New year, new energy

Aaron

Hello, Colleen.

Colleen

Hey. Good morning, Aaron.

Aaron

How's it going?

Colleen

I am doing really well. I was sick for, like, 2 weeks over the break, which was a super bummer because it was the break, and we were

Aaron

on vacation. Of course, when you have kids,

Colleen

you have, like, non refundable occasions happening when you get sick. However, I am now feeling better, and the spike in my energy level just being healthy has been tremendous. So

Aaron

So that's kinda like a productivity hack. Get really sick, and then by the time you take all the medicine, you're, like, really ready to go?

Colleen

Yeah. It's super winning.

Aaron

Yeah. Probably not replicatable, but I'm glad you're feeling better. I did not recommend. I actually saw last night on Twitter, as one does, that you started working on some documentation. So you just have, like, a, like, a burst of energy, or what's going on?

Colleen

Yes. I did. And I had deep thoughts. So with all this newfound energy, I've been having deep thoughts. And my deep thoughts are I just need to work more right now.

Like, it's that's it. That's the deep thought.

Aaron

I I have actually, I've been noticing that on from just from your Twitter content about you were like, hey. So hustling's not bad. Right? Right. I saw you, like, you very soft pedaled asking the question because you didn't wanna get, like, you know, labeled as a toxic, yeah, hustle bro.

But, I noticed that. So what's what's the story there?

Colleen

I am in I've been thinking about it a lot. And like I said, with all my newfound energy, many deep thoughts, and I just have to work more. Here's the thing. Building a business is a tremendous amount of work. Full stop.

It's just a lot of work, and this is our year. And so I think I need to go back into a I hate to use the word hustle because that is has so many negative connotations, but I also kinda need to go back to that where I just need to work a lot. I need to just figure out, okay, for the next x number of months, like, I just need to work more because that's what's that's what it's gonna take, and it's game time. Like, I'm all in. Let's do it.

Aaron

So we independently had the same awakening. I think yours was, due to the sickness or whatever. But over the break, I came to that same I came to that exact same conclusion, for myself, not for you. I came to the same conclusion. Like, I did a lot of, like, I did a year in review, which made me look back on the year.

And for the first time, I've I've ever done a year in review. And one of the things I looked back on was, like, I just could be working a lot harder. And I think, you know, at some point, I decided that this is the time in my life where I'm gonna, you know, put in maximum effort, and this is not the time where I'm gonna take a whole bunch of of leisure. Like, I'm not a semi retired independent, builder. Like, that's just not who I am right now.

I would like to be that. So over the break, I've spent a lot of time, like, writing down what I, like, what I feel like is blocking me and what I want to do this year and kinda, like, what I wanna do with my life. And one of the big conclusions was you just you just gotta work harder. And, of course, this is not prescriptive, so nobody listened to any of this. But for me for me, the answer is you just gotta work harder.

Like, everything that you want is on the other side of working really hard. And I think a big part of that for me is, like, better time management and better discipline, but also just I don't know what it is, but I just feel this huge amount of energy. I've been getting up without an alarm clock, weirdly. Like, this morning, I woke up at 5:50. I was like, okay.

It's time to go. Let's go do some stuff. And so I've been working out here until about 7:30, and then I go back in and help, Jennifer and the kids or help Jennifer with the kids' breakfast. So I get to hang out with them for a while, and then I'm back out here by, like, 8:30. And then at nights, I've just been doing more.

So I don't know what I don't know what's in the water, but we're both feeling the same way. And that's good because this is this is our year to make it happen. Yep. That's that's what I think, and, I'm excited about it. But I but I do think, like you know, I think the thing with our very,

Colleen

you know, my very wonderful friends and, like, people on the Internet, I feel like there's this cultural shift because so many people, like, work too hard and burn out. There's, like, this cultural push that, like, oh, you should never work more than 40 hours a week, and you should never work at night. And that is not reality with what we're trying to do. Like, this is not this is not the game. Like, you have to work hard.

