's a little bit of a public face to a certain community. And then I feel like who was Kelsey Hightower working for for forever? Do you know?
Ian
01:02:39 – 01:02:46
No. Or is he in that? I don't follow him that much, but I've seen him on Twitter. But, see, I think the thing, like, Microsoft is different. Right?
Ian
01:02:46 – 01:02:55
Because ultimately, they're so huge. They don't care. They're gonna be like they might they might be able to be like he might be able to get a little more money or whatever. He's doing a good job, and that's all fine. But they're just so huge.
Ian
01:02:55 – 01:03:01
Like at the end of the day, they can afford to go out and find more amazing talent if they need to. And they can do it.
Aaron
01:03:01 – 01:03:02
And they can also
Ian
01:03:02 – 01:03:02
afford to bring
Aaron
01:03:02 – 01:03:04
him 5,000,000 They
Ian
01:03:04 – 01:03:18
could do it that way too. Right? Like they have a lot of options, whereas like a, a startup is a, is harder for them to pull that off. Right. Or even just to replace you, if like, if you walk away and you start your own consulting thing, like we talked about last week on the show, right?
Aaron
01:03:18 – 01:03:19
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian
01:03:19 – 01:03:33
You left and did that. They they wouldn't be able to replace you even for more money. They would be hard. Their reach is not as big as, like, a Microsoft and things like that. So, and just, yeah, sheer dollars would be hard too.
Ian
01:03:33 – 01:03:40
So, alright. So what else we got here? Let's let's go. Let's let's switch let's switch to the future.
Aaron
01:03:41 – 01:03:42
I love the future.
Ian
01:03:42 – 01:03:43
Let's get Better.
Aaron
01:03:43 – 01:03:45
Gotta be better than the past. Right?
Ian
01:03:45 – 01:03:46
That's gotta be better. That's the
Aaron
01:03:46 – 01:03:48
best thing about the future.
Ian
01:03:48 – 01:04:04
So what are you thinking about? Obviously, you there's 50 job offers on the table. Some very impressive companies including I mean, I can I mean, CloudFlare was one of them? A lot of other big name companies, and these are just people publicly posting. So Yep.
Ian
01:04:06 – 01:04:07
So you have those opportunities.
Aaron
01:04:08 – 01:04:08
I do
Ian
01:04:08 – 01:04:27
have obviously going your own way. Like we already talked about last week. I think this kind of opens up maybe some other possibilities, like, could you have a job that's not full time and give yourself more time to do some of your own stuff. So there's a lot a lot of potential. So what are you thinking about?
Aaron
01:04:27 – 01:04:39
Well, let's, let's turn turn the tables before I poison the well on what I'm thinking about. What are you thinking about? If you were me Yeah. Or in fact, if you're brilliant, which you are.
Ian
01:04:39 – 01:04:39
I am. Yeah.
Aaron
01:04:39 – 01:04:46
What do you I'm such a What do you think is the obvious move for Aaron Francis in this situation?
Ian
01:04:46 – 01:04:47
Okay. Well, I
Aaron
01:04:47 – 01:04:48
got What's right in front of my face?
Ian
01:04:49 – 01:04:49
I'm gonna have to ask you a
Aaron
01:04:49 – 01:04:51
question, and I don't know if you
Ian
01:04:51 – 01:05:14
can answer it, but I can't answer it without the question, which is k. It depends a lot on your financial situation. Like if you are like, hey, it's pretty tight, Then my answer is gonna be probably different than if hey, we have a good amount of saved and I could take some risks I can answer both ways, I guess. Maybe, you know, it's like No. I can answer I can
Aaron
01:05:14 – 01:05:29
answer I can answer a financial position question. The Francis family, do you know completely discreet from PlanetScale Incorporated. The Francis family has plenty of runway. We're Okay. We're fine.
Aaron
01:05:29 – 01:05:30
We can take some time.
Ian
01:05:30 – 01:05:42
Okay. So then, I think in that scenario, what I would probably do is I would be leaning more towards some type of trying your own thing, I think.
Aaron
01:05:42 – 01:05:43
K. Okay.
Ian
01:05:44 – 01:05:59
Because it seems like that is a good opportunity for it. Like, if you could start up with you've already been thinking a lot this direction. Mhmm. If you get in another job, like, that's going to you're still gonna be having these thoughts, but you're gonna be trying to do a good job at the other job. And Mhmm.
Ian
01:05:59 – 01:06:15
You know, I could see that being nonoptimal in some ways, potentially. So I'd probably lean towards that. I do think, because also if you have the runway, these jobs are gonna be there. So if not every single one of them. Right?
Ian
01:06:15 – 01:06:33
But you will be able to get another job. I think we we the ship has sailed on like, you are not employable. Like you are going to be employable and you'll be fine. So if you take a year and try something risky and it doesn't work, then you'll be okay. You can just go get a job and it'll be fine.
Ian
01:06:34 – 01:06:36
My asterisk to all that.
Aaron
01:06:36 – 01:06:36
Okay.
Ian
01:06:37 – 01:06:58
Would be, I would still take some calls with the most promising of the job offers and see what they're talking about. Because maybe they're just talking about an amount of money that's so much that, it's more than you're realistically gonna do yourself, especially if you're more on this, like, consulting angle and not like building a software product or something like that.
Aaron
01:06:58 – 01:06:59
Mhmm.
Ian
01:07:00 – 01:07:25
Because ultimately, like, I mean, if you're a consultant, there's only, so there's generally a ceiling, like a few people can break through the ceiling and get into the, you know, many millions or tens of millions, but that's pretty rare. Most of the time it's like, you know, there's going to be some kind of upper limit, a million, a million and a half, whatever. Cause it's ultimately it's your time and you only have so much time. So Mhmm. So I would probably take a few of those calls and see what people are thinking.
Ian
01:07:25 – 01:07:41
And if there's something just really incredibly interesting, and incredibly, you know, lucrative that it might make sense to to go that way, then that would be motivating, of course, in its own way. Yeah. That's probably what I would be thinking if I was in your shoes.
Aaron
01:07:42 – 01:07:56
Nailed it. Got it. 10 for 10, baby. Woo hoo. So I have right now, 20 interviews booked.
Ian
01:07:56 – 01:07:57
Oh, wow. Alright.
Aaron
01:07:57 – 01:07:59
Maybe maybe more.
Ian
01:08:00 – 01:08:02
That's a great negotiating position.
Aaron
01:08:02 – 01:08:25
The rest the rest of my day, this is my nightmare, but my calendar is just totally striped with Wow. With calls. Yeah. So here's here's kinda how I'm thinking about it. I wanna take all these calls because if there's a job if there's a job that, you know, I get on the phone and it seems really compelling and they wanna give me a good amount of money, that's that's awesome.
