Conferences and First Revenue 💸

Aaron

Okay. We're recording. Lyricon is over.

Colleen

Awesome. What success?

Aaron

It went great. So I am just thrilled to death with how it went. So that was, I guess, last Wednesday. Today's Tuesday. And, man, I I practiced so much, that when the time came, it just felt like another practice session.

I did everything that I wanted to do, and the people seems to like it. So just completely thrilled to death and quite proud of myself for putting in all of the work and having it pay off. So pretty freaking pumped about that.

Colleen

Yeah. It was it was amazing. I mean, the whole thing was just so amazing and the response you got, so great. Nicely done.

Aaron

Yeah. There's, like Thanks. There were thousands of people watching you, which has been the weirdest feeling. Like, you're just sitting in your shed like normal and Uh-huh. Talking to 2,000 people.

Yeah. It was it was extremely weird because I didn't obviously, I didn't have any of the live chat going. I couldn't see anything. But I did watch it back with the live chat because YouTube does chat replay and I watched it back and I was like, man, this is pretty cool. I was so freaking pumped.

Colleen

It was super cool. And so when I went in to watch it, like, I was a little worried because, like, live chat, I was like, you know, you don't know what people are gonna say.

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

I'm like time. So so I went and I saw the chat, and I was, like, this is awesome.

Aaron

Yeah. Everybody thought, like I I think everybody thought it was super cool and they were pleased. I think they were pleased with my excitement and my energy. And I I feel like, that was something I'd purposed to do was, like, be excited about the thing. And because, you know, sometimes conferences can get a little can get a little plodding, a little slow if, you know, you're just sitting there for hours.

And so I think my excitement rubbed off and people were excited about it. So, yeah, it was great. I'm so I'm just I'm super pleased it went well, but I'm also super pleased it's over. So now having watched it, Colleen, are you gonna build it in Ruby for hammer stone? Are you gonna build it for rails?

Colleen

I mean, honestly, I'd love to not right now. It's super cool.

Aaron

Yeah, that is cool. Yeah. So and I've got it. One of the big reveals was I got it working on Vercel, which I think is gonna be super fun, because now I can get it on Vercel and maybe get some of their, you know, maybe get some attention from Vercel, and then I can get it on Google Cloud Functions. And I think there's just a lot of there's a lot of cool stuff that can be done with it.

Somebody's already working on a queue driver that executes all the queues on Lambda instead of in your local app, so you get, like, infinite scalability. So people are doing some cool stuff with it, and I'm very, very pleased. So that's my Laracon update.

Colleen

Yeah. I'm speaking at Sin City Ruby at the end of March and talking to you about Laracon and everything you went through to prepare that presentation was also a good reminder that I need get on it and build out a talk.

Aaron

Do you know what you're talking about?

Colleen

I don't know. I think I wanna use the same talk. I wanna submit the same talk that I talk about. It's in Citi to RailsConf. And so I'm trying to build a talk that is hammerstone adjacent, but also fits the tracks they have put out at RailsConf.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

So I have to go I have to do some deep thinking about it. I think last week we talked I had thrown out the idea of doing a, like, advanced active record workshop. So I need to think about if I wanna do a workshop or if I wanted to do a talk, which is then more reusable, but a workshop is, like, super cool and could be a whole course. So that's kind of my what I'm trying to work through.

Aaron

Yeah. I guess I didn't realize, Sin City, Ruby, you were already speaking at. I thought we were talking about just RailsConf or whatever. So you have one on the books already.

Colleen

Right. I have one on the books at the end of March.

Aaron

Cool.

Colleen

Yes.

Aaron

Coming up soon.

Colleen

Yeah. I mean, your 80 hour comment reminded me, like, I also

Aaron

You don't you don't have enough time to do a workshop between now and then.

Colleen

I'm just saying if I switched my so I could do 2 things. Right? I could do a talk for Sin City and build out a workshop for RailsConf or

Aaron

Oh, yes.

Colleen

Ditch the workshop idea and make one talk about advanced active record and use it in both places. So I think the Sin City Ruby crowd is gonna be very senior compared to RailsConf when you get a more diverse level of experience. So just trying to figure out, like, what the best what the best move is. But I have to do I haven't had time to do deep thoughts on it. I will be doing deep thoughts on it very soon, probably this weekend.

