Mostly Technical · Jul 2, 2024
Ian and Aaron check in the results of Aaron's course launch, talk about the new developer position that Ian just posted, dive into the benefits of scheming time, and so much more.
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Ian
Hello? Hello, hat guy. Hat guy. Hi.
Aaron
This is so new. I've never seen this in my life.
Ian
So look at how cool this hat is, but it's got a fatal flaw. First of all, I like to wear hats backwards in general, but this is cool. Potentially forward hat. Uh-huh.
Aaron
Very cool.
Ian
K. K. But see, it's got see this? What is this?
Aaron
It's bad shape. Yeah.
Ian
What? That's a
Aaron
that's a hipster doofus shape.
Ian
Whose weirdo head fits in here to fill this pie? Nobody has a head.
Aaron
Head, but that's like a that's a very hipster shape.
Ian
Yeah. I don't like it. Little horns or something there to, like, make that work. I got this hat for free. Chrome
Aaron
is that the chrome offline dinosaur?
Ian
This guy who works on the Internet. It's a shit up
Aaron
here, man. That is amazing. He's gonna be on
Ian
no sleep. It doesn't matter. He's still sharp as attack. So Where did
Aaron
you get it?
Ian
Google emailed me, and they're like, yo. You've got, like, $40 in Google Play Store credits or something. I don't have an Android. I don't have anything to do. I know Google stuff.
What am I gonna do with this $40? Right? So I go on their site thing in the little store and they got this hat. I'm like, I'll buy a hat for $38 or crazy how this hat is. But I like these little things.
So, anyway, it's going backwards. I like it back backwards, it fits nice. It's got a pretty nice backwards look.
Aaron
It's got a good backwards look, and it has
Ian
the the blue the pop of color on the
Aaron
the adjuster there with the strap. It's very cool.
Ian
Color. See that? I don't like how this is going backwards. Oh, man. I don't like that.
Oh, man. I fucked it up. I don't like this either. I have to go no hat. I might have to put my Taylor Swift hat on.
I get my Taylor Swift hat over here. See, how's the last time you sold me the hat?
Aaron
The good the good news is is this I feel like this is mostly an audio, experience, so I don't think it There
Ian
we go.
Aaron
Okay. That's, yeah, that's gonna distract me. Can't handle the secret.
Ian
Go out to a dinosaur. It's
Aaron
gonna. Yeah.
Ian
Alright. No. There we
Aaron
go. Alright. There we go.
Ian
No. So big week. Big week. Boy. Big
Aaron
What a week. What a week.
Ian
What you got? We got a lot to cover.
Aaron
Ask ask me some questions. Where do we wanna start?
Ian
So you launched on you had a day delay, if I recall. Had a
Aaron
day delay.
Ian
Launched on Friday. Yep. So what give us a we're here. Give us the behind the scenes. Why was there a day delay?
What happened?
Aaron
So there was a day delay because we were finishing the website, and I thought, yeah, we need, like, 15 minutes to build a whole, you know, learning platform. And it was close, but we needed a little bit longer. So the plan was to launch on Wednesday. Nope. The plan was to launch on Thursday.
And Wednesday night rolls around, and it's, like, 8:30 or 9. And I'm, you know, sitting at the kitchen table working, and Steve calls, and he's like, hey, man. Are we gonna finish this tonight?
Ian
I was
Aaron
like, you know, it it sure isn't feeling like we're gonna finish this tonight. Yeah. And he was like, why don't we just launch on Friday then? I was like, well, that's actually a pretty good idea. So, you know, ideally, we would have launched on a, like, on a Tuesday or something, but Right.
Ian
The playbook.
Aaron
That, you know, stuff happens, and we launched anyway. And so fine. So we decided to we decided to punt. So then we worked on it all day Thursday. Mhmm.
Hysterical thinking we were you know, we thought we were gonna finish on Wednesday night. So I worked on it all day on Thursday. Steve is working on the front end. He's doing a bunch of stuff too. And then Thursday night, Jennifer and I had, like, a a dinner party that we went to.
So I went to this dinner.
Ian
Why not? And then Okay.
Aaron
Yeah. And then at, like, 9:30, I came back to the office and was like, great. Just gotta finish up. Went home at 3:30 that morning. So I stayed up all night Thursday
Ian
night boy.
Aaron
And came back up here on Friday, Friday morning, and started live streaming, which I think we gotta talk about this. Great great hack. Great hack.
Ian
When you've been in the whole night, that's what I recommend. Night. Right on to the livestream.
Aaron
Just give you give you that energy. So then, you know, Friday morning, I I don't know, around 10:30, 11 CST, something like that, we launched. And, you know, it started working. So we'll we'll stop there, and we can we can dive in on any any of the details.
Ian
Yeah. So woah. There was I mean, there's a lot right there. But yeah. I mean, you definitely made the right call because there's nothing I mean, especially with a course where, like, there's you know, you're hoping this course lasts a long time and all that stuff, but still there's gonna be a big day.
One, most likely is a lot of pent up demand. You hate to have that be like, everybody gets a bunch of errors and the camp actually buy and yep. How, what percentage of those people just never come back or whatever. So you gotta like, gotta make sure that at least works on some basic level. So good.
Good job hunting. I think one day he seemed totally reasonable. I don't know about this dinner party situation. Seems like a bad call. I don't know if I did a dinner party.
He did the day before I launch or apparently planned for the day of the launch.
Aaron
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was supposed to be, you know, the day of launch, and then we go out to dinner with friends. And it's like, oh, that was nice.
Ian
What a
Aaron
great day. But Sure. Really hoisted by my own petard there.
Ian
Although on the flip side, you were working all day. You know, there is a point of diminishing returns there where, like, the break, even if you know, then you're gonna have a long night. Like, there is a value in that break versus just being like, yeah, I'm gonna work 8 AM to 3 AM and straight through, and that doesn't always work.
Aaron
That wasn't gonna work.
Ian
So Yeah. Yeah. So it kinda probably worked out for the best, actually. So alright. So that's all good.
I mean, I think, I mean, Steve's I wanna talk a lot about Steve's then not here, but I mean, obviously, incredible job to produce this many videos in that period of time. I'm sure a lot of them, you know, didn't all need animation and crazy stuff, but still, like, that's a lot of videos to make sure that everything's right and all that.
Aaron
Yeah. So It's especially when we're doing dark and light mode videos.
Ian
What the what the you guys are fucking crazy. Let's just start right there. It's just we don't curse a lot in the show, but I think this is appropriate. Somebody tweeted this. I was like, what are they talking about?
This is obviously can't be correct. And then no. Apparently, it is correct. When you go to dark mode, you get dark slides on your crazy videos, and I I don't even know why you're thinking that's bizarre. And I think that's
Aaron
Isn't it great?
Ian
I guess. How did you do the gray? I didn't, like, I didn't have a chance to look deeply into this. So did you, like he puts in this after, or you had this up and you're doing it twice?