If If we're gonna turn this into a real business, we have to work hard. And I like that we're both hitting that at the same time.

Aaron

Yeah. That that's helpful. Yeah. If we were hitting that at different times, that would be cool. Yeah.

Colleen

Yeah. So

Aaron

so if you're in sync on that Yeah. I feel like the pendulum pendulum has swung super far where it's almost like you can't talk about how hard you're working or how much you are honestly, how much you're trying to grind. Like, I know Yes. I know my first million has, like, taken the grind word and kinda poisoned it, but it's a freaking grind. And I feel like that's kinda what I wanna do right now is grind it out and see if I can make it happen.

There was somebody that tweeted, like, if you're coding the day after Christmas, I just have one question for you. And then in all caps, it just said, why? And a lot of people responded and were like, because it's a work day, and I have to work today. And some people responded and said, like, I don't celebrate Christmas. It's like, okay.

Well, that makes sense. I responded and said, you know, for some people, coding is is fun, and I think that's okay. And I got blocked for that. Ouch. She blocked me.

Wow. Like yeah. But I was feeling, like, the day after Christmas, I was like, you know, the kids are asleep. I have to keep it all in context of family, but the kids are asleep. And the thing I really wanna be doing right now is doing some work.

And so I was I don't remember what I did the day after Christmas. It might have been recording videos for PlanetScale or something. But, yeah. So, anyway, I'm glad we're at the same spot. You were grinding on some documentation last night.

How did that go?

Colleen

Well, my dear friend who has our website made in Laravel, that's how it went. Okay. I'm just giving you our time.

Aaron

That good, It was fine. I think, first of

Colleen

all, you know, it's funny because when I went from when I learned to code, like, I used Twitter as a motivational tool because it was hard. It was it was every night, like, a motivational tool because it was hard. It was it was every night, like, hours, like, 8 to 10 PM. And so, one, I really last night, I was like, okay. I'm gonna start working at nights again because I just need to work more.

So it was really fun. Like, I like to tweet something and then go do a tomato timer for 25 minutes, and I do that three times. So I'm like, okay. Every night, I can give it an hour and a half. And then come back, and, like, people have responded.

It was super fun. It was fine. I mean, I think the documentation, it's kind of meditative actually, because it's not that hard. It's just a lot.

Aaron

Yep.

Colleen

So so so I actually kind of I mean, it feels a little bit laborious because it's like, this is a lot. It's

Aaron

a lot.

Colleen

But it's also kind of you know, it's it's kinda nice. I didn't mind. I do need your help actually getting the route so I can actually see it because I'm just doing it in markdown. Oh, gosh.

Aaron

I do.

Colleen

I do need you to valet valet something, valet wave your fingers or whatever so I can actually see what I'm making. But,

Aaron

That would probably be helpful. That would probably help,

Colleen

but I figured it wasn't worth wasting my time to figure that out last night because you probably can set that up for me really quickly.

Aaron

I can. And, yeah, I think everything I think it's all marked down, so you probably

Colleen

Yeah. It's all marked down. I just copied your files, and it's all marked down. But it but it's I think, man, I mean, this is, like, the bigger picture for the company and the business, but, you know, I was do I started with Boolean condition, and we have all of that ways you can handle nulls and Boolean condition. And in Rails, nulls are are often a problem because people often forget to set their migrations and set nulls, so nulls exist.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

And I was like, wow. None of our customers know that they can

Aaron

Yep.

Colleen

Exactly. Handle nulls however they want because there's no way they would have known this.

Aaron

Yeah. I found, I found writing the documentation for the back end to be really, really helpful because it made me notice things that were, like, kinda clunky. And so I'd be writing something and be like, okay. Well, here's what you have to do, and you and then you gotta do this and, but you also have to do this. And I was like, wait.

Why don't I just change it? Like, if this is so hard to document, why don't I just change it to make it better? So I'll be curious I'll be curious if you run into any of those, like, any of those, documentation driven design decisions.