Aaron
01:08:25 – 01:08:29
Like Right. Yeah. I love that. I love that for me. Thank you very much.
Aaron
01:08:30 – 01:08:51
So I wanna take all these calls and, like, see what's out there because this is the first time I have ever publicly hunted for a job. And I just don't know, like, I don't know what's out there. I don't know the state of the market. It's never really been on my mind. You know, I wasn't when I was playing the scale, I was very happy and didn't even, like, didn't look around.
Aaron
01:08:51 – 01:09:00
I don't know what's out there and have never, ever tweeted and been like, hey, everyone, I'm looking for a job because, like, that has never come up before.
Ian
01:09:01 – 01:09:01
Yep.
Aaron
01:09:01 – 01:09:05
So I'm very interested to talk to all these people, regardless of if I end up taking,
Ian
01:09:05 – 01:09:05
you know, I can only
Aaron
01:09:05 – 01:09:21
take one job and I may take 0 jobs, but it's still good to, like, talk to these people. And, you know, they have done me a favor by, like, reaching out, and so I would like to talk to them and see what's going on and see if I can help.
Ian
01:09:21 – 01:09:57
There is also Go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say there is also, like, we it's often, especially on Twitter, like, idealized, like, indie, whatever, bootstrapper and being your own boss and all that stuff, which it is does have amazing benefits in areas. But there is something really awesome that I do miss a lot of the, like you work in a bigger company, trying to do something that you, that a small company could just never accomplish. It's just not possible. Like you're part of a larger initiative, making something big happen in the world that Yep.
Ian
01:09:57 – 01:10:15
Just can't happen in a 10 person company. It's not what it's set up to do. And so I do think that or as a consultant or whatever. Like, this is like it's a bigger type of change. And so that is compelling, in in in if you're into that kind of thing, and it's something worth thinking about too.
Aaron
01:10:15 – 01:10:24
And that was one of the fun things about playing a skill is, like, I got to watch all these these uber geniuses build stuff, and it's like, man, the stuff the stuff we're building is very good. And I was, like,
Ian
01:10:24 – 01:10:25
proud of that.
Aaron
01:10:25 – 01:10:37
So, yeah, there's there's there's absolutely an aspect of that. Yeah. So I'm gonna take all these calls, and I'm gonna take them in good faith. If there's a good enough job, I'll take it. These aren't just like, I should just talk to people.
Aaron
01:10:37 – 01:11:00
Yeah. So I'm gonna I'm gonna see what the world has to offer, and then I agree that this is like this is a low risk time. I think if I were going to try something, this this would be the time because I think I could I could publicly come out and say, like, hey. I'm gonna try to do my own thing. And then 6 months later, come out and say, hey.
Aaron
01:11:00 – 01:11:06
My own thing failed. I would love to get a job. And some percentage of people are gonna be like, great. You can still let's reorder. Let's do it again.
Aaron
01:11:07 – 01:11:33
And I don't think I've lost too much. I think I think it does seem really exciting to me to, like, go out and try to do my own thing. So I don't know. I'm I'm still actively thinking about that pretty hard. The downsides do seem pretty small to trying my own thing right now.
Ian
01:11:33 – 01:11:37
I will. I I have a devil's advocate position here.
Aaron
01:11:37 – 01:11:43
Okay. So you're you're both angels on angel and demon because you started out by telling me I should do it.
Ian
01:11:43 – 01:11:45
Sure. Now I'm gonna tell you why you shouldn't do it.
Aaron
01:11:45 – 01:11:46
Okay. Tell me.
Ian
01:11:47 – 01:12:06
I guess the thing that the definitely the biggest negative to me. So it sounds like financially, it's not like super tight. So obviously, I think you're you're right. We've agreed that, like, these jobs will be here in 6 months or a year. If you need to go get a job, if it doesn't work out, do your own thing, like, that's fine.
Ian
01:12:07 – 01:12:22
But I do think in terms of your actual life where it is right at this second, I don't love it for starting a big new thing. I just think, like, you have 2 tiny babies. You have 2 not that tiny babies.
Aaron
01:12:22 – 01:12:23
Is it the arthritis? Is it
Ian
01:12:23 – 01:12:24
the gym house?
Aaron
01:12:24 – 01:12:27
Is it the department? Department? What which one is it again?
Ian
01:12:27 – 01:12:30
When you're under that kind of stress and time the type
Aaron
01:12:30 – 01:12:34
1 diabetes, lest we forget. I don't don't care about
Ian
01:12:34 – 01:12:34
that one.
Aaron
01:12:34 – 01:12:36
That's the OG right there.
Ian
01:12:36 – 01:12:40
Yeah. Right. So that's the one I'm least worried about because it was better. You've been dealing with that one
Aaron
01:12:40 – 01:12:41
for 15 years. Under control. Yeah.
Ian
01:12:41 – 01:12:55
Right. You know what stuff with that. So, okay. Like we could, that's like in your daily routine at this point to kind of manage, but these other things are not. And, you know, I did it co we're having babies, and it was super hard.
Ian
01:12:56 – 01:13:01
And that was just, like, with 1 and then the second and then later the 3rd when things were more established. But
Aaron
01:13:01 – 01:13:02
Sounds easy.
Ian
01:13:03 – 01:13:22
Yeah. It's way easier than twins and more twins and everybody's under 3. Yeah. So I do think that's the part that gives me a little it's a definitely I mean, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but it's worth some heavy consideration because, like, there's just gonna be the grind and the hard parts and the like. There's no vacation time and the pressure on yourself.
Ian
01:13:22 – 01:13:41
If you're not working, the money's not coming in. Mhmm. And all that stuff, is there and and just a lot of added stress over just, Hey, I clock in and I have a team that supports me and they're doing stuff for me and whatever I show up and I bang out some videos and like
Aaron
01:13:41 – 01:13:41
Yep.
Ian
01:13:41 – 01:13:49
I, I can take a week off if I need it. And I'm still gonna get paid, all that stuff. Yeah. You have healthcare, like all that stuff. You don't have to figure out healthcare.
Ian
01:13:49 – 01:14:12
You don't have to figure out retirement. You don't have to figure out all this stuff you have to do. You know how to, you know, set up a company and do all these things. And like, so there is like so much overhead and stress there that, just at this phase of your life feel a little tricky, but at the same time, you know It is an it is also presenting itself as a good time to do it. So it's, it is both sides there.
Ian
01:14:12 – 01:14:23
I don't know if it's like, might be something to think about. Is it something where you could have a partner or, initially an employee like pretty early on or something like that?
Aaron
01:14:23 – 01:14:25
The partner thing is very much on the table.
Ian
01:14:26 – 01:14:31
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want something like that where it's not just you Yeah. Taking it all on.
Aaron
01:14:31 – 01:14:40
So I I'm I'm actively talking to somebody about going out solo together, which would be duo in that case. Going out duo.