Aaron
So we we planned ahead a little bit with the color schemes. So I a lot of a lot of the work is just done in terminal, which is black and white, so that's nice.
Ian
Right.
Aaron
But the work that's done in TablePlus, Steve before I recorded anything, Steve gave me a custom color scheme that would look pretty good inverted. And so he actually he renders every video twice. And so it's not just like a, you know, a CSS, you know, rotation filter or something. So, yeah, all his animations, all the graphics, and all the screen work is rendered twice over over or, I guess, under the same talking head. So I didn't have to record everything twice, but he had a little script.
And the he did stuff where, like, you know, you can invert it, and then certain colors in Final Cut Pro, you can pick and, like, rotate the hue. So if something inverted weird, he would, like, change it.
Ian
But Right. He basically, like, green screened it sort of,
Aaron
like Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, I'm separated from the footage all the time, and so he could leave my camera alone and just muck around with the screen, which is a lot. It's just a lot simpler.
Ian
Yeah. Wow. Good touch. Right? That was yeah.
I don't think I've ever seen that. Nobody's ever nobody's ever done it. It's it makes no sense. Who would
Aaron
why would you do that?
Ian
It's completely bizarre. But I guess I like it. It makes some kind of bizarre world sense. It's I mean, marketing wise, I like it. I don't know now.
Do you have to keep stuff forever? What are your thoughts there?
Aaron
Who knows? But it's a great it's a great shtick. It's a great shtick. I think it
Ian
Especially a great shtick thing. Yeah.
Aaron
It aligns well with the try hard brand, and it's one of those things that's, like, remarkable. So when you when you first do it and you see it, that's something where you would, like, go to Twitter and remark on it, and that's a good thing.
Ian
I love remarkability. I've never honestly had a product with great remarkability, but it's always something I want to have. Like Yep. Yeah. It's such it's so hard to come up with obviously, b two b is extra hard, but, like, for something like this where it's like, yeah, Having a little remarkability is so good and I don't know.
You read the purple cow? You must have read the purple cow.
Aaron
I mean, I stuff go have I read it or has it been just like, yeah, soaked into my brain?
Ian
I don't know. But I know. Yeah. You gotta have a purple cow.
Aaron
It's all there in the title. Yeah.
Ian
I got a big, hanging across from my office in my house. I have a gigantic sort of print of the cover that he did way back in the day. That's cool. And it's signed by him. Woah.
And it's only, like, it's signed and numbered. So I don't know. It's like, whatever. He did a 100 of them or whatever.
Aaron
Cool.
Ian
I've got one.
Aaron
So All these all these years, you've had the you've had the print and not found your own purple cow.
Ian
I know. Hey. Do something with it.
Aaron
You we'll get there. We'll find you one.
Ian
I know. I have I have a few ideas on this on, like, the I'm working on new HelpSpot website, and, I might I might utilize some of it there, but that's still that's still not the same as, like, in the product, in its core. There's just some crazy shit that, like, people are gonna So Yep. Alright. So let's not get off track here.
So Okay. Alright. So it's, you you you are up basically all night.
Aaron
All night.
Ian
Come in. You're like, hey. Let's livestream. Why not? So you you throw on the livestream.
You deal with technical difficulties, whatever other BS is going on. And alright. So how'd livestream go? I watched a good chunk of it. I watched the relaunch, I think.
Aaron
The livestream the livestream was great. I think the I think it's an ultimate it's like a hack for sure because you go live on Twitter, and Twitter, like, blasts it in everyone's face.
Ian
It's over the top now. Yeah. All over the new lives. Like, hey. By the way
Aaron
go to? Yeah. You can't get around. Yeah. Exactly.
Ian
Look. This bot is live right now. And
Aaron
you you cannot like, if everyone laments the the death of reach on Twitter, but then you gotta livestream because that's ultimate 100% reach. Everyone's gonna get shown it multiple times.
Ian
What they want you to do. Yes.
Aaron
Yes. Exactly. So I went live on Twitter. You know, the first 30 seconds, it was like, hey. Your microphone's blowing out our ears.
Ian
And I
Aaron
was like, okay. Uh-huh. We'll start over.
Ian
So I
Aaron
went live on Twitter a second time, and that time it worked. And, yeah, I was really just, like, literally working through the details of launching. You know, I'm writing this launch email. I'm, like, deploying stuff. I'm talking to Steve on the phone.
I'm like, wait. What's going on? What have we messed up?
Ian
Very cool. Yeah.
Aaron
It I I felt like it was fun. Like, it's a fun It
Ian
was.
Aaron
I had never seen that kind of content before, and I, you know, if I could watch Yeah. Adam Wavin and Steve launch something, like, I
Ian
would have
Aaron
watched that
Ian
for sure.
Aaron
So I thought, hey. Let's give it a go. And you know what? I think it was a great idea. The numbers, you know, all the numbers are made up on Twitter, and they don't really mean anything, but they're directionally correct.
And so, you know, bigger bigger number is better. And I think Right. The livestream has, like, a 100000 views at this point, which means Wow. I don't know what it means. Yeah.
Right.
Ian
But even if it's 50,000 in real life Like,
Aaron
even 10,000
Ian
or whatever. It's 10,000 more than you had before. Right? Like, it
Aaron
was Exactly. Good. Yes. Yeah. And No.
But people were asking. Find it. Yeah. So yeah. A 101.3000 views according to Twitter, which, you know, the tweet itself has 300,000 views.
So, yeah. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah.
So that was good. It was fun. A lot of interaction. A lot of people being like, hey. Don't forget this, or why don't you change this email to say that?
Dave Hickey came in with a great he was like
Ian
Came in with a haymaker.
Aaron
Bury the lead. It sounds negative, and I was like, that's a good point, Dave. And so I took out bury the lead. So So that was helpful. Thanks, Dave.
Producer Dave.
Ian
Yeah. I feel like the, the sort of peanut gallery had some good comments on it. Like, helped actually helped you out, caught some things.
Aaron
Yep. Jason Beggs was the one that knew that, what was it? Queue workers weren't running because we were in maintenance mode, so that was good. It
Ian
came out the same. That's what you wanna figure out too. Yeah.
Aaron
Yeah. I just never ever ever used maintenance mode. Right. I was just literally never used
Ian
it in my life. Right.
Aaron
Yeah. And so I'm like, I I have no idea what could go wrong here. So that was helpful. And then, another happy side effect, I think, is when I put out the launch tweets, like, the proper, hey. It's live.
Go get it. Mhmm. Everyone on stream interacted with that tweet and because they were, like, into the story now. And so they find the new tweet, they go comment or retweet, and that worked really, really well, I think.
Ian
Yeah. Especially nowadays where it seems like the algorithms of all these social sites are big on the, like and, you know, within the first, who knows how long minute or 5 minutes or whatever, like, they're gonna weight you more heavily if you get a bunch of likes in that time period. So you have a little army of people you can just send off to like it right away is definitely advantageous.
Aaron
Mhmm. Yeah. So that worked out awesome. Then the stream had kind of an ignomius, and my microphone quit working. Actually, my microphone works since OBS.