Colleen

Yeah. And I think it was really good to start getting into it. So that's that's that's this week. Like, I'm like, okay. I have a lot of things to do, but I think this is this needs to be a priority.

And it was really nice, though, because I have been living in the front end and the struggles we've been having in the front end. So it was really calming to be back in, like, the back end world where I feel very comfortable, and, like, I know what everything does, and I know how it works. It was it was quite lovely, actually.

Aaron

Yep. Man, I feel that. That's absolutely where I wanna hang out.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

So speaking of front ends, that is where I have been living, and it's a nightmare. And I hate it. It's fine. It's not that bad, but I'd it's not my favorite. So what I've been working on, with all my newfound energy is getting Nova, getting Nova just completely done for both 3 and 4.

So Nova has 2 major versions, 34. Nova 3 relies on view 2.6, and Nova 4 relies on view 3. And so just everything is completely different everywhere. The Nova package that we have had it used a front end from a long time ago that I just kinda, like, copy and paste it out of what whatever Sean was working on so that I could get it done. Now, thanks to lots of frustration and effort, the Nova package relies on our proper view 2 and view 3 front ends.

So that's that's really good.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

And so I've been making I've been working across, like, 6 different repos at once, which has been really hard to keep straight because I'll have, like, the refined front ends, which holds the v 2 and v 3. And then I have the nova 3, the nova 4, a nova 3, Laravel package so I can actually test the thing, and a nova 4 Laravel package so I can test the thing, and the actual Laravel back end. So it's been really complicated, and that's part of what I part of what I've been spending time on is, like, the plumbing between it all so that don't I'm not afraid to make changes the next time. Because I think the worst thing that could happen is I could get this all done and then not touch it for 2 weeks. And then somebody needs a change, and I'm like, I'm too scared.

I don't remember how this works. I don't know how to develop on this. I'm not gonna make the change. And then knowing myself, that fear is just gonna grow to the point where it's like, oh, I can never touch that again. Yeah.

So, like, setting up all of the the bundling and the packaging and the releasing, all of that has been not very much fun, but I think it is extremely valuable because in the future, it'll be easy to make a change, bundle it, release it, and do all of that with confidence. So that's been good, if a little bit frustrating. I don't know how I don't know how these people work on the front end all the time. These these front end people, I don't I don't get you. It's it's really it's really frustrating to, like, try to bundle and package JavaScript.

Colleen

Yeah. No kidding.

Aaron

I just yeah. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Done. Well, it's mostly done. So all of that leads us to it's time to launch Nova.

Colleen

Woo hoo. This is amazing.

Aaron

So By

Colleen

the way, let's let's pause and say, yay. Like, awesome job.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. That's the point. Yeah.

I don't really just like I see it as a a task. And it's like, okay. Well, I've I've completed the task. Now it's time to move on. So we have the new landing page, that will go on hammerstone.dev and will be the landing page, and there will be a little thing that's like, are you looking for Rails?

Click here because this is not the landing page for that. And then it'll be linked to buy the Nova package, which will support Nova 3 and Nova 4, and it will be 200 and I think it's 249. Okay. $249 for a Nova license, and that'll be 1 year of updates. So it's gonna be just like Nova, which is 1 year of updates.

If it expires, you retain access to your last version forever. Okay. So the experiment here is dropping the Nova price, getting Nova 4 done, and pushing on it super hard. Can we make any Nova sales? And if so, how many, and will it be worth it?

I guess is the question. Right.

Colleen

Yeah. Well, that's exciting. This is a a theory we have wanted to test for quite a while.

Aaron

Yep. It is, and we're ready to go. And I think after we test this theory, it'll be interesting to see I think there are at least 2 routes. 1 is continue forward with Nova and expand into the Nova eco ecosystem, and the other is continue forward with Refine and sell it to just vanilla Laravel applications. It'll be interesting to see which one we feel like is most, possible after this.

Colleen

Yeah. And it'll be interesting too to see if so if someone buys Nova, you know, we can then upsell them

Aaron

to Correct.