Ian
01:14:40 – 01:14:41
A solo duo?
Aaron
01:14:41 – 01:14:43
Yeah. So that's very much on the table.
Ian
01:14:44 – 01:14:45
Yeah. My thought it'd be a good idea.
Aaron
01:14:46 – 01:15:06
My counter to your counter counter is, I yes. Turns out the money money was absolutely necessary. I loved working at PlanetScale, but it turns out the money was you know, getting paid is a big part of it. So, yeah, that that that's kind of that's kind of an important detail. Right.
Aaron
01:15:06 – 01:15:07
Where does the money
Ian
01:15:07 – 01:15:07
come from?
Aaron
01:15:07 – 01:15:15
So, yeah, going out and doing the work on my own would be fun, but you you got it. Guys gotta get paid. You got 7 mouths to feed here.
Ian
01:15:15 – 01:15:16
Right. So
Aaron
01:15:17 – 01:15:32
my counter to the counter is, I've been basically trying to do all of the stuff we're talking about on nights and weekends. Right. Yeah. And there's a part of me that thinks like, oh, thank god I'm free now.
Ian
01:15:32 – 01:15:42
Like That is always I feel like any listener in the show has gotten that impression. That, like, well, Aaron's trying to run a complete business on the side. He's got 42 side projects and
Aaron
01:15:42 – 01:15:42
Yes.
Ian
01:15:42 – 01:15:43
Like,
Aaron
01:15:43 – 01:16:04
Yeah. And so, like, trying to trying to, like, faithfully execute my duties at PlanetScale, which I think the record will show that I have and run everything else is like Yep. That's stressful. Right. So now we're trading a little bit of, like, I don't like, I have I have 9 to 5 free now.
Ian
01:16:04 – 01:16:05
Right. Yeah.
Aaron
01:16:05 – 01:16:25
And so I'm not trying to squeeze it in. The corollary is I don't have the money. And like we said, the money turns out as a crucial part. Important. So, like, where does the stress where does the stress meter go now that I have eliminated the 9 to 5, requirement, and I can just focus all of that energy on, you know, Aaron Francis Incorporated.
Aaron
01:16:26 – 01:16:30
Yep. I I don't know which one moves the stress needle higher or down lower.
Ian
01:16:30 – 01:16:48
So Which will be interesting experiment if you do not get a job right away and it's like you could try it. And if it turns out, hey, it's way too freaking stressful. Like, whatever. You go get a job and that's fine. And I was like, this is a little bit of opportunity to like kickstart the Aaron Francis Inc world because you're having all these conversations.
Ian
01:16:48 – 01:16:53
Some percentage of these people, hey, you can rent Aaron Francis. Yeah. There you go.
Aaron
01:16:53 – 01:16:54
Yeah. So if
Ian
01:16:54 – 01:17:02
you can get a couple of clients out the gate, to consult with or whatever you're thinking about doing, that might might be interesting opportunity.
Aaron
01:17:02 – 01:17:12
Yeah. I think so. And I think this is also if I do go down this route, this is also like, I have I have the attention right now. Yeah. Right?
Aaron
01:17:12 – 01:17:33
So I great for the I I have I have the cultural, conversation headed my direction, which is good. And so now if I can take all these interviews this week and then decide next week, I think I can still capitalize on this wave of, like, social media attention. And I think that's pretty important.
Ian
01:17:33 – 01:17:38
So what are you thinking? I don't know how much you wanna tell us, but what are you thinking about if you do go out on your own?
Aaron
01:17:38 – 01:17:38
Like, what Mhmm.
Ian
01:17:39 – 01:17:40
What are you thinking there?
Aaron
01:17:41 – 01:18:03
So if I do, which is still an open question, I think screencasting.com becomes an empire, finally. Mhmm. So I'm already talking with several people to do extra courses for it. So that would be, like, deep dives into ScreenFlow, Adobe Premiere, Camtasia, like, have 6 different courses on these editors. Right?
Aaron
01:18:03 – 01:18:24
Yeah. And so, like, you take the you take the flagship course for me that tells you how to do screencasting philosophy, ethos, like, tips and tricks to make it go faster. And then you pick your favorite editor, and you get either a course from me if it's ScreenFlow or Steve the editor if it's Adobe Premiere. These different instructors that are like, great. You watch the flagship course.
Aaron
01:18:24 – 01:18:27
Here's how we execute that in the software that you have just
Ian
01:18:27 – 01:18:28
I like that.
Aaron
01:18:29 – 01:19:01
So we do that. That becomes you know, we we do a add a forum, add a bunch of other stuff to make it more of a destination instead of just a course. And then try to make that evergreen and experiment experiment a little bit with paid ads to see if we can make those numbers work because this, again, is such a broad it's such a broad topic that I think, you know, I gotta get outside I gotta get outside my bubble with it. Yeah. So that's a latent asset that I think can be beefed up pretty quickly.
Ian
01:19:01 – 01:19:13
And just the YouTube, the YouTube of that. Like, I feel like there's a lot you you haven't done for yourself on YouTube that to reach that broader audience. And so, obviously, it's video, and it lends itself presumably very well to that. So
Aaron
01:19:13 – 01:19:26
Yep. Exactly. So I think that's, that's probably right in front of my face, step 1. Yep. I think step 2 is I focus a little bit on my own courses for for a second.
Aaron
01:19:26 – 01:19:48
So I I have maybe 2 or 3 courses in in my heart of hearts that I could crank out. Yep. And so I think I can I can do a few of those, and those would be good for, like, cash infusions? Right. You know, if I can crank one out in a month or 2 and get a big get a big launch, that would, you know, that could set us up for the rest of the year even.
Aaron
01:19:48 – 01:20:16
Right. So I think that's interesting. So I think I'm kind of I'm kind of seeing the product mix as a combination of my own first party, basically teaching, so education material. Then the layer on top of that is, some sort of training slash consulting. And I think I could get I think I could get like, I did a team training last week for screencasting.com, and it was a freaking blast.
Aaron
01:20:16 – 01:20:22
It was great. Loved it so much. Yeah. Very easy for me and I think very valuable for them. And Yep.
Aaron
01:20:22 – 01:20:25
Like, I could I could do way more of those.
Ian
01:20:25 – 01:20:25
Yep.
Aaron
01:20:26 – 01:20:41
And so maybe I take, you know, maybe I take the show on the road, and I'm like, hey. Look at these numbers that I did for PlanetScale. Look at these numbers I did for my own channel. Like, you you know, I wouldn't say this if I wasn't sure of it, but you know who I am. Right?
Aaron
01:20:41 – 01:20:44
Like, I could go to somebody that knows who I am and be like, you know who I am because of this. You know
Ian
01:20:44 – 01:20:45
what I've done? Let me
Aaron
01:20:45 – 01:20:59
let me help your team do that as well. And I think that could be I think that could potentially lay a good base of consulting revenue. And I do think that's That's kinda what I'm thinking.