Aaron

Well, you're gonna have a busy March. If client is trying to do something by, you know, March 11th, and now you have a talk or I guess always had a talk at the end of March, you're gonna be pretty busy.

Colleen

March is gonna be crazy, and February has been very, very busy. So, I I mean, at least I'll have my spouse back, so that'll be good.

Aaron

When does when does he come back?

Colleen

The end of the month. I mean, you forget. I've done this before, but, like, you forget how hard it is to single parent. Like, it's like you work all day, you come home, and then you have to have all of this emotional energy to, like, do all these other things.

Aaron

No freaking way.

Colleen

So March will be busy, but I think it will be it will be good because I'll be able to get long stretches of focus, which it's really hard to get right now.

Aaron

Is that why you're at the co working space more often?

Colleen

Yeah. Yeah. Sure is.

Aaron

Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Jennifer went out of town one time for, like, 2 days, and she came back and I said, I I don't know how you do this. Like, I knew, like, I knew in my mind that she worked harder than I do, but then I had to actually do it myself.

Colleen

And I

Aaron

took 2 I had to take 2 days of PTO because she was gone for Thursday Friday. And at the end, I was like, I really don't I don't know how you do it. Like, I, I can't, I can't

Colleen

do it.

Aaron

So yeah, I can't imagine trying to work and obviously yours are a little older, but still sounds exhausting.

Colleen

It is.

Aaron

Well, you wanna keep going? What else is going on?

Colleen

Yeah. So you were just there. We had a great meeting with, our client representative. Can I call him our client representative?

Aaron

That sounds very official. Yeah.

Colleen

Sounds very fancy, doesn't it? I think I feel really good about that meeting. I feel like things that are working now are gonna slot well into this concept of filter conditions, and it's gonna be cleaner than the way I have safe filters working right now. Because right now, safe filters as you and I have discussed around the filter level, not the condition level. So I feel good about, like, building out these filters and having a path forward.

And Sean is gonna help with some of the UI shenanigans, clean up, whatever you wanna call it. So that's gonna be great. Yeah. So that's kinda what's going on.

Aaron

And then there's a new deadline or launch date?

Colleen

Yeah. March 11th. Yeah. That'll be an internal launch, but there's a lot of people at this company, so an internal launch needs to be good.

Aaron

Pretty big deal.

Colleen

We don't want. Yeah. It's it's a big deal. It's, yeah, exactly what I'm saying. And, oh, one of the senior engineers at client who does not know me built out a filter without asking me.

He asked me to review his PR, but outside of that, he didn't ask. I mean, he has no he has no documentation. Like, he just built it. And, at the meeting, we have, meetings every other week, he said really nice things about it. He said it was easy to get up and running, and he was able to send in the scopes that he wanted, and he was using it.

It was so cool. Like, so he did his demo, and they're using, like, the multi select feature, and they're using ors and ands, and he did his demo using our filter. It was really cool because it's been in the app in some of the models.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

But to see him implement it himself was legit.

Aaron

Oh, what a good sign.

Colleen

It was so exciting. I was like How

Aaron

nervous were you when he was demoing it? And then once it was over, how on top of the world were you?

Colleen

Right. Well, I didn't even know. Like, I didn't even know this was coming. I didn't know it was such a critical part of what he was. So his whole, like, t you know, his team, like, it's a critical part of their workflow, and I didn't even know that.

So when he said query builder, you know, there's a lot of people at these meetings. And so, you know, you just kinda sitting there. And he said query builder, and I'm like, what? Uh-oh. What's happening?

You didn't warn me that you were gonna talk about the query builder. And he loved it and said really great things about it. And again, like, he's not biased because he has never met me. He doesn't even know who I am. So it was awesome.

Aaron

What a good freaking feeling.

Colleen

Feeling. Because I do feel like I mean, I feel like I'm behind you, Aaron, and I'm in you're like in the DevRel part, which is the fun part. Right?

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

You get to talk Totally. And talk about how amazing we are and use it with clients and immediately get that instant gratification. I do not feel like that. I feel like I am sitting in a sea of changing requirements and change no one really knows what they want, and no one's really using it, or at least no one's telling me if they're using it. So it was so cool to see it in action.

It's pushed up. I mean, it's in the, you know, it's in the app. It's live, and they're loving it. That was really, really great.