Colleen

To Laravel proper. Mhmm. So it might be a good channel as well.

Aaron

Yeah. It might be. Yeah. And I'm I'm hoping that that's the case, because I feel like a lot of people use Nova for their admin back ends, and might want refined on, like, their regular site, which would not be a Nova site. So I'm really hoping that's the case, but I guess we'll find out.

And if I think another interesting thing is if this does super well in Nova, there's another admin panel that we talked about a long, long time ago called Filament, that we could potentially try to sell into there. So I don't know. Lot lots of lots of things, hopefully, that we'll learn and we can talk about here. But I am excited to, like I feel like this is weirdly or maybe not weirdly, but embarrassingly, the first time we've got a, like, a proper, polished, finished package ready to go. Like, people have been buying the refined layer valve stuff, but and it's always been kinda like, oh, there's some sharp corners, especially with the front ends.

This is the first one where I'm, like, super proud of. Okay. This is done, done. Then there's no reason you shouldn't buy it.

Colleen

Yeah. That feels pretty good. That feels good. Yeah. Yeah.

So let's talk about launch strategy.

Aaron

Let's do.

Colleen

Now that we have a proper product, we should do something fun. Properly launch it.

Aaron

We should. Yeah. Well, so what are we gonna do? I think the first thing is, push everything live, which it's it's not right now.

Colleen

Right.

Aaron

Like the website. Push everything live. Get all the packages released. All of that is just, like, groundwork. Then I wanna I'm gonna tweet about it.

I may do a a bunch of tweets about it. I may just do one. I don't I don't really know, what the Twitter strategy is, but I think that's the first step, is to tweet that. We still have a mailing list of people who have signed up for, like, early access and stuff, and it's full of Laravel and Rails and Nova and not Nova. And you know what?

We're just gonna freaking email all of them and say, it's ready for Nova. If you don't use Nova, well, it's also ready for Rails, kind of. Why don't you just come to the website anyway? And we'll figure out what happens with that.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

So we'll send everybody an email. I'll tweet about it. And then beyond that, we've had a couple ideas. You are super keen on doing product hunt.

Colleen

I am just because I wanna try.

Aaron

I know. Sounds super fun. I know. This just feels like such a niche thing for Product Hunt, but Nope.

Colleen

We're doing it.

Aaron

We're doing it.

Colleen

We're doing it. I wanna I don't know

Aaron

case is nobody up votes it, and it's embarrassing. And you know what? I've realized, you don't die from embarrassment, so that's fine.

Colleen

That's right. I wanna do it. Because I figure we'll set we'll we'll launch on product on so many times. We wanna practice. Yeah.

Aaron

That's true. I'm into that. And then I had thought about potentially buying an app on Laravel News, and we'll wait we'll wait a while on that, until after we've done all of the organic stuff that we can. Yeah. Yeah.

And then beyond that, there's some bigger strategies that I don't feel like I wanna discuss here openly, but that's about all I got. And I I feel like it's gonna kinda be a rolling launch. Like, I'm just gonna have to continually launch over and over and over. Yeah.

Colleen

I think that's the move. Isn't that like Derek's launch Savvy Cow, like, 5 times? I don't know if it's 5. Yeah. Like, several times.

Yeah. He's just like, yeah. Let's do it again. Like, alright. Yeah.

Aaron

It seems like

Colleen

a good move. I mean, more eyeballs, like, whatever, you know, whatever traffic you can get. I think it's Yeah. It's a good move. Okay.

This is really, really exciting. This is yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. This is exciting. This feels like momentum to me, which has been sorely lacking, for a long time.

Colleen

I agree. This is awesome.

Aaron

Oh, I feel good about it. Alright. What else?

Colleen

Good. Well, so issues I'm dealing with, documentation, I told you. I've been trying to make a high level plan for the quarter. I mean, really the year, but like the quarter because as we discussed at the top of the episode, like, it's game time. Like, I'm all in.