Ian
01:20:59 – 01:21:00
Product mix
Aaron
01:21:00 – 01:21:02
of products and consulting.
Ian
01:21:03 – 01:21:11
And I think the risk the there is overall fairly again, it's like I think if you were like, I'm gonna start a SaaS, right, or whatever, like, the risk will be very high.
Aaron
01:21:11 – 01:21:12
Yeah.
Ian
01:21:12 – 01:21:24
But I think with this, like, I have some rough idea, let's say, of what you were making at PlantScale and to match that or and obviously, hopefully, go beyond it. I think it's
Aaron
01:21:24 – 01:21:26
double it. That's my To double it as we talked about
Ian
01:21:26 – 01:21:27
last week. Right?
Aaron
01:21:27 – 01:21:29
Double it then double it again.
Ian
01:21:29 – 01:21:40
It feels achievable that, like, you could pretty with the reasonable amount of effort, replace your salary at least at the very like, if we if
Aaron
01:21:40 – 01:21:46
that's, like, the minimum level effort with maximum effort, boy. Right. We're getting a $1,000,000 a year, baby.
Ian
01:21:46 – 01:22:03
But even if we go we go baseline, what's the, like, minimum acceptable outcome? It's like, hey, I work for myself and, you know, I I have a similar salary to what I used to have. That's like, at least you can keep going and working on stuff. And then, obviously, the upside is much higher. Runway.
Ian
01:22:03 – 01:22:06
Right. You have a runway as they say in the business. And then,
Aaron
01:22:07 – 01:22:08
a term of art.
Ian
01:22:08 – 01:22:23
And then you can, build on that. Yeah. But I do like the idea, especially of because screencasting there, it's like it's all everybody's loved it. Who's taken it. So it's just like a valuable asset and having that asset work for you, I think would be really good.
Ian
01:22:23 – 01:22:36
And then, is a nice balance to like consulting work, which might have ebbs and flows based on the economy or different trending things or YouTube and chat bots and whatever, who whatever is happening technology
Aaron
01:22:36 – 01:22:37
Whatever comes
Ian
01:22:37 – 01:22:39
next. Yeah. Down. Right? Who knows?
Ian
01:22:39 – 01:22:47
But, then if you have, like, the baseline asset that's always performing at x and then you layer on some consulting. Mhmm. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense.
Aaron
01:22:47 – 01:22:51
And and then I find I find more baseline assets to layer on.
Ian
01:22:51 – 01:22:52
Right.
Aaron
01:22:52 – 01:23:10
So I have screencasting. I've turned it into, you know, I turned it into an evergreen thing, and then I find the next one. And I have a few ideas for what the next, like, evergreen, broad reaching thing could be, that I won't spill here. But I think I think that could be a thing. One thing I'm trying to think about is how how broadly can I teach?
Aaron
01:23:10 – 01:23:20
Right? Because if I teach something like, you know, integrating integrating Clerk into Next JS, it's like, great. Congrats on your 50 students. Right? Right.
Aaron
01:23:20 – 01:23:37
But if I can if I can teach something like screencasting or like maybe, for example, generic database, something like MySQL, then Yep. The the total addressable market is just so much bigger. So that's something that I'm actively trying to think about.
Ian
01:23:37 – 01:23:43
A lot of stuff in SQLite land these days. I could see that Aaron Francis SQLite angle.
Aaron
01:23:43 – 01:23:52
Man, I wonder who owns SQLite for developers.com. That's crazy. I know. I wonder who owns, goodness, postgres for developers.com.
Ian
01:23:53 – 01:23:55
I I wonder if they're in this room with us here.
Aaron
01:23:56 – 01:24:00
I don't know. I wonder who owns my I wonder who owns MySQL for developers.com. Wow.
Ian
01:24:00 – 01:24:02
It's kinda surprising that was available, to be honest.
Aaron
01:24:03 – 01:24:13
Yeah. Imagine imagine that. So, yeah, there there are lots there are lots of things on my mind. We'll see what you know, I think I'm trying to execute on the things in front of my face first. Yep.
Aaron
01:24:13 – 01:24:21
It should should I go down this route? Right? Like, I may Yep. I may talk to any number of these companies and be like, holy crap. I'm not going solo.
Aaron
01:24:21 – 01:24:25
I'm going somewhere where they'll pay me and give me health care. Right. So
Ian
01:24:25 – 01:24:35
I do. I I like that whole I mean, I do think you've. Here's one of the things I've learned, right? It's like, I've always been looking for, like, the next thing too. What's the next thing I should be looking at thing.
Ian
01:24:35 – 01:24:56
And then, like, I just realized, oh, like the next I had one good idea and it's still the good idea. And so like also being aware that like, like kind of like what you're saying here, right? Like, Hey, you're really good at explaining database stuff to people. And maybe that's just the good idea. And like, let's just run with that in different angles and strategies and formats and whatever.
Ian
01:24:56 – 01:25:03
And we can just like, obviously, it's a beautiful topic that can be sliced and diced in a 1,000 different ways. And so
Aaron
01:25:03 – 01:25:06
not even reached we haven't mined this vein for
Ian
01:25:06 – 01:25:07
Right.
Aaron
01:25:07 – 01:25:09
For 1 tenth of its worth. Yeah.
Ian
01:25:09 – 01:25:10
Exactly. There's still a long
Aaron
01:25:10 – 01:25:10
way to
Ian
01:25:10 – 01:25:16
do it. Much opportunity there. Obviously, getting into, like, vector databases, all this stuff with the AI stuff. Like, there's all Yep.
Aaron
01:25:16 – 01:25:17
And all that.
Ian
01:25:17 – 01:25:21
Like, so there's tons and tons of database stuff. Databases aren't going away. Everybody's gonna
Aaron
01:25:21 – 01:25:30
need databases forever. Everybody sucks at databases. Yeah. Yep. Everybody who teaches databases, save for a few of our friends, are they're just neck beards.
Aaron
01:25:30 – 01:25:31
Like, they're lame.
Ian
01:25:31 – 01:25:31
Right.
Aaron
01:25:31 – 01:25:41
They're like, I wanna teach you how to be a DBA, and I'm like, I don't wanna be a DBA. Right. I I don't wanna do that. And I say that with all respect to my dad who was a DBA for, you know, 40 years. So sorry, dad.
Aaron
01:25:41 – 01:25:42
It's in
Ian
01:25:42 – 01:25:45
the blood. It's in the blood. I don't know if we heard that on the show. Have we? I don't think I
Aaron
01:25:45 – 01:25:49
do that. I don't think so. No. He was a SQL Server DBA, The
Ian
01:25:49 – 01:25:50
best step to it.