OBS sucks. Yeah. And so I was just not audible for the last, you know, 3 minutes, and then I was like, well, guess I'll see you guys later. Thanks thanks for stopping by. Thanks for the 2 hours.
Ian
I'm just gonna sign off now. Part. Alright.
Aaron
So that's kind of a bummer.
Ian
But That's probably better. You had other stuff to do.
Aaron
Yeah. I I had to just freaking rest after all that. So, yeah, it that part went great. The the the stream was a it was a huge hack, and I'm definitely gonna do that again.
Ian
Yeah. No. I thought it was really cool because it was definitely, like, sincere, as is your style always anyway, but it was very clear you wouldn't like, well, let's have a problem and, you know, or or the like, or the other side of like, okay. We're gonna do the launch stream. Everything's set.
You're just there to, like, literally push the button. Like, I think having some stuff to do, yeah, which just made it way more interesting, obviously, than just like, okay. We're pushing the button, everybody. Yay. We pushed the button.
Aaron
Yeah. Let's push
Ian
the button to
Aaron
count my money. Like, that's not Right. That's not that's not very interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian
So, no. The stream was awesome. I wasn't expecting that. So that was really cool. Okay.
So you pushed the button.
Aaron
Push the button.
Ian
You, you had it well, we we should talk about this because you were you had the mailing list and Yes. So there was some drama of sorts around how quickly to email the list and Yep. Bento's kinda telling you what to do. And then behind the scenes, other people are telling you what to do, whatever. So give us the give us the mailing list rundown, I guess.
Aaron
Yeah. So I use Bento for my email for all of my emails. Love it. It's great. Founders, super responsive.
And so, you know, I've got a list of I forget what it was, like, 5,052100 people on this SQLite, list. The last email I sent was about DHH. So it was maybe, you know, 4 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, something like that.
Ian
Too long.
Aaron
Too long and too few. So when I sent it, there were, like, 22100 people on the list.
Ian
So some bunches, but I've never I've never gotten an email from
Aaron
you before. Exactly. So what I really needed to do and let this be a comfort to people who think that, people on the Internet have everything figured out. I freaking didn't have everything figured out. What I what I really needed to do was send an email to the entire list, like, a week ahead of time.
Ian
Right.
Aaron
Maybe 2 or 3 emails.
Ian
I think so.
Aaron
Just so that, like, Gmail understands, 1, this domain, high performance SQLite, it sends emails, and 2, people like that. And they're like, Yeah. They don't market spam. They read it. Like, this is a good thing.
Right. And so, you know, Bento has this, UI help text that's like, hey. We recommend sending, you know, this many emails per hour, to a list this size.
Ian
And I, you know, I cheated a little bit. I bumped it up a little bit. It looked low. It would've taken you, like, 2 days or something to send
Aaron
it, or
Ian
it was like yeah.
Aaron
And so I was like, let's spread it out over I think I chose 6 or 7 hours, which is still less than ideal. Yeah. Ideally, I would've had the site ready at midnight, and I could have started email sending at 4 AM. And, you know, by 11, everybody has their emails, but, you know, I didn't.
Ian
But then you wouldn't have done the stream, So I think I would have done the stream. Yeah. It would have been different anyway. It would have been a different type of thing. So, yeah, I
Aaron
think that's fine.
Ian
So Gmail shut you down for a little bit?
Aaron
Gmail shut us down for a little bit, and very helpful people have been saying like, oh, you should switch to postmark. It's like, okay. Thank you. That's very helpful. However, that is not what I'm talking about whatsoever.
Like A different Gmail Gmail has limited our domain for 24 hours, regardless of who I use.
Ian
It's not the provider. Yeah.
Aaron
Could use anybody. And so and, of course, in behind the scenes, you know, the founder of Bento is DM ing me, and he's like, hey. Here's what I'm seeing. Yes. Here's I'm seeing the soft rate limit.
Here's when it will be lifted. Here's what you should do. And it's like, great. That's really helpful. And he helped me switch over to a different, domain.
So I sent a few emails from the aaronfrances.comdomainafterthat because that was Mhmm. You know, it's been around for 15 years.
Ian
Yeah.
Aaron
So that was kind of a bummer because, 1, a few launch emails, like, bounced around no man's land for a little bit. Everything eventually got retried. You know, Gmail didn't block us. They're just like, hang on a second. Yeah.
But the real bummer is, we have this this auth flow where, like, you could check out without being logged in, which I think is pretty important. And then when you get back to so you then you like, you're redirected to lemon squeezy. You process the order, and then you get back to our domain. And what we do then is, if you're not logged in, we instantly create an account based on the email that you provided to Liv and Squeasy. And then we say, great.
You have an account. You're already logged in, so begin watching. And, also, we sent a reset email or basically, like, a claim your account email that you can use to set your password. And, of course, those were the ones that, like, people were like, hey. That's not true.
This isn't coming through. Like, shit. Dang it. So Got
Ian
a little fancy there. A little fancy.
Aaron
Yeah. And it would've it would've worked great if we hadn't, like, hosed our deliverability on accident. I guess accidentally is the correct way to say that. So that was kind of a bummer, but I think, you know, I think it it worked out fine. I ended up just, like, people sent emails to support, and our support also got rate limited because because we can't send outbound emails from the domain.
So we're kinda, like, we're kinda hosed there for a minute. But then we just we just freaking dealt with it, and it was fine. And I think it was only Gmail and only people that, like, bought when they were not logged in. And so it's just it's it's a pretty small amount,
Ian
but it
Aaron
was still kind of harrowing slash super frustrating.
Ian
Yeah. Oh, boy. What do you think about I know a friend of this show, Adam Waffen was kind of talking at one point about just having a single domain, which makes a lot of sense. Like, you know, the company domain or whatever you wanna do, but like this way you don't have to re set it up for time and Postgres domain. Probably gonna have a a bigger list.
Right? So next time you
Aaron
I know.
Ian
20,000 people on the list, you might still get soft limited because they'll be like, well,
Aaron
not I know.
Ian
20,000 people. And last time they only sent the 5,000 that's big change or whatever. Like, so there's other Yeah. Potential weirdness in there. Plus a lot of domains, man.
It's like you're planning on doing a number of these courses. It's like everyone's own domain. So infrastructure. Yeah. Kind of a lot of junk.
Aaron
We'll just wanna empire. I'm
Ian
all about collecting domains, but, like Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. I love it. I actually have a domain story too we can talk about, but, we'll
Aaron
I love a domain story. Let's let's talk about what Adam said, though.
Ian
Yes. So what do you
Aaron
So Adam Adam was like, hey. You shouldn't ever send emails from that domain. And I'm like, I don't know. I'm not buying it. I mean, I I'm not buying it.
I understand. I think I think, technically what do I think? I think if I'm a user, I wanna get emails from high performance SQLite dotcom, not from TryHard Studios because who are they? You know? That's kind of my first gut reaction.