I'm divesting myself of all other clients and commitments, and I'm all in here. So one of the things I'm struggling with is we have 6 rails customers who have prepurchased essentially Refine.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Colleen

And I wanna say that I told them it would be ready in December, and now it is January. So I am trying to effectively manage the communication with them. And this we're in this big rebuild, which I don't know if I've talked about on the podcast, maybe casually. But it's a big rebuild, and it's gonna be amazing, but it's gonna take a while. And so I'm trying to figure out what is the right balance between should I put the customers who have already bought Refine on what we have, because we know it works, because our enterprise client is using it in production, Get them happy and then offer to help them upgrade once the rebuild is is complete or ask them to wait.

I mean, waiting 3 more months, that that that feels too long to me.

Aaron

Oh, yeah. But it might not feel too long to them. You'd have to ask.

Colleen

Well, and that's probably the answer. Maybe I'll just ask them.

Aaron

I think that's the answer always. Yeah.

Colleen

What do you wanna do?

Aaron

Yeah. It's like when I'm trying to plan out, like, what Jennifer and I should do, and I'm like, well, she'll probably wanna do this, and now she'll wanna do that. I'm like, oh, wait. Let me just go ask her what she wants to do. Yeah.

And the rebuild for context, is taking all of the things you've learned from trying to get the first one or two people on and all the rough edges and just realizing this is not good enough?

Colleen

So the biggest thing let me actually explain the rebuild because I think this is beneficial. First of all, I have an architect working on it, and I love what he's doing with it. A couple big things he's changing. 1 is going to be how you actually integrate refine. Like, he's writing generators, and it's gonna be everything is gonna be contained in a file.

Because right now, there's a lot of there's a lot of challenges to integrating it. It's like a 12 step process. I think I told you that. And, so this is gonna be first first big change is you're just gonna run a generator, and it's gonna do all the things for you that you needed to do. Perfect.

It's gonna be beautiful. 2nd really big thing is you're gonna be able to write and easily slot in your own views. Right now, you're tied into our HTML structure. And I have, you know, one customer, and he just copied out all the views, which you can do. But because the views are so heavily tied to the stimulus controllers, if Mhmm.

The the problem I'm having now is if I change something in stimulus or I decide, you know, I don't you know, we change something on the front end, he has to know since he's overridden the view, but the view is tied into stimulus to make that change. So that's a breaking change. So the new architecture is not gonna be so tightly coupled. And so you will be able to do if you want to override every view, we're giving you this option where you can just say, render refine view with this theme, this custom theme, and you can just do a custom theme. And so, the whole how you integrate it from the front end, back end's the same.

That's not changing. From a front end perspective is gonna be so much easier. So, and how you actually render not rendering the filter, but how you receive the filter as a param and actually execute the filter. Because right

Aaron

now, you know, as you and I have talked

Colleen

about a little bit, stable ID in your controller. This, very confusing to people. And I get it. It's very confusing to me, and I

Aaron

Myself included.

Colleen

Yeah. Everyone is confused about the stable ID thing. So we're getting rid of that completely, and we're just gonna make you post the params as a blueprint to your controller. So

Aaron

Sounds good to me.

Colleen

The rewrite basically turns this thing that we've turned into this kinda complicated JavaScript. And right now, it's kind of this complicated JavaScript engine. We're managing state on the front end. We're managing state on the back end. And it's just gonna make it a form.

Like, it's just gonna be a form. Like, let's let's get back to basics. Like, what are we doing here? And so with all of that, I think when we are ready to relaunch, if you will, v 2, we're calling it v 2, It's gonna be awesome. Like, I think people are gonna love it.

It's gonna be so much easier to reason about and wrap your brain around. And it's gonna be so much easier to use. But this is software. And, you know, that's the hardest thing in project management is how long is software really gonna take. Yeah.

And so I guess my my conflict is people have already paid me, like, good number of people, and they have been waiting very patiently. And I don't know if they listen to this podcast, but if you do, I really appreciate it. Hey.