Aaron
01:25:50 – 01:25:51
Yeah. Isn't that crazy?
Ian
01:25:51 – 01:25:52
Now it all makes sense.
Aaron
01:25:52 – 01:25:56
Yeah. I learned I learned SQL from him at probably 12 or 13.
Ian
01:25:56 – 01:26:01
Wow. Okay. Yeah. So all right. So there, I mean, I think that that makes a lot of sense.
Ian
01:26:01 – 01:26:06
I love this plan. But again, I do agree also, like you're already doing, like, take the meetings.
Aaron
01:26:06 – 01:26:07
Yep.
Ian
01:26:07 – 01:26:25
Somebody makes you an offer. You can't refuse, as they say in the godfather, then that's its own thing and you have to deal with that. Right. But, and I still think there's probably some mixed opportunities there with somebody who, like, really understands you. And it's like, hey, listen, we want you for 1 week out of a month to really kick ass on our stuff.
Ian
01:26:25 – 01:26:37
And we're going to pay you an outsized amount of money to do it. Maybe that even makes sense for a year to do something like that. Right. And like, I mean, it's effectively consulting really anyway, or whatever. There's probably some hybrid things in there.
Ian
01:26:37 – 01:26:40
So I definitely love the idea of taking the conversation.
Aaron
01:26:40 – 01:26:51
That is one of my that's one of my thoughts on the consulting thing, and one of my concerns with joining a big comp or joining a company is, like, do you need this full time?
Ian
01:26:51 – 01:26:51
Like,
Aaron
01:26:51 – 01:27:07
part part of me feels, you know, part of me feels a little burned, obviously. I feel Right. I feel burned and a little bit, you know, betrayed and a little bit sad. And so part of me is like, I don't wanna get into this again. But, you know, I'm more a less emotional part of me, which is very small.
Aaron
01:27:07 – 01:27:14
I'm most I'm 80% emotions. The less emotional part of me thinks, like, does a company need this full time?
Ian
01:27:15 – 01:27:15
Right.
Aaron
01:27:16 – 01:27:19
I don't know. Maybe. I don't know.
Ian
01:27:19 – 01:27:19
I get I think that's
Aaron
01:27:19 – 01:27:21
something I'm thinking about. Yeah.
Ian
01:27:21 – 01:27:42
Because I think it really comes to, like, what we were talking about before. Like, are you gonna as a company, are you gonna make the commitment Mhmm. To real commitment to, like, 3, 4 years of paying expensive people to really grind this out, to really juice the orange fully or is what you need to, like, be in the market, have videos for your customers.
Aaron
01:27:42 – 01:27:43
Exactly.
Ian
01:27:43 – 01:28:12
Yeah. And things like that, which is not, you probably don't need somebody who works full time to produce those videos. Or you could have, like we talked about last week, like maybe somebody who knows how to put these things together helps you put them together a plan, and then you can have other people execute that plan. And even if it's like they're not as good as Aaron Francis at it, like, they could probably get to 80 or 90% of Aaron Francis if they have a good plan and are picking good topics. And And
Aaron
01:28:12 – 01:28:13
I think that is
Ian
01:28:13 – 01:28:14
I think
Aaron
01:28:14 – 01:28:32
that is I think that is the most value that I can provide and the most value that a company needs is Right. How do we think about packaging? Topic selection, title, thumbnail, framing of the things. Like, if you just launch a new feature and you make a video that says we launched a new feature, it's like Right. Nobody cares.
Aaron
01:28:32 – 01:28:44
That's great. But there is framing that works, and there is packaging that works. And I think being on retainer to, like, advise an existing developer education team
Ian
01:28:44 – 01:28:44
Right.
Aaron
01:28:44 – 01:28:50
Is good. And that also that also skirts around the issue of, like, is Aaron gonna be the face of every company?
Ian
01:28:50 – 01:28:51
It's like, wow.
Aaron
01:28:51 – 01:28:53
I just I I simply one, I can't
Ian
01:28:54 – 01:28:58
that future. I want that future where everywhere I go. Aaron Francis. Aaron Francis is everywhere.
Aaron
01:28:58 – 01:29:26
You know what? If people wanna pay me to do it, that's fine. But I think the I think the the downside to that is, like, I can't I I'm happy to be the face of every company, but I can't promote every company to, like, my existing audience. Right? And so if, you know, a bunch of different, you know, a bunch of random companies want me to be the face, like, let's say, for example, a a highly Next JS JavaScript specific company.
Aaron
01:29:26 – 01:29:42
Like, I'm happy to work with them. I would love that. But my my audience that I currently have doesn't care about that. And so, like, you're gonna get a great video, but you're not gonna get the support of, like, the people that follow me. And I think that's an interesting, like, limiting reagents to work around.
Aaron
01:29:42 – 01:29:50
And Yeah. A way around that is to offer strategy and have your in house person be the face of your company. So
Ian
01:29:50 – 01:30:01
Yep. Let's build you a playbook, and you you take it and and run with it. And, I'll be there to help you tweak it along the way, which I think makes total sense. Yep. Alright.
Ian
01:30:01 – 01:30:11
I think we kinda covered a lot here. What are your do we not cover something? Is there something we missed? Anything you wanna get off your chest Anything you got that we didn't cover? Dangerous question.
Aaron
01:30:11 – 01:30:15
I can't I've lied through it. That's that's an interesting yeah. That's an interesting point.
Ian
01:30:15 – 01:30:16
Content. I'm trying to get
Aaron
01:30:16 – 01:30:16
the content.
Ian
01:30:16 – 01:30:17
I'm trying to get the clips.
Aaron
01:30:18 – 01:30:31
It's good content, baby. It's good content. You know, I don't think so. I enjoyed working at PlanetScale. I'm bummed I don't work there.
Aaron
01:30:35 – 01:30:39
Oh, Jesse Hanley wants me to start a planet scale competitor. Oh, I
Ian
01:30:39 – 01:30:40
did it.
Aaron
01:30:40 – 01:31:03
I was friend friend of the pod, friend of mine, creator and owner of bentonow.com, which is the ESP, the the email service provider that I use. He said publicly, he's like, you should just create a competitor. And I thought there's a 0.0% chance that one, I could do it. I just can't. No freaking way.
Aaron
01:31:03 – 01:31:29
I was the dumbest person at playing in skill. There's no way there's no way I could create a competitor, and there's a 0% chance that I want to do that. And he he you know, he's encouraging me to do the hard thing, and he's like, listen, running an ESP, which he does, is hard, and it's worked out great. And I'm like, I I salute you, but there's no way that I could create a freaking database company.
Ian
01:31:30 – 01:31:54
So I hate everything about this idea for you, especially, But I will say I absolutely love the pure vengeance idea of it. It's like my business my business plan is pure vengeance. Like, that's my business plan. Like, I I do love that and respect that aspect of it. I think that would be incredibly fun to, to watch, but I do think yeah.