It's like, I don't know TryHard Studios. Why why don't I talk to them? Now provided we get something like database school, that's a little bit closer. Right.
Ian
I thought at one point, you were talking about doing more of a, like, an overarching brand for
Aaron
Yes.
Ian
These courses.
Aaron
For sure. We are, and we will. And at that point, you know, I'd be curious actually what domains Wes send Wes Boss sends emails from for his Yeah. Various courses because he has a lot of standalone sites as well. Like, each, you know, each course is kind of its own mini brand.
And I wonder if he sends so there's some sort of combination of marketing emails, transactional emails, and no emails. And what like, which of those 3 does he do marketing plus transactional, or does he send marketing from his West Boss domain and transactional from the course domain? So I'll need to do some research there. But
Ian
Yeah. I would be surprised if he used different domains for each, but
Aaron
tossing emails?
Ian
Yeah. I would think that he has a centralized domain.
Aaron
What what are your so on the back end on the back end, everything dumps into 1 Bento account. Right. And so it's not like I'm managing, you know, 6 Mailchimp instances, and they're the twain shall meet. Like, everyone goes into one pool, and they get tagged with certain things. And so, like, I'm happy about that.
So what are your what what what do you think about this domain situation?
Ian
I mean, I think yeah. To me, the the issue is that you're sending bulk email, which is already like, you know, a a a little bit of a negative, right, compared
Aaron
to
Ian
a transactional email. And then you're always gonna have a new domain. So, like, you're always gonna be in the worst spot. So I don't know. I just feel like I think I I would go with 1 domain because I think, like, even if you lose a small percentage of it because it's always new domains, like that's still a small percent.
Like 5% of the emails don't get seen. Sure. Because you're not on a more established domain. Like that's still kind of significant. And then also if you do like 6 of these, that's like just a lot of like sort of annoying stuff to set up bigger and, yeah, make sure it's all right and, like, all that stuff.
Aaron
Yeah.
Ian
So I'd probably use 1, but I don't know. I mean, because you could always change the personal name part to address your other concern. Right? Like, it could be from I mean, it depends how you wanna run that, but, like, you can use other ways to deal with that. I think you can also even like, there's some trickery you can do with, like, the reply to email so that you're sending it from the main email, but the reply to is the other is the more direct domain.
And then, like, you could do some just forwarding and stuff. But so I believe what would count for your reputation is the from domain. Although you definitely wanna check that. So there are some shenanigans there, but I don't know. I think building up the, like, the sort of value and the trust of your of one domain seems good.
Aaron
It does seem good. I that that part is compelling to me. That that does seem good. But I don't know you know, if we, I don't know, if we end up moving all of these courses under one domain, then that makes it easy. Like, that's the easy easy answer.
Yeah. If we continue to have separate properties per course, that's more of an open question.
Ian
I don't love, I guess, on the flip side, kinda I think to your point is I don't love try hard studios as the the main domain in that scenario, I guess. Makes no sense. Yeah. It's kind of a weird nobody's gonna probably Good domain that.
Aaron
Right? It's a it's a great company. It's a
Ian
good company.
Aaron
You have to admit. Yeah. There you go.
Ian
Yeah. I like that. But like Okay.
Aaron
But it's not associated with SQLite in any way, shape, or form.
Ian
Yeah. Like, that part's a little weird possibly. So I guess you just have to see. If you end up going with the the overarching brand, which Mhmm. Seems like a good idea, I think overall, because then you can build up that.
I think so. Outside of email, you get like that credibility and like, I
Aaron
think so.
Ian
You're just doing like, like what West boss has done, but he uses himself like you're gonna use this other thing, entity. I I mean, it's still even I don't think it's a horrible idea to go the West boss route completely either. I mean, it could just be Aaron Francis and everything's Aaron.
Aaron
Just build it all around me.
Ian
Domain. Just build it all around you. And I mean, that's probably honestly the best, like if you wanna just straight maximize dollars, I think Aaron Francis is probably the best way to go about it. Cause you're, they're finding these products through you, through your name, your Twitter account, your YouTube, whatever, like it's all consistent. The email comes from aaronbrantz.com.
Everything's Aaron Francis. Like, obviously, whatever. It's TriHard Studios, Inc, blah blah blah. But, like, that's why I got the action is having it all be you is the optimal, but that's kinda weird when you're in business with a partner and all that stuff. Do we want to just be aaronbrances.com and everything?
I don't know. But
Aaron
Steve and I have talked about that a lot, and I'm always like, oh, man, Steve. We gotta get you out there more. And he's like, oh, man, Aaron. I don't wanna be out there more. So I don't think I don't think that would I don't think that would matter.
I think, 1, I feel man, what a I feel like maybe that that sparks in me some sort of, like, vanity or, like, you need to be more humble about this. Like
Ian
but
Aaron
I'm also I also wonder, like, I also wonder if that is, like, thinking thinking small. Like, does it have more gravitas if a stranger lands on, you you know, aaronfrancis.com/sequeliteorsequelite, you know, high performance sequelite.com. You know what I mean?
Ian
Well, yeah. I don't think like the product domains. I'm not saying that that, like how west does it where he has different domains for the products. But it's like, you know, it's sort of an Aaron Francis thing, your face is on it, which is already is like it's coming. The emails are coming from you.
I mean, there is a, a small, a thinking, the, the thinking small part about it to me is that it could get weird. Like this gets big and someday you wanna sell it.
Aaron
Like, it's
Ian
weird that like, like now you're so tied to it that it's basically not sellable probably, like, really? Or at least it's gonna hurt its value because, like, you're not going with it, presumably. And now they own aaronfrancis.com. And what use is that? Right.
Aaron
It's not handing over sending ability from my domain. Like, that's Yeah.
Ian
I mean, that part gets weird. So but without that, you're obviously hurting the products a lot, presumably, which is gonna be true no matter what, but it's even more so if it's, like, very tied to you and your personal domain. Right. So, yeah, that part's not great. I think the middle database school is like an interesting middle ground.
Obviously, it's a little more limiting if you do a high performance Laravel, of course, like that going database school. I guess that's just its own thing. Right? So like
Aaron
We have brands on brands on brands. I'm fine with
Ian
that.
Aaron
Auto rates. I just want a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Maybe I'm just a hoarder.
Ian
Just love a good domain.
Aaron
Yeah. We should get Wes on here. We should invite Wes to come in and tell us all the answers.
Ian
We we had him on for a stupid reason. We were talking about having him come on for a stupid reason. We should have him come on for a real reason. Yeah. It was like, let's talk about hey, Wes.
Let's come on and talk about socks. We could do that for an hour.
Aaron
Did he say yes?
Ian
Well, so, I think he did or something, but then, like, he didn't write me back at another point. And then, then I just talked
Aaron
to him.
Ian
Just popped the kid. No. No. No. We popped it out.
Aaron
That's right.
Ian
That's right. Then I was like, I'm not gonna harass him about, like, coming out and talking about socks when he's got, like, a 3 day old, so I just kinda let it be. But We should have him come on
Aaron
and talk about this.