Aaron

Amazing. That's incredible. How many people are proud of yourself?

The meeting got over from me. It's only 50 still. Okay.

Colleen

You're welcome. But the what but what has happened is now there are more teams, so it went an hour and a half last week. Oh. Oh my god. Last.

Aaron

Oh my god.

Colleen

I told Andrew, I was like, I'm not gonna last anymore.

Aaron

You gotta get a better slot. Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen

I was like, dude, I'm the only first, I mean, I'm the only woman, and there's 50 people in this meeting, and I have to go last. Like, no, dude. I'm not going last anymore. Next time we get.

Aaron

They don't make you take notes. Do they? That's the ultimate. Okay. Yeah.

That's brutal. You gotta lobby for a better slot.

Colleen

I did. I did. After the meeting, I was like, yeah. We're not especially when they go an hour and a half. I mean, it's okay for me because I'm Pacific time.

But people on the East Coast, it's like 4:30 in the afternoon on a Friday. They're probably just like, get me out of here.

Aaron

Brutal. Well, that's super exciting. I'm glad. It's nice. It's nice to get a win.

I mean, it's so hard.

Colleen

To get a win.

Aaron

It's so hard to just be building something that, you know, with 99% confidence is right and cool, but have nobody use it. And the 1% is like, man, what am I doing here? And then to have somebody pick it up with no docs and implement it. Yeah.

Colleen

That was pretty cool.

Aaron

That was pretty great. Yeah. It's pretty awesome.

Colleen

We did find so we did find that it's challenging for the guys to implement it straight Hotwire. So if they have to build we so we have that guy who had a really great experience, but, like, the Hotwire stuff was already fixed for him solved for him. So I have someone else who's trying to build it trying to, build it out in a different workflow path, and his whole UI is different. And so he tried to build his own, say, an apply filter button, and there was a lot of challenge there, I think. And so Sean's gonna write up some docs, but

Aaron

in the beginning rethink the API for, like,

Colleen

a code. I I really think you should, Sean. Like, I know you don't have a ton of time, but, like, it is very they need, like, 3 stimulus controllers, because with these unstable, stabilized events, I think you should if you have time for that, I think that would be really added because that part was was very confusing to them.

Aaron

Yeah. Because to them, they're seeing the, like, apply filter button as, like, part of refine.

Colleen

That's exactly.

Aaron

And and so, like, we got we'll just have to bundle some stuff with it versus, like, if we're selling a component and it's in reactor view, it's like like okay. Like, the the reason that this is weird is because in reactor Vue, like, in Vue, you would pass in your blueprint object as, like, a v model prop, and it just gets updated, And then you do whatever you want with it. And then in React, you know, it'll be a similar idea, except it'll probably be just like an on update callback or, you know, something like this. It'll be something that is straightforward and obvious to React developer, and then you know that as a React or Vue developer, I'm just gonna add a add a button and do the thing that I need to do with it. Like, the query builder is just responsible for building and updating this query, and then it's up to me to, like, build the UI for, like, applying it and, you know, doing all this stuff.

And then in Stimulus, there's the way that I'm handling that is via event publishing. So and and and added complexity of, like because of the way the Hotwire thing works, we have to do a round trip, to to update the blueprint. So, So, I mean, like, the blueprint gets updated, but then we create a stable ID, and there's this sort of awkward round trip that we have to do in order to get that stable ID for them to use it. And it's it's awkward because, you know, it's like just because the way turbo works and all this, and it's not a great fit for, like, our thing. So I tried to get around it with this, like, event publishing thing, which then means if you wanna have, like, a an apply filter button, you have to when you click apply filter, you have to have been listening to the blueprint updated events and have the most recent, and then apply.

So there's, like, a bunch of JavaScript that has to happen. With the new stable ID and then apply. So there's, like, a bunch of JavaScript that has to happen. So, anyway, that stuff's weird, and I will just I don't think I can necessarily eliminate that complexity, but I can maybe hide it behind, like, some controller that I give them that does a lot of that. Like, here's your button controller for applying a filter.

But maybe. I I mean, because it just pushes them the complexity to, like, well, what do you wanna do with it? And, like, how do you anyway, yes. It requires thinking, and I'll I'll at very least, we could do better docs. But, yeah, I'll I'll figure something out.