Ian
01:31:54 – 01:31:55
I don't think I just think I
Aaron
01:31:55 – 01:31:55
don't think
Ian
01:31:55 – 01:31:57
that's a mouth. Thing. Yeah. You have
Aaron
01:31:57 – 01:31:58
to go out. I mean, you
Ian
01:31:58 – 01:32:00
couldn't just start it like he's done with Bento. I think
Aaron
01:32:00 – 01:32:01
I don't think you could do that.
Ian
01:32:01 – 01:32:07
I think you'd have to go out and get a bunch of money. And No. Then you're CEO of this VC back thing. Which
Aaron
01:32:07 – 01:32:07
I don't
Ian
01:32:07 – 01:32:20
think you doesn't really leverage No. Yours, really, skills and assets you've built up. I think that's like a whole different direction. So, yeah, I don't love that, but I do love I just love the pure, pure vengeance. Yeah.
Ian
01:32:20 – 01:32:24
The pure, like, eye for an eye. Like, we're going fire
Aaron
01:32:24 – 01:32:28
and brimstone. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know. I got some quotes from the movie.
Aaron
01:32:28 – 01:32:33
Listen. The way that I'm trying to get vengeance is I'm gonna start working out a lot, and I'm gonna get super hot, and then I'm also gonna get rich.
Ian
01:32:33 – 01:32:35
And then that's gonna be like,
Aaron
01:32:35 – 01:32:40
See? I win. You wish you could have me. I'm hot and rich now.
Ian
01:32:40 – 01:32:47
Or you're just gonna be the face of every other company, and you're just everywhere. And every time they're on YouTube, they're like, fucking Aaron Francis. He's on here again.
Aaron
01:32:47 – 01:32:47
Hot now.
Ian
01:32:48 – 01:32:53
He's so hot. He's on YouTube all the time. Ridiculous. Look at his hair. It's perfectly fine.
Aaron
01:32:54 – 01:33:15
One time when, before Jennifer and I were married, she broke up with me, and it was, like, it was, like, for 45 it was 45 days called the dark ages. I didn't count or anything, but it was 45 days exactly. And, like, right after she broke up with me, I bought a piano. Okay. I was I was like, alright, I'm going to learn how to play the piano.
Aaron
01:33:15 – 01:33:27
I'm gonna she loves she loves it. I'm gonna get I'm gonna get super, like, I'm gonna be super artsy, and I'm gonna be this guy that, like, plays the piano, and all the girls are gonna love me. And then we got back together, and I've never played piano.
Ian
01:33:27 – 01:33:29
I would've gone with the harp. It's different. I should've gone all
Aaron
01:33:29 – 01:33:30
in. So it's great.
Ian
01:33:30 – 01:33:31
Gone all in on the harp.
Aaron
01:33:32 – 01:33:33
You could
Ian
01:33:33 – 01:33:35
be doing YouTube videos right now on your harp.
Aaron
01:33:35 – 01:33:41
Yeah. So I'm gonna I'm gonna start working out and get really buff, and then I love it. Show them. Right?
Ian
01:33:41 – 01:33:49
That's a good All your YouTube videos will be topless. You're already wearing no pants, but then you'll just have no shirt too, and it'll be it'll be a thing.
Aaron
01:33:49 – 01:34:05
It's gonna be great. So, yeah, lots of people have had lots of ideas, including start a competing database company to which I say, no, thank you. I mean, there's, you know, Taylor Taylor's made a lot of money with forge. We've seen publicly. He's talking about how forge is successful.
Aaron
01:34:06 – 01:34:21
Frankly, that's a wrapper on another that's a wrapper on a bunch of clouds. Right? And so there's a world in which there's some kind of value I can add on top of RDS, but there's no effing way I'm gonna be on the hook for hosting databases. I just Yeah.
Ian
01:34:21 – 01:34:22
The stress level is like
Aaron
01:34:22 – 01:34:23
The stress level.
Ian
01:34:24 – 01:34:24
Yeah.
Aaron
01:34:25 – 01:34:36
I would watch I would watch Slack channels at PlanetScale, and I'm like, not my circus, not my monkey. Like, I'm I'm so I'm so glad that I'm not the one that's like, hey. What's going on with this database? I don't know. Let's figure it out.
Aaron
01:34:36 – 01:34:38
I'm like, I don't know. I'm gonna go make another video. So
Ian
01:34:39 – 01:34:56
I actually think what you're talking about is very forged, like, in a certain mindset. Right? It's like, what Ford does is make it like it's a layer above, this complexity. And this is kind of that similar thing. Like, how could you provide a layer above the complexity of, like, how do you be successful on YouTube or how
Aaron
01:34:56 – 01:34:57
do you
Ian
01:34:57 – 01:35:16
edit a good screencast? Right? Like this is a different format, but it's a similar mind of like the value is that people wanna do hard things with complex tools Yep. And in complex businesses. And you know things about that that can help people do those things, and you're going to convey that information to them.
Ian
01:35:16 – 01:35:24
And so, yeah, there's all these kind of things that are opportunities out there in these regards to to do that. And so I think,
Aaron
01:35:24 – 01:35:36
speaking to the stress comments from earlier, I think the least stressful products that I could offer right now is is education. It is not a sass. Well This is not I don't
Ian
01:35:36 – 01:35:38
like the top idea for you at all. Definitely. This is not
Aaron
01:35:38 – 01:35:40
the time in life for me
Ian
01:35:40 – 01:35:40
to No.
Aaron
01:35:40 – 01:35:59
To have a SaaS. Frankly, like, one, it takes a 1000 years to get off the ground. Yep. And, like, as we discussed, money was a big part of why I worked at PlanetScale because they they gave me a paycheck. And then, like, I don't want the I don't want the on call stressed, especially if a database are you kidding me?
Aaron
01:35:59 – 01:36:02
But even imagine the on call stress of, like anything.
Ian
01:36:02 – 01:36:03
Any real application.
Aaron
01:36:03 – 01:36:07
Anything that people actually use in their business. Yeah. So Yeah.
Ian
01:36:07 – 01:36:08
It's That's just
Aaron
01:36:08 – 01:36:12
I don't think that's a make that's the right that's the right thing for me right now.
Ian
01:36:12 – 01:36:14
Yep. Yep. No. I agree. And that's like yeah.
Ian
01:36:14 – 01:36:25
You can, like, always dial back the number of consulting gigs. You can always take a week off and screencasting will still be there. Like Right. It's all fine. And you're not on the hook or anything.
Ian
01:36:25 – 01:36:28
There's no customer support. And there's, you know, frankly, there's some
Aaron
01:36:28 – 01:36:45
extent to which I go down this road and become super into video and ideas begin to materialize for, you know, more pure SaaS plays. And I'm like, great. I can I can pursue that at my at my leisure? But right now this is it's not a good time to start a SAS.