Ian
Yeah. This this is this is
Aaron
more of a this is more of a carrot than socks. Although he may wanna talk about socks, which I, of
Ian
course, would be open to. Yeah. We could do that as a fun little aside, but I don't know if we need an hour on socks, so we could
Aaron
No, probably not.
Ian
Fold it in. Fold it in.
Aaron
Yeah.
Ian
So okay. So Alright. How do we go.
Aaron
We'll figure that out.
Ian
Emails are loud. Tell me, are you happy? Are you are you high level happy, medium level happy, low level happy, competitive this
Aaron
time? Launch or just in life in general?
Ian
Well, let's go with money from the launch. I want money from the launch.
Aaron
But that does constrain it quite a bit. Yeah. Okay. So I'm gonna reveal actual numbers here.
Ian
Oh. Woah. Yeah. Woah. Woah.
Alright. So legalize So we got hold on. Hold on. So we got a little Yeah. Yeah.
Rebuild this, and I don't think you're gonna reveal this. I don't think you should reveal this, that you have Yeah. Some sponsor money. From day 1, you got some sponsor money. Just a little baseline of money.
Right?
Aaron
Not like
Ian
Which I will which I will not reveal because that is only partially my business. That is partially Tursa's business, and I don't wanna talk
Aaron
to her. A nice amount of money. It's not like Yep.
Ian
You're not gonna work for a year because of this amount of money, but it's a nice little seed money to, like, get you going, get the project done, brand into the company. Okay. Great. Yep. You have a baseline money.
Aaron
Food on the family while we were while we were doing this course. And that was, extremely helpful. It was it was necessary.
Ian
Right. A nice little stress buffer from after the layoff in between by that time to do this. Okay. Yep. So now Alright.
You launch and there's money involved. People are pulling out their credit cards, the paying you guys. Give us numbers, I guess.
Aaron
Do do you remember what I said what I what my target was? Because I certainly don't. I think I said it on podcast last time.
Ian
What? I think you were trying to get to a 100,000
Aaron
Yeah.
Ian
In the near term.
Aaron
In the Yeah. In, like, in the first 2 months, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian
And something like that.
Aaron
Okay. So do you I mean, this could make me look really good or really bad. Do you wanna take a guess? If you come in super high, remember, I'm gonna look like an idiot, so give me the homie guess. Dollars.
Yeah. Thanks.
Ian
Alright. I'm gonna go with, I'm gonna go with 72,000.
Aaron
Wow. That is a pretty good guess. Are you ready for the big reveal?
Ian
Yeah. What is it?
Aaron
Is this a small $79,244.
Ian
Very nice. Very
Aaron
nice. So bad.
Ian
That is a good, what do we got? Day 4 or something like that
Aaron
here? 4. Yeah. So over one one weekday plus a weekend, $79,000.
Ian
I like it.
Aaron
Thoughts on that? Let's let's, let's spin that out a little bit. Yes. That's a lot of money. We'll just start there.
Ian
Nice chunk of chain.
Aaron
A lot of money. When you look at all that money and you divide it by 2 for me and Steve. Right?
Ian
And then There's this there's this slot machine that I played on occasion, and it when you hit some money, it goes, that's a lot of money. And so you just said, that's a lot of money. I can't help, but laugh there. That's a lot of money.
Aaron
We gotta find that clip.
Ian
That's a lot of money.
Aaron
Alright. That's a lot of money.
Ian
That's a lot of money.
Aaron
You divide it by 2, and that gets to be less money. Right? Because there's Steve and I both exist.
Ian
I think it's half the money.
Aaron
I can't verify that. I'm on
Ian
I don't do math live, but I think that
Aaron
that sounds right to me. So Okay. It it becomes, let's say, half.
Ian
Yes.
Aaron
So still a lot of money. And then you say, alright. Well, that took, we'll say, maybe 3 months to do. And the money per month just gets to be a lot smaller. So
Ian
Yeah.
Aaron
It is a lot of money, and I'm extremely grateful that it worked because I think this shows us the model can work. So that's, like, that's the big takeaways is okay. We can do this. This is gonna work. This is not a life changing retire amount of money, obviously.
Yeah. This is we we need to do several more of these to, like, make as much as we were making. And, of course, my goal is to double what we were making at, you know, the old company. So Yep. We'll we'll get there.
So feelings are I am extremely happy. I think with with the with the launch and the the money, I'm extremely happy in life. Mhmm. There's such a lot of pressure. But with the launch, I'm extremely happy.
It went great. I'm Great. I'm very, very optimistic about the future of this company, and I think it is going to work. So what do we do from here? We gotta turn it into a business.
Right? So we had a we had a fun, big launch, and we did a thing, and it worked. And now we've gotta we've gotta, like, 1, we've gotta shore up some of our existing assets. And then 2, we've gotta turn we've gotta turn these we've gotta turn these assets into evergreen pro producing
Ian
assets. Got it. Got it. I feel like it's absolutely critical.
Aaron
We cannot live launch to launch. I've already God. I've already declared to my wife that the next one will be very different. Not gonna be this stressful.
Ian
Yeah. No.
Aaron
No. No. No worry. I fully committed. I yeah.
I said it's a 100 percent gonna be different. Left myself no wiggle room. So No wiggle room. Very, very smart, Aaron.
Ian
Very good, man.
Aaron
Yeah. So here's the here's the here's the going forward plan, and then I'll let you, rebut. Going forward plan is to, one, shore up the you know, I've 1 there there are several videos I need to finish, and so that's good. Right? Because that will be an excuse to email, an excuse for people to buy and talk about course some more.
So the early access thing worked out pretty well because, 1, I needed, to stop, and 2, now we have a reason to email people. So that works out great.
Ian
Yep.
Aaron
So that will keep going. And then, we need to figure out and this is this is an exciting thing. This is not a a despairing thing. We need to figure out the flywheel. So we're gonna, you know, we're gonna do content, and we're gonna pay for ads.
Like, this has been people have done things before where you pay for advertising and you make money on the back end. Like Right. Bootstrappers have not yet discovered this this reality. I think I think we're gonna try it. So Okay.
Ian
We'll do
Aaron
some of that. Interesting. On yeah. Whether on Twitter or, honestly, Reddit, we're gonna try that as well. We'll see.
Ian
That's interesting. I would
Aaron
have yeah. Yeah. We'll have some some fun fodder for the show there. So shore up that asset. And then I think in the in the near term, we're gonna turn a lot of attention to screencasting.com, and Steve and I are gonna redo that together because, you know, that was just an Aaron Francis joint.
Ian
Yep.
Aaron
But we're gonna redo it together and expand the offering there and kind of bring that into the fold more fully. And then, hopefully, we can start pushing those assets forward and, hopefully, start getting a little bit of a flywheel going with those. And that will lay the base of TryHard Studios' income upon which we can build new launches that fall off, but then add a little layer that grow over time, new launches. And hopefully by the end, our cohort graph is up into the right. So that's it.