Aaron

How are you?

Colleen

Hey, guys.

Aaron

You're the best. Sorry.

Colleen

And and I feel really excited about this new direction, but it is it is gonna be it is like breaking change. But also, you could theoretically put in what you have now so they have something. Again, we know this works because we're using an in product. I could sit down with each one of these people and get it working for them, and that would make me feel good. Like, I I think that's a non zero consideration factor.

Aaron

Like I agree.

Colleen

I've I've taken on 6. I think I've accepted I I've accepted payment from 6 people. So that's non zero that, like, if I sit down with them and I can actually get it working in their app, it would make me happy.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. It would be just like

Colleen

that emotional emotional boost. Because right now, it feels like this just like, man, these these people are unhappy. They're not telling me that they're unhappy. They're being very patient. I mean, maybe they maybe that's the answer.

I mean, I'll just ask them. Do you wanna wait for v 2? Do you want me to work with you to get set up on v 1? And you can migrate to v 2 when it's ready.

Aaron

Yeah. Oh, man. I totally feel all of that. I feel the emotional, like, when that it would be to get them started, but also the burden of this is not clean enough to use, and it's gonna change in 2 or 3 months. So what a pain that would be also.

I would I would talk to them. I would ask them. I would go to them with a I would personally go to them with a realistic timeline of when you think it'll be ready and a pitch on why they should wait. That's my opinion. They can they can say, no.

I need to get started right now, and you're like, that's great. We can do that. I would pitch, can you wait? Because I think it's gonna be I think it would be nice, like, it would feel like a win for you to get it installed in somebody's application. I don't think it's an uncomplicated win, though.

I think you'll get it installed, and you'll feel good about that. But you'll feel bad about how gonna be like, wow. Yeah. I know

Colleen

this part's bad.

Aaron

You know? And this is well, this is gonna change soon, and it's just gonna be full of caveats. And I just don't feel like that's gonna be as as much of a win as you think it would be.

Colleen

Yeah. That's that's a fair point. And I think, again, taking a break it's not a break, but, like, taking this week to be, like, I'm gonna get this documentation done, and I'm gonna do the documentation based on what we have now. And so even once I can, like, really, really wrap my brain around it again, the back end stuff, I I understand that. But, like, the front end stuff is complicated as we have talked about Yep.

Many, many times. But it's not an it's not like you can't figure it out. It's complicated, and it feels messy, but it does work. So I think just having the documentation laid out, being able to give people the documentation, saying this is how it is now, and we have kind of made this documentation of what it's gonna be like. We've already done that.

Like, so my architect is doing, you know, documentation based development, which is cool. So he was basically like, this is what we should be doing to this is how hard it should be to install. So let's write the documentation, and then let's build it. I was like, this is that's a great plan. Love this plan.

Yep. So I can say this is what it is now. I will will sit down with you, and we will get this working if you need this now. If you can wait, it's probably 3 months to be realistic. If you can wait, this is what we're moving towards, and it's gonna give you a ton more flexibility.

So, yeah. I I like that plan. I think that's a good plan. I think, you know, I just need to continue to communicate with them.

Aaron

Yep. I think so. And I think they'll be, honestly, I think they'll be happy to wait if you pitch them. Listen, I've learned all of this from our client. I'm making it way better, and I wanna give you that version, but it's gonna take a little bit longer.

I think they'll be okay with that.

Colleen

Well, and they bought it for a $1,000, and now it's gonna be $75100. So, hopefully, that is a nice

Aaron

They're definitely gonna be okay. Yeah. A nice a nice nice salve as well. Like, oh, okay. Speaking of, did you hear back from that first person you told it was 75100?

Colleen

I did not. No response.

Aaron

Surprised me. Okay.

Colleen

Yeah.

Aaron

Onward. Onward. That was quite alright. Alright. Anything else?

Colleen

Nope. That's it for me.

Aaron

Okay. Back to work.

Colleen

Alright. Talk to you later.

Aaron

See you.