Ian
01:36:45 – 01:36:50
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Alright, man. Well, I think What else is on there?
Ian
01:36:50 – 01:36:54
We covered it pretty well. We kept everything on the list. Yeah.
Aaron
01:36:55 – 01:36:57
Oh, I wanted to I wanted to oh, you go. You go. You go. Oh, I
Ian
01:36:57 – 01:37:09
was just gonna say if you wanted to give an actual update on the, Aaron Francis studio of light and sound, like, just are you launching that soon? I know you seems like you got it mostly built out.
Aaron
01:37:09 – 01:37:27
Yep. So the the Aaron Francis Studio of Light and Sound looks amazing. I got everything built. Everything's done. My brother-in-law and father-in-law are coming over on Wednesday to help me move this place where I'm currently sitting to help me move all of this stuff over there.
Aaron
01:37:28 – 01:37:38
And then I'll be I'll be over there. I'll be over there full time. So, yeah, studio looks great. I'm really happy with it. I put in just tremendous amounts of work.
Aaron
01:37:38 – 01:37:44
Yeah. Like an idiot. Tremendous amounts of work, during, you know, paternity leave.
Ian
01:37:44 – 01:37:45
During the interview.
Aaron
01:37:45 – 01:37:51
Yeah. Yeah. Well, oopsie doopsie. Oh. And it looks great, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.
Aaron
01:37:52 – 01:38:18
And one one thing one little one little human anecdote is every day my daughter, so my son and daughter are almost not almost they're they're 2 and a half. They're they're probably 2 and a half years old. And my daughter has started doing this thing where, she asks us a lot of questions like, how was your nap, mommy? And stuff like because we're always asking them, like, oh, how did you sleep okay? How was your nap?
Aaron
01:38:18 – 01:38:38
And so she started saying, how was your nap? How was your walk? How was the store? And now every day every day when I come home from the Anne Francis Studio of Light and Sound, she says, how was work today, daddy? And, you know, I've realized that, like, being a dad is kinda hard because you just say, like, work today was great, sweetheart.
Aaron
01:38:38 – 01:38:46
How was your day? It's like, dad got laid off today, but I'm not gonna tell you that. Like, you don't know what that means. That's not Yeah. Your burden to bear.
Aaron
01:38:47 – 01:38:47
It's like
Ian
01:38:47 – 01:38:48
She's a little young person.
Aaron
01:38:48 – 01:38:57
Work was really great. That is so nice of you to ask. How was your day? And that's just like, oh, man. That dad stuff that dad stuff is real.
Ian
01:38:58 – 01:39:15
So I have a very similar story that happened to me this week that will be fun to share here. So we were driving back, from my daughter rides horses. We're driving back from the barn, and she's just out of the blue. So my daughter's 10. She's like, so have you ever been arrested?
Ian
01:39:17 – 01:39:18
And I'm like
Aaron
01:39:18 – 01:39:19
One time I sold oregano and told
Ian
01:39:19 – 01:39:27
her I was weed. And then I had to sheepishly tell her that, no, I hadn't. And I was like, almost bummed. I was like, man. So embarrassing.
Ian
01:39:27 – 01:39:32
Life goal. I gotta I gotta get rested. I gotta work on that. I feel like Oh, man. And I
Aaron
01:39:32 – 01:39:39
thought I was just square. Yeah. You're still square. No. I've never been arrested either, but I I did commit a federal crime.
Aaron
01:39:39 – 01:39:42
Together. Unless the statue of limitations has run if you're listening.
Ian
01:39:42 – 01:39:45
Really researched that. We should have researched that before we put it out there.
Aaron
01:39:45 – 01:39:50
Yeah. Yeah. But there's also no way to prove it. Like, I I mean, who's gonna prove that?
Ian
01:39:50 – 01:39:51
Confession, but yeah.
Aaron
01:39:51 – 01:39:55
I'm a podcaster. You can't take this. You can't take anything I say.
Ian
01:39:55 – 01:39:57
I don't know. Maybe this will be like we thought it couldn't go lower, but
Aaron
01:39:57 – 01:39:59
then Oh, maybe I get a rest.
Ian
01:39:59 – 01:40:02
Yeah. Yeah. The FBI at your door. It could be a step down. Like
Aaron
01:40:02 – 01:40:03
Can you imagine?
Ian
01:40:03 – 01:40:07
When you're like, Ian, could you get down here and bail me out? Like, could you get off late and you can get me?
Aaron
01:40:07 – 01:40:11
No. I'd be like, Ian, start recording, and then I'll talk to you. That's what I mean.
Ian
01:40:11 – 01:40:12
I gotta come get you
Aaron
01:40:12 – 01:40:15
at the gym. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be amazing. Yeah.
Aaron
01:40:16 – 01:40:25
Let me turn this into a true crime pod. Okay. I've got an interview in 10 minutes. Alright. Starting the day of interviews, but I wanna cover, one more thing.
Ian
01:40:25 – 01:40:25
Okay.
Aaron
01:40:25 – 01:40:32
First of all, follow-up, Mary on Twitter. Her last name is Perry. Great last name. Mary Perry.
Ian
01:40:32 – 01:40:33
Perry Perry. That is Yeah.
Aaron
01:40:33 – 01:40:34
Isn't that great?
Ian
01:40:34 – 01:40:47
I love parents the weird place parents get into where they name kids, like, rhymey things or matchy names or things like that. It's very fascinating to me. I I I wanna talk to parents who do that kind of thing, actually.
Aaron
01:40:48 – 01:40:49
Yeah. So her
Ian
01:40:49 – 01:40:49
name is her
Aaron
01:40:49 – 01:41:06
name is Mary Perry, friend of the pod she deemed to me after and was like, my last name is Barry. It's like, oh, that's great. So that's a follow-up. The other follow-up is, well, this is kind of not a follow-up. It's a brand new topic that's on the next podcast, but I wanna talk about it now.
Aaron
01:41:07 – 01:41:10
Are we gonna do a call in show? That's a great idea. We gotta do a call in show.
Ian
01:41:10 – 01:41:13
It's an interesting idea. It's an interesting idea.
Aaron
01:41:13 – 01:41:16
I just got the interesting in response to great. Well, first of all,
Ian
01:41:16 – 01:41:28
a call in show is that I mean, people have they're not always the most fun if you get a bad run of calls. You know? Like, so so I did have this idea. I I posted. I don't know if you saw it.
Ian
01:41:28 – 01:41:33
So my idea for the call in show, which we could talk about here, is, like, instead of a pure call in show that's, like, live
Aaron
01:41:34 – 01:41:35
and Mhmm.