What do you got?
Ian
I like it. Yeah. It's just super I mean, I feel like everybody lets the courses fall off. They're, like, launch the course, then that's it. They move on with their lives.
Seems critical to not do that. I don't know the best way to do it. That might be a West boss type question. He's kinda mastered this. Right?
Like, I don't know.
Aaron
Get him on here. Yeah.
Ian
You gotta get him on. But yeah. How do you do, like, relaunch every quarter? Do you read, like, is it just more of still, like, doing launches and just, like, relaunching or is there some way to make it more, just create some, yeah, ongoing flywheel type effect. I like the idea of advertising, especially Reddit, which I think will be a little more set and forget.
The Google is tricky.
Aaron
Sounds tricky. It feels tricky.
Ian
It's a little tricky. It's like super optimized on there and stuff. There's a lot of people going after things. I think if you like, I think like sequel, like course or something, you might be able to like really dial it in and try a couple like,
Aaron
yeah.
Ian
Right on the nose ones.
Aaron
There cannot be that many people advertising for that.
Ian
You would think not, but I don't know. You have these big, like, platforms like Linda or whatever. Like, whatever the JinkoS platforms just have everything. So they might be throwing money at everything. Like, that's what we base a lot in our world is like, they're just throwing money at everything.
It doesn't matter. I wonder about like, so did you ever see that, tweet from the guy who does Jenny AI? Mhmm. They might have talked about that a little bit in the audio.
Aaron
Keep going.
Ian
I'll post it up, but it's basically their how they've, like, built their, like, kind of flywheel with social media video. And, they're kind of angled to it is not to pay for the ads, which I would think would not be good for you guys probably either too much because, like, just to think, like, I don't know. I think if I get kind of expensive, but, but if and you guys are good at video. So, like, if you just basically, what they do is they make intriguing videos and the short short form videos. Because the thing with the short form video, like Instagram and TikTok and all that stuff, is that it's actually, like, quite decoupled from your account.
So, like, nowadays, it's not that you have a Yes. Account with millions of followers. It's like, hey. If you make something interesting and it gets that initial surge, we're just gonna send it to millions people. And that's great.
Right? So that's kind of the whole thing is they make fun, quick, short videos that and they do a lot of them and 1 or 2 take off every once in a while. And that's what Ben the driver. So since you guys are good at video, like, I don't think your sequel light video's gonna get sent to 2,000,000 people, but you don't need to get sent to 2,000,000 people. If it gets sent to a 100,000 devs.
Right. And 5% of them convert, then that's great. So Right. I don't know how you make it fun. I don't know how you make it so people are like, this is awesome.
They like it, whatever. That's your guy's job. But, I don't know. Something like that could be interesting where you do some, like, content oriented content for specifically marketing in these different sorts of channels maybe. Might be This
Aaron
is interesting. Here's a thought. Make I I I don't think I've cracked short form yet, and I don't super love it, But I will I will yes and your idea, and say yes and here's an idea. We could do long form, you know, whatever, 5, 10 minutes long, long form SQLite videos like I've like I've been doing, like I do, like I'm good at. And then we can pay, that also, like, you know, teaches you something, but also is like, hey.
If you wanna learn more, there's there's a course. Go watch the course. Right. And then we can promote that on YouTube. So, like, you can boost your own videos and
Ian
pay to boost?
Aaron
You can, yeah, you can pay to get views. And maybe maybe that's a good way to advertise somewhat cheaply. That, ah, that's interesting. Actually, we already have some SQLite videos out, so maybe we should just try that.
Ian
Just boost those. Yeah. Add on the, like, edit them to have your core stuff, like, in it somewhere. And then, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know. I I will say, like, the thing about the advertising is it does always add up very quickly. So it's like, hey. It's like Yeah.
Even not these Facebook and platforms that are ostensibly cheap, it's like, oh, it's 1¢ a view or whatever. Like, it's not a big deal, but, like, they don't usually convert super great. So, like
Aaron
Right.
Ian
You know? Yeah. You could go through 20, $3,000 like super, super quick. And in your
Aaron
mark, it's
Ian
easier to sell, which is good because like the one off purchase is usually easier to sell. But on the flip side, you know, there's no recurring part, which is bad. So it's like your cost of acquisition needs to be lower than, like, you know, the revenue. So, but I mean, people get good at this and they just play that game. I don't know if you guys wanna get good at it, or maybe again, there's like third parties that do this.
Always follow, like, the math is hard on that.
Aaron
Be good at it. I don't want to get good at it.
Ian
Right. Is
Aaron
there is there a way to do that? Yeah.
Ian
So if you play that game, like, I've known a few people in software who just got really good at it. It did take a long time, but they're like, hey. Like, their margin is tight usually with advertising, but it's like we make 9% or whatever, but it's like, hey, if you can just pile money in and you can make 9%, then Get credit card
Aaron
points on the back end and free money.
Ian
You get a credit card points.
Aaron
Okay.
Ian
Yeah. I mean, it's not as nice as when you get the 90% profit margin, but whatever. If you're just and it's but it's also often reaching a market you'll just never reach a different way. So if you can make the economics work of, like, you're making 5 or 10%, it doesn't really matter because it's, like, a bonus 5 or 10%.
Aaron
And there's something there's something that's even more valuable than money, and that is with love, truly. Love. That is that is having those people on your email list at that point. Right? So if you can get them in the door and you make a little bit of money off of them, that's awesome.
But then you can continue to email them with new products and extensions and that sort of thing.
Ian
That's your recurring revenue on them.
Aaron
Right.
Ian
Is what else you can sell them down the line. So yeah. I mean, I think a combo. I definitely like the Reddit one. I think that's, like, you know,
Aaron
whatever the
Ian
SQLite thing is. I mean, there's also, like, what, I don't know how you would do this. This would be more like it's like advertising, but it'd be more like maybe a partnership or advertising with, like what, Caleb does with LiveWire. Right? Where obviously he fully controls the whole thing, but it's like on the docs, you saw on the screencast.
Yeah. Like, are there sequel light sites that get any kind of real traffic other than the Right. The docs would be great. I doubt the docs are gonna put a banner up for your course.
Aaron
I I can tell you it's 0% chance you
Ian
would do that. Docs, and they don't seem like they're gonna be adding the banner there. Yeah. So that's unfortunate. If the docs were an option, that would be cool.
But, but, yeah, is there other I don't know. Maybe there's other resource sites of some sort that you could get a banner on or somehow partner with or whatever. So there are some other things that's not too potentially. But I
Aaron
also wanna do affiliates. You know, we're on we're on Lemon Squeezy partially for that reason. Like, I don't super care about taxes. In fact, if I could turn off tax compliance on Lemon Squeezy, I would. But it makes everything else so much easier, including affiliates because they automatically handle the splits and the payouts and the tracking and all of that.
Ian
Oh, I think so.