That's I gotta do this cleanup, and then I'm planning on and making that better.

Colleen

Yeah. I think that would be great because I think the way it ships now is complicated and confusing. And you're absolutely right. They they thought that's exactly what happened, is they thought the apply button was part of the hammerstone component. And so they just added one when they saw it wasn't there, and they didn't know they're supposed to be listening for events and all that.

So awesome. That's awesome that you're gonna look at that.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. The Hotwire thing is a hot mess. Like, I don't even I don't even know what the theming story is gonna be for that. Like, I kinda have that sorted out with React and Vue, but, like, on the Hotwire side, and I know now because we've had a few clients and customers that that's gonna be, like, a thing we need.

So it's gonna be I don't know. That that thing is that may just be a one off, like, for them forever. I don't know if we are able to pull that out and support it, or if it even makes sense for us.

Colleen

You're woah. Woah. Woah. You're talking about Hotwire? Hotwire?

You don't know if we can pull that out and support it?

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

Interesting. Okay.

Aaron

Yeah. I don't know if it's worth it for us now.

Colleen

So you would have all your Rails people using React?

Aaron

Yeah. Or Vue. They could use either. Both of those will will work. Yeah.

Colleen

Okay. Which, you

Aaron

know and then most I think most apps that are gonna need a query builder will have a

Colleen

Will already have a one of those dependencies. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Aaron

I mean, I think that it could expand the number of people that would buy a new user component to have the Hotwire option because there are definitely rails places that don't have those things in their stack. Like and, you know, there's a kind of move towards doing less and less of that in the culturally in the community. And so I think that it makes sense, but we got reactive view, and there's plenty of people that are using reactive view, and it's enough to support those 2. And then the Hotwire thing to even get it to where it is, like, yep. We can actually, like, offer this as, like, a a thing that works for lots of people and not just a one off.

That is not a light lift. I'll just say that, like, based on everything we just talked about. You kinda get the idea. Like, it's it requires significant thinking and work. So, yeah, I don't know.

We don't have to think about it now, but just just the thought.

Okay. Colleen, what's your first potential client? What's their, I guess, second potential client? What are they using?

Colleen

You run that call with me.

Aaron

I know. I don't remember.

Colleen

It was Hotwire. He was using Hotwire.

Aaron

Shoot. Okay.

Colleen

I didn't ask him if he had React added, but he was using Hotwire.

Aaron

That's true. Okay. Yeah. I kind of agree. It seems like Hotwire may be a very implementation specific thing.

And I just I don't know enough about it to say for sure, but it does seem hard to generalize.

Yeah. Sorry, Collin. You look like you're gonna say something, so I'm waiting for it.

Colleen

I'm thinking yeah. I'm just thinking about this. I mean, your comment you're right. We don't have to solve this today, and we don't really need to waste time. But but I don't know that like, I I mean, I feel like there's a there's a fair amount of purists who don't wanna pull in a React or Vue.

Aaron

I agree. There's also a fair amount of Vue and React users in Rails.

Colleen

Right. You're saying don't we don't have to go after everyone who has a Rails app. We can go after those who already have a React or okay. Cool. Yeah.

We can we can totally, iterate more on this in the future.

Aaron

I the only the only place where that doesn't make sense is if our if we're when we're doing the positioning and branding and marketing and, like, how we talk about it, like, it's much more powerful to have the Hotwire option in that case, I think. I think it Yeah. Dovetails much more into the current, like, conversation that they're having over there in the red plan.

Colleen

Okay. You just got me really excited, obviously. That's why I raised my hand. I'm sorry for interrupting. So listen.

Part of my plan here and why I'm speaking at this conference in March and back up. When I had Corey Haines on software social, we were talking about developer marketing, and he was talking about this whole concept that he thinks people are underutilizing, which is basically get kind of what Aaron is doing. Right? Get the people that are high profile in the community to support your product. And so the people as you just said, Sean, like, the people who are high profile in the community are gonna be all in on Hotwire because it's the new it's the new thing, and you wanna be in the stack, etcetera, etcetera.

So I think even if that even if we could pull away from it and just do React, it's gonna be better from a marketing perspective to get the big names to do you know, to support this. And I think we're gonna get closer to getting there if it's Hotwire.