Ian
01:41:35 – 01:41:37
Whatever weirdo on the Internet shows up or
Aaron
01:41:37 – 01:41:37
wants
Ian
01:41:38 – 01:41:40
to yell out a phrase or something like
Aaron
01:41:40 – 01:41:40
Yeah.
Ian
01:41:43 – 01:41:50
We structure it, so that it's like we record a sort of call in show once a month maybe or k. Twice a month.
Aaron
01:41:50 – 01:41:51
Uh-huh.
Ian
01:41:51 – 01:41:58
And we pre vet the people and their topics. And then we invite them in, they get a segment, like maybe we do 15 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever.
Aaron
01:41:58 – 01:41:59
Mhmm.
Ian
01:41:59 – 01:42:03
We were and we just do that. It's like more of a preplanned call in show. They're still call ins.
Aaron
01:42:03 – 01:42:03
Okay.
Ian
01:42:03 – 01:42:16
But it's more more preplanned, and then maybe we can break it up as, like, little interlude episodes of the podcast or something like that. So we can kinda cross cross utilize it other than just people who happen to be listening live at the time of
Aaron
01:42:16 – 01:42:16
the year
Ian
01:42:16 – 01:42:20
or whatever. So I don't know. What do you think about that take on it?
Aaron
01:42:21 – 01:42:24
I like it. That's an interesting that's an interesting take. Yeah.
Ian
01:42:24 – 01:42:26
Are people out there really interesting, though? I don't know.
Aaron
01:42:26 – 01:42:37
Yeah. I'm not opposed to that at all. I think, I used to be a big Dave Ramsey listener, and then I realized it's kinda crazy. But his call in his call in show is great
Ian
01:42:37 – 01:42:38
Is it good?
Aaron
01:42:38 – 01:42:42
Because they've got they've got a producer that vets all of the calls. Yeah.
Ian
01:42:42 – 01:42:43
Of course. Yeah.
Aaron
01:42:43 – 01:42:47
It's like, alright. Tell me your name. What's your question? You better get to your question immediately.
Ian
01:42:49 – 01:42:50
It would be fun to try. We could just try.
Aaron
01:42:50 – 01:42:51
It would be fun to try. Right?
Ian
01:42:51 – 01:42:55
Dave could if we line up where Dave's available, he can produce,
Aaron
01:42:56 – 01:43:05
the crawler. Dave would have to, like, screen for weirdos and normies Yeah. And tell them, like, what the vibe is. Like, you can't just come on and be like, oh, I have more of a comment than a question. Be
Ian
01:43:07 – 01:43:11
so think, though, it's better as, like, a spaces? Is that the more modern way to do it?
Aaron
01:43:11 – 01:43:14
I actually whoever said that, thank you.
Ian
01:43:14 – 01:43:14
Yeah.
Aaron
01:43:14 – 01:43:18
I think that is a pretty good idea because if Kinda
Ian
01:43:18 – 01:43:18
think it might be.
Aaron
01:43:19 – 01:43:25
If I host a space, then a bar shows up across the top of everybody else's Twitter, and it's like, these people are on a space.
Ian
01:43:25 – 01:43:31
And we could still record it and, like, throw it on the podcast feed or whatever. So it's out there.
Aaron
01:43:31 – 01:43:39
And it it lowers the barrier a little bit because it's not video, and so people don't have to, you know, be on video. Right. So it's interesting.
Ian
01:43:39 – 01:43:43
People on video no matter what. I think we're the only ones on video. Yeah. I think so. Even in general.
Aaron
01:43:44 – 01:43:51
But, yeah, it would be it would be fun. I think it could be it could be interesting. I think it's worth considering at the very least.
Ian
01:43:51 – 01:43:56
Worth considering. I think it is definitely worth consider. It's definitely worth I mean, whatever. We could just do one. Right?
Ian
01:43:56 – 01:43:59
We'd do one and we see how it goes and people like it. And if there is,
Aaron
01:44:01 – 01:44:05
I I wanted to be strange just places car talk?
Ian
01:44:05 – 01:44:06
I don't think so.
Aaron
01:44:06 – 01:44:08
Oh, dude. You've got to go
Ian
01:44:08 – 01:44:11
listen a lot of talk radio, though, and call and chat.
Aaron
01:44:12 – 01:44:25
Old old episodes of car talk are just the funniest thing in the world to listen to. They barely talk about cars, and they just laugh the entire time. So go go listen to a few of those.
Ian
01:44:25 – 01:44:33
When I was starting the business, I used to always listen to Mike and Mad Dog. I don't know if you're familiar with them. They're kind of a northeast, thing. They were simulcast on video back in
Aaron
01:44:33 – 01:44:35
Sounds like Shout Jocks, Mad Dog.
Ian
01:44:35 – 01:44:42
Like, well, they're like, no. It's a sports talk radio. It was sports talk radio, but they would get into other things or whatever. But,
Aaron
01:44:42 – 01:44:47
There's one down here called the ticket that all my sports friends listen to, and they're like, man, the ticket is hysterical.
Ian
01:44:47 – 01:44:48
Nice kinda thing.
Aaron
01:44:48 – 01:44:50
Yeah. So that'd be fun.
Ian
01:44:50 – 01:44:53
Alright. Maybe we'll try it. We'll do we'll experiment. I like it.
Aaron
01:44:54 – 01:44:57
K. Alright. Well, I gotta go I gotta go,
Ian
01:44:57 – 01:44:58
prep my
Aaron
01:44:58 – 01:45:00
brain for interview day. So
Ian
01:45:00 – 01:45:04
Alright. Good luck. We'll get a update next week on, how it's going.
Aaron
01:45:04 – 01:45:10
Alright. Alright. Well Everybody that came everybody that came for the tea, please subscribe and stick around for the next episode.
Ian
01:45:11 – 01:45:20
Yes. And, we will, talk to you all next week. Definitely subscribe, follow. It's on YouTube. If you wanna watch our pretty faces.
Ian
01:45:21 – 01:45:35
Mostlytechnical.com, at mostlytechpod, on Twitter, and mostly technical podcast@gmail.com. We do already have a few feedback emails, which we will try to cover next week. It will get more from this. It's going to be more of a feedback show next week. But,
Aaron
01:45:35 – 01:45:39
yeah, tell me what I should do. Dear listener, tell me what I should do. I'd be curious.
Ian
01:45:39 – 01:45:42
Comment down below. You gotta you gotta comment down below on YouTube here.
Aaron
01:45:43 – 01:45:46
Smash that like and subscribe button Yeah. And leave a comment.
Ian
01:45:46 – 01:45:49
Do it. Alright. Have a good one. Later on.
Aaron
01:45:49 – 01:45:50
See you.
Me

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

If you ever have any questions or want to chat, I'm always on Twitter.

You can find me on YouTube on my personal channel or the Try Hard Studios channel.

If you love podcasts, I got you covered. You can listen to me on Mostly Technical.