Aaron
I do wanna, you know, I do wanna reach out to, like, Kent c Dodds, whom you continue to not know somehow. But I wanna reach out to Kent Kent C. Dodds and Wes and these people that are like, hey. We've got email lists of maybe React developers or otherwise front end developers, and we're not competitive, like, we'd we're not we're not gonna do a database course. And, hopefully, I can but, see, again, with That's a
Ian
really good idea.
Aaron
People, yeah, but with people like Wes, does the money the money is not gonna move the needle for him, I have to imagine. Yeah. Like, if he makes on a good day $10,000 off of selling my course, like, does that make him happy? I don't know. Should have him on.
Ian
I mean, everybody likes $10,000.
Aaron
Everybody likes $10,000.
Ian
Everybody likes it. That's a good point. But it is one of the best feelings in poker is, like, when you cash out your chips, if you've ever been lucky enough to cash out for over $10,000 Mhmm. And they just give you a stack wrap of $10,000.
Aaron
That's awesome.
Ian
It's a nice feeling. Just a wrap stack of 10. Glorious.
Aaron
Maybe that's how I that's how I that's how I sell them. I'm like, hey, Wes. Do you wanna get a wrap stack? And he's gonna be like,
Ian
I don't know what a wrap stack is. Oh, shoot.
Aaron
Yeah. Yeah. Make me believe this was more understood. I thought this was a common thing.
Ian
If they're poker players, I'll understand. The other thing you could do with those guys is you could take a different, like, there's like the affiliate angle, which they would presumably want if they were willing to do it at all, but you could also limit the downside for them and be like, hey, I'll just pay you $10. Like, you're gonna send do x, y, and z. And then if whatever, if we sell less than $10 worth, I'm out. And right.
But if we send more, then you're not getting any of that. But like, this is just like a here's $10,000 Don't even worry about it. You're gonna send this email with pitch or whatever you decide to do, or we're gonna cross and do a video or whatever. So you could sponsor. I don't know if they already have sponsored programs for their videos and things.
They may already have something set up where you can sponsor stuff. That's true. So maybe
Aaron
they'll just buy a slot in their email list or something.
Ian
Yeah. Or on their videos or if they do YouTube or whatever. So there might be some other options. But on the flip side, $80,000 is not that much money. Like, I know what you're saying is there's a lot of money, but it's also not that money.
If you start paying people $10,000 to do stuff, all of a sudden You
Aaron
should only do that 8 times and then you're it's game over.
Ian
That's right. That's not a lot.
Aaron
So It's not a lot.
Ian
It's tricky. It's tricky. We're only 4 days in. It'll be 4 days in. How it goes and like how it plays out over the coming even week or 2.
And just see like, do any sales hold, or does it kinda fall Right. More traditional, really, peters out kind of, and Yeah. Go from there.
Aaron
Yeah. I am confident that I think we can hit a 100,000 in 1 month total.
Ian
Yeah. That seems doable.
Aaron
Yeah. So I think that's doable. And then when we do when we do, I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna have to make a video for the the try hard YouTube channel that's like how I made a $100,000 on a course launch. I think I have to
Ian
do You have to. People love that stuff.
Aaron
Don't I?
Ian
It's catnip. You gotta make it.
Aaron
It is. Everybody everybody's gonna click on that.
Ian
And then the numbers, you have to maximize your sharing
Aaron
of numbers. Saying. So I talked to Steve this weekend, and I was like, hey. We're gonna record on Monday morning. Do are we cool sharing the numbers?
And we decided, yes. It's good. Like, it's good marketing up to a point. And so at at a point, we will stop. Like, this is marketing.
This is marketing. So at a point, we will stop, but the real driving factor was this YouTube video. So we decided, yes, we're gonna make we're gonna make a behind the scenes of a $100,000 launch YouTube video. And so Oh,
Ian
I like that. Have to share the numbers,
Aaron
so why not share them? Yeah. Yep. Isn't that good? And so there's another there's another angle we could do for that YouTube video.
This, once it hits a 100,000, this will be my 3rd course that's done a $100,000 Oh, okay. Pretty pretty good.
Ian
I mean, it's taken
Aaron
you know, I'm not I'm not fat and happy, but, I am a little bit fat, so I'm working on that. But this is this will be my 3rd one, so that's that's pretty good. One of them, you know, took, like, 6 years to get there, so it's not really, you know, a $100,000 launch, but still, it's better than a poke in the eye, and that would make a good YouTube video, I think.
Ian
Now you gotta build the course about how to make courses.
Aaron
See, that's where it gets that's where I get, like, moral quandaries because my my my attempt at the course on how to make courses is screencasting. And the angle there is I will teach you to be technically proficient. Because what I don't ever wanna do is be the guy that's like, hey. If you just buy this thing for $997, you'll get super rich. Because I just know it's not true.
Ian
It's just
Aaron
not true.
Ian
That's one of the other businesses I wish I've had. Like, that's a great business. Like, get you over the business. Prettier. We're gonna make you healthier.
We're gonna make you smarter. We're Gonna teach you how to flip this real estate.
Aaron
Yep. It's all good stuff. It just feels it just feels like a slippery slope. I don't wanna I don't wanna go making these promises
Ian
to people
Aaron
because I know that it's not it's not totally possible. So I know. Yeah.
Ian
These are all just dreams I have. It's like how I would love to be a spammer, and I could do better at spamming than other people. But
Aaron
You could. Yeah.
Ian
Actually do it. You know? But I feel like I could I could do a good job at it.
Aaron
But See, spammer, I understand. Executive producer of a movie, I still am a little lost on. But spammer, I can wrap my head around spamming. Spamming is easy. Please.
Please. That'd be so easy.
Ian
What else you got on the course? So we're gonna see a 100 k launch video thingy. That's gonna be fun. Uh-huh. Do you have some stuff planned out then for ongoing to keep it going?
Like, just in terms of your regular content stuff, you're gonna do some more videos. I guess you have this kind of the additional segments that'll be the obvious
Aaron
next day. The additional modules for the course, which will be will be good content for YouTube as well, because these these next modules are, like, full text search and JSON and maybe do some vector stuff. And, like, that's you know, some of these videos are, like, super in the weeds and would not do well on YouTube, but these full text search, I feel like, would be interesting. Yeah. So I'll do that.
I'm gonna take you know, I'm taking a little bit of a break. It's, like, kind of a light week. Steve's out for 4th July, and I'm just, like, cleaning up stuff. So take a little bit of a light week and then finish the modules, pump out some YouTube. I gotta pump out some Laravel content on YouTube as well.
That's kinda fallen off, during the crunch time. And then, yeah, I think, one thing I'm super looking forward to is just having a little bit more time to, like, scheme again because as much as I love creating database courses, that's not, like, what I wanna do with my whole life. And so there are some things that there are some things that I think, Steve and I are gonna work on that are a little bit outside the realm of normal, which is not that surprising for me, to to be honest. Okay. Up to and maybe including digging a swimming pool in my backyard, which we can talk about later.