Aaron

Yeah. Totally agree. That's the that's the wave. That's the trend that we could ride.

Colleen

Okay. Cool. Anyway, we don't need to dwell, but definitely something to think about.

Aaron

Sean, do you wanna keep talking about what you're up to besides client feedback?

No. I mean, I that's it. Like, it's on I'm gonna be helping Collin with the Hotwire thing and then trying to script the others some time to, like, close some of the loops. And I think the priority I'm gonna make it is, like, to close the the view loop and make sure that that's working because that's a big blocker for everything. So but Hotwire stuff and, like, helping Colleen out be my number one priority, and then I'll and I'm just gonna sweep up that remaining stuff.

Colleen

And by the way I was just gonna say, by the way, Sean helped me out, like, before the demo with some refinement blueprint stuff, and that went beautifully at the demo if I didn't tell you that. So thank you for that.

Aaron

Oh, so

Colleen

it was awesome.

Aaron

Last minute. Last minute right there.

Colleen

It was last minute. It sure was. I always see you. Okay. I feel like we need to make it a a team rule, guys, because I'm on Pacific time, and I can see you guys being green on Slack.

And I wanna message you because you're green. And, Sean, you are always green. You were green until, like, midnight last night. So what are what are our Slack our Slack rules to do you guys just never you want me to always schedule them for the next morning?

Aaron

Do you want me to do that for you.

Colleen

Okay. I know you will. Aaron won't ignore me

Aaron

no. Send it whenever you want. I I will, if I can help where I'm at, I will. And if not, I'll just tell you I can't help or I'll ignore you. But yeah.

But yeah. Send send it whenever you want. I won't feel I won't feel obligated to help.

Colleen

Okay. I've been working a lot more at night. And so I'm like, oh, I don't wanna be a jerk and send them this at 11 o'clock their time. I'll just send

Aaron

I think that green button lies. Like, I I don't I wasn't maybe I was, like, had my laptop open or I don't know. That that doesn't make sense.

Colleen

It was not working last night. Yeah. You weren't working last night? Okay. Because I I saw you were green, and then I was like, it's, like, 11 o'clock in Chicago.

I should not send him a message.

Aaron

Oh, no. I wasn't working. I was. Yeah. But not that late.

Like, what the hell? Not till 11. I went to bed at, like, 10 o'clock. That's weird. I don't know.

Bizarre.

Colleen

Maybe it's just open on your phone or something.

Aaron

Yeah. Instead of sending me

oh, I do.

Good for you. Had it on my phone. I will never have it on my phone.

Colleen

I'm impressed.

Aaron

Instead of sending me a late night message, you scheduled it for early morning on my birthday, And it was a, it was a tome. It was like 8 paragraphs. Yeah. It was like 8 paragraphs. And at the end it said, TLDR JK, you actually have to read all of this.

You can't skim it. So.

Colleen

I know what's worse. I don't, I didn't know it was worse. Oh, it's

Aaron

fine. Send it send it whenever you want. I don't care.

Colleen

Okay. Good. I'm glad we cleared that up.

Aaron

Yeah?

Yeah. Like, if you really need me, you have my phone number. Just do

that.

Colleen

Oh, yeah. If I need like, in that situation last week, like, that worked out. But, yeah, I would have texted you otherwise because I really needed you because I needed to get that sorted.

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

Yeah. But, like, for Slack, I'll just I'll just send them when I feel like it, and you can just ignore me if you want. Cool.

Aaron

I was gonna ask with regard to Vue and React. Are we still utilizing Jeff and Dave, or are they just kinda waiting on us to do something?

No. They're not waiting. They're they're still doing stuff, but just, you know, at their own pace.

Okay. Cool. I do have so one of these, potential clients that's in the Slack and is, that's the one that pulled, like, 8 team members in after we switched from paid Slack to free Slack because we had a shared channel and we went free and kicked them out. And then it was like 12 people have joined. That that that that's who I'm talking about.

They had need for the deferred option option condition, which is the type ahead load over Ajax. So what's what's the path here? Should I talk directly to Jeff? Should I have send that through you and have you figure that out or just boot altogether?

They need that, like, ASAP. They need that like, what's the priority?

I can find out. I don't know.

Because, like, if they can live without it for a bit, you know, I'll I'll I have it on my list. I'll get to it, or we could, see. Because the thing is if you have Jeff do it, he's gonna have and then you're just, like, having him reprioritize and reshuffle what he was working on. He's Right. Toss away whatever mental scaffolding he's built up for the renderless stuff that he's working on and then switch over to that.

So it would be better, you know, if I did it, and then that way you could just keep doing that one thing.

Okay. Well, I I will ask them.

But, you know, it has to be me, then it has to wait for Colleen stuff, and then it has to wait for me to get the view 3, view 2 branch finished, which is close. So, like, that's not a huge thing, but, like yeah. Then then and only then will I be able to do it.

Okay. Okay. I will find out from them how close they are to absolutely needing it.

Like, can they wait a month?

Yeah. Okay. I can find out. Okay. The oh, sorry, Sean.

I think you were still going. Did you have anything else? How are you doing in terms of not working 80 hour weeks? Have you been able to pull that back?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was completely by choice and fun and not just get a little tired, so back off. So yeah. Good.

Back to working a little bit less.

Good. It's

nice. But it just I just swapped it with now I have to go pick up the kid from school because Beth was, like, pinch hitting for me with with Isaac stuff. So Gotcha. Sound like I'm really working less.

Just different.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, I know that that was the plan, so I'm glad that happened. So I don't think we've mentioned it here, and I actually don't think we've celebrated.

We got paid. Neil Neil bought a license. Woo hoo. Yay.

Colleen

So we

Aaron

that. We're officially rich. Split between the 3 of us, we have $333 each to our name.

I like how initially, though, the banks, like, rejected it because they were like, what is this shady hammerstone organization?

Yeah.

Colleen

That's It's

Aaron

a good auspicious start.

Yeah. So I know that to be like a real indie hacker, we have to share our MRR and public and charts up into the right and everything, but it is exciting. That's our first

Colleen

Very exciting.

Aaron

That's our first Stripe payment. We ran it through the proper way that, like, we ran it through unlock dot sh, which is connected to our Stripe account. We found out it says torchlight on the statement descriptor, so I switched that to say, hammerstone. So it works. It's great.

And we did that, you know, we did that right before Laracon in case, you know, anybody found it and ran through it. We wanted to make sure that we could actually take their money. So off off to a start, we have one, like, proper paying licensed user, which is pretty exciting.

And I think we have, like, 400 ish people on the Mailchimp mailing list. We picked up Oh,

that's great.

70 or 80 from your from your talk, I

Colleen

think. Wow.

Aaron

I haven't looked I checked kinda right after, but, yeah, that's that's decent.

You know what? We're also we're also getting sign ups on our, reform list too. So we probably have even more than that, because people are signing up directly for the Mailchimp one. But then on the docs, I think I still have the early access list, so I think they're probably still signing up. Because I'm still getting emails about people that are being added to the reform list.

Okay. So it's probably even more than that. I didn't think about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey. Can you speaking of minor thing, can you add me to the Mailchimp account? I mean, I think I can't remember if you just gave me the password or whatever, but I Yes.

I think I gave you

I think I tried one of the accounts that I was using your login for complained, and they were like, hey. That looks suspicious. Okay. So I should probably I think it was Mailchimp. And just now, I was trying to log in, and I don't appear to have an account, so I'm guessing it was that.

Yeah. I think I added both of you to unlock and to Stripe. Yes. But I I think

I did both of those.

I do think I shared my password for Mailchimp. So, yeah, after this, yeah, I've got it open now. So I'll add you after this, and I'll add you to Colleen.

Colleen

Thank you.

Aaron

And the reform the reform thing. Yeah.

I'll add you I'll add you to reform as well. So, yeah, at the end of my Lyricon talk, I I went for it, man. I directly pitched Hammerstone, told them what we were building, told them to come sign up, told them that's where the sidecar docs live, so it was like a tie in to the thing I just presented and getting them to our site. So, yeah, I'm glad we I'm glad that worked. So for me, this past week after the Laracon talk, I just kind of crashed in a good way.

Just kinda was done working for a while. Now so I have a couple of there's a lot more attention on our open source stuff now, obviously. And so there are some things that I'm having to maintain, and so I'm getting more of a look into the life of, like, open source maintainer. Because also, Laravel just released version 9, and so everybody on these packages is like, hey. Where's, you know, where's support for Laravel version 9?

So I'm getting a little bit more of a taste into that. So I spent just a few hours this weekend fixing up some of the packages and releasing support for version 9 and that kind of stuff. And then there are a couple of people that have reached out directly and said, hey. I wanna try refine for Nova, either in Twitter DMs or via email. And so I have a few demos set up, and I need I need to get back to some people.

So I have some people that are waiting on me. But all in all, I think the the buzz is great. Some people, you know, reaching out directly saying they wanna use it is great. So that's kinda what I'm gonna be focused on for the next little bit is getting back to these people. There are a couple of, the last time I was giving a demo, there were a couple of wacky bad spots that I ran into while I was given the demo They're easily fixable that I just need to fix.

So I'll fix those as well. And then I wanted to circle back to recording a video conversation that we had last week. So last week, we talked about me recording, you know, 1 and 5 and maybe 10 minute, kinda like demo video of refine. And we nixed the idea, because we're too early. I wanna circle back to that and talk about it as marketing and not sales.

So the I think last week, we talked about it, and we talked about how we don't wanna do it as a sales crutch because we want to get the two way communication and not just me demoing it to an unknown person, and I don't get the feedback and that kind of stuff that I still buy. What I would like to do is use it more as, like, a marketing thing and not get, like, super into the weeds, but do a 1 or 2 minute video about how cool it is and some of the things you can do with it. And just kinda like show the thing in action in high fidelity with the next step being like, reach out to me for a demo, not this is your demo, but look, this is Nova. I did this, this, this, boom, it works. This is what I'm talking about.

That kind of thing. So is that any different, and do you have thoughts on that?

That makes sense. It's just, if you're doing that, what are you not doing? And is the thing you're not doing better? That's all. Just that thought.

This seems like a good idea to me.

Okay. I can navigate that trade off. Yeah. That that's fine with me. I just didn't want to have made this decision not to do a video and then turn around and do a video.

So we're viewing it more as like

okay, you get to do demos, so sales demos, and then also we have a very hands on approach to getting people started. And I think both of those things are the right, like, place right now. We should be doing that. And then working towards backing away from that as we understand more and more and marketing wise. Yeah.

Sure. But, I mean, I guess the only thing would be we're just collecting email addresses and building up a little bit of, like I mean, because we could sell Nova. So it would just be if people are interested in just the Nova piece, we

can input

directly to that.

Yeah. That's what I would be that's what I would be focusing on with this Yeah.

That makes sense.

Video is

That'd be awesome.

You know you know Nova here is this thing that we're building in Nova. Don't you love it? Reach out to me, and we'll get it sorted.

Colleen

Okay. And Okay.

Aaron

I

Colleen

have a paid to this. I have a paid Descript account if you need help editing that.

Aaron

Oh, cool. Yeah.

Colleen

Man, I think my most fave.

Aaron

I totally forget they do video.

Colleen

Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, their software's a little clunky, but it's really nice to be able to edit using text instead of edit it Right. With the video editor. So just FYI, if you're, like, don't spend hours and hours editing something, just send it to No.

Aaron

No. It's also Recut.

Yeah. That's what we're that's what we're using for our podcast now. I run it through recut. So any long awkward pauses, we're we're trying to figure out who goes next. They're gone.

We don't have to worry about it.

Colleen

Love it.

Aaron

Okay. I think that that might be all that I wanted to talk about. Yeah. I think that's that's all that I have.

Colleen

Cool. This is not really related, but, so have you ever heard the Product Journey podcast? It's Noah

Aaron

Yeah.

Colleen

And Ben. Did you hear this week? He had his wife on and it made me think of you guys. You heard that? Okay.

Aaron

Yeah. I definitely did. No. I was I was listening along and I was thinking, you know, at first she was like, this is so awkward. And I was thinking that's exactly what Jennifer would say if she was on the podcast.

But, yeah, it was it was fun to listen to her talk. And she was like, I didn't realize when we got married that this was, like, gonna keep going this whole side

Colleen

business thing. It was Sean. Okay. Let me tell you what she said. She said, I thought you were gonna grow out of it.

It was awesome. And get a real It was so fun. Laugh. Yeah. It really it was excellent.

Aaron

I had a good time. Yeah. Yeah. That was great. All right.

Shall we call it

there? Okay. Sounds good.