Ian
Man, we need to
Aaron
But, like, you know, I I just kinda I kinda wanna scheme a little bit. And I I was thinking this weekend about, like, some of the schemes and, like, what is my what is my strategic answer for why I would want to do some of these things? And as much as I, like, tried to convince myself, my strategic answer just kept coming back to, I want to do it. And it was like, is that enough? That might be enough.
That might be enough. It might be enough of a reason to say, like, I'm gonna do this thing because I wanna do this thing. And it's like that guy that's you know, that meme where he's, like, an energy field, and he's levitating. It's like, that's my reason. I wanted to do it.
And so that's kinda where I'm feeling right now, but we'll see.
Ian
Now at one point, you had another course stacked up behind this one. Is there a little buffer between, or do you have another course you actually have to start?
Aaron
Oh, yeah. There's another one we have to start. Okay. But we do have we do have a little bit of, you know, a little bit of time. It's today's July 1, and I think we're not launching it's Postgres.
Ian
July 30th? Okay.
Aaron
Yeah. July 30th. So I have at least 3 or 4 minutes to rest. No. I don't I don't think we're launching that until maybe mid September or early October or something like that.
I don't remember.
Ian
We got some scheming time.
Aaron
I have some scheming time. I have some dreaming time. I have some I have some time to, like, just do random crap. Like, I just wanna, 1, I wanna stream a lot more. I I wanna build a, you know, I wanna build a little internal tool for me to, like, keep track of my life, and that feels like a fun thing to stream.
And that's one of those that's like, why are you gonna do that? Because I wanna do it. I just wanna do it. And the part of part of this business is, like, keeping me engaged and energized and motivated, and some things I just have to do because I wanna do it. So
Ian
I will say, and I'm this is, like, do as I say, not as I do 1,000 percent. But, there are people out there who are capable of this, and they have a huge advantage, which is, like, they need the scheming time. Right? But their scheming time is I'm going to scheme on marketing for the thing I just built. Like, I'm gonna come up with all I'm gonna use that scheming energy to market the thing I built or to whatever.
Yeah. Do something around the thing I already have that's profitable. And this is I've definitely I'm not good at any of this, so I'm not, judging here, but I do think that is a superpower that people have that I find fascinating of, like, my downtime is just scheming in a different angle on my main thing. And, so that's still, like, all the energy's going that direction, but I'm being also rejuvenated at the same time, which is, fascinating. But, yeah, it's never been I've never been too good at it myself.
But
Aaron
Yeah.
Ian
Maybe some people out there are. Maybe. Alright. So alright. So you're gonna keep us updated on that.
I wanna do a domain story. Come. Yeah. Switch the domain story?
Aaron
Tell me a domain story. I love a domain story.
Ian
I actually have a real thing to talk about, but I wanna talk about domain story first because while you're sharing numbers, I'm gonna share some numbers. So Yes. I, you know, I have this little side business, little scheme of my domains I own that I sell here and there. And one of them is tag.app. K.
Tag.app.
Aaron
Okay. Wow.
Ian
Short domain. Okay. Short dictionary word, technically appropriate. Right. And also now there's all the app has these like premium domains, because like whatever some words are more expensive than others and whatever.
So this one is premium, but it's not ultra premium. Some of them are, like, $1,000 a year. So to hold it, it's, like, a little pricey to hold. I think this one's, like, $200 or something. So whatever.
It's not that much to hold. So we had a guy this is kind of how domains work. Are you behind the scenes? It used to be up for I think even more. I don't know.
Some people would hold this domain for they'd want 6 figures, but whatever. I'm I'm not really into that. I'm like, I'm just trying to make a few bucks. It's valuable. It's real estate.
Aaron
It off the shelf?
Ian
I'm not gonna agree. Yeah. I acquired it right when the the app was launched, like, 4, 5 years ago. And so I've just been holding it. The guy offered us 3,000.
I said no. He offered, like, 6 or 7 or something. I just said no. Yesterday, it came back with 15. Oh.
I said no. You said no. You said no. Because I'm holding out for 19. That's up for 19.
I'm holding out for 19. It's worth 19. It's a single word, 3 characters long in tech, super applicable to a million businesses.
Aaron
Alright. Alright.
Ian
Tag that up. Alright. Okay. So he said 15. He said no.
19. I said no. I said instantly said no.
Aaron
That's it. He went away?
Ian
I already told him. I was like, I'm not negotiating on this one because it's like 19 is more than fair price. And here's the thing. If you have 50, you have 19. Right?
Like, if you had 3,000 then you come back for 4 and 5, what or maybe you just don't have 19. You can't get to 19. If you have 15, you have 19. Like, there's no scenario where you don't have 19 if you have 15. So That's I mean It really should be true.
Aaron
Is, but yeah.
Ian
No. They're not. Not in this scenario. They're really. Not in this scenario.
And they're like, I'm gonna start a company on tag dot app, but and I only have literally $15,000, but I don't have 19. Like, that's just not, no, they may choose not to, they may go with tag HQ or whatever. Fine. Then just go do that. I'm okay with that.
So we'll see. That'll be a little update next week. We'll see if we, get the sale. I'm feeling pretty optimistic because when they come back, usually
Aaron
They they moved a lot. From 3 to 15, they moved a lot.
Ian
That's what I'm saying. You're all the way up to 15. I think you'll get And it's worth it.
Aaron
15. That's great.
Ian
It's worth it. I should have made it 20 because then I would have 2 stacks of high society. Yeah. Yes. Two stacks, which should be a nice one.
Poker session.
Aaron
What's your best one like, what's your best sale? Have you had any any big ones?
Ian
Yeah. No huge ones. I think the biggest was 30,000.
Aaron
Okay.
Ian
Which I probably sold to a competitor, honestly, because it was, support that app.
Aaron
And That's a great domain for your core business.
Ian
I know. But it's also generic. Like, you can't really bring it. All these dom dictionary word ones are a little tricky because, like, there is, like, some legal stuff around. Can you really
Aaron
Yeah.
Ian
Trademark it or not? But anyway, I was gonna turn down 3 stacks of high society.
Aaron
No. No. No. No. No.
So
Ian
Zendesk or whoever probably owns support that app out there. Whatever. And there nothing's ever been built on it. It's just sitting there. Watch.
I'll probably say that. It's like, there's all kinds of stuff on it now. But last time I looked, it was nothing there. No. It's just like some generic placeholder thing.
Yeah. Just like a loading page that never loads. Yeah. So there's nothing there. I think I I don't know.
I think I've done a few other ones, like, in the high teens, low twenties. Something like that.
Aaron
That's real money.
Ian
That's real money. There is like the carrying costs of holding all the other domains that you don't actually sell and things like that. So, I
Aaron
did not know you were a domainer.
Ian
I am. So if people don't like them, I'm one of them. You can
Aaron
That's right.
Ian
You can thank me for being part of the problem. But, no, man. I'm trying to get to my list, but I can't. Oh, well. Yeah.
Anyway, I've sold a few in there. I'm not like see, people who are really into it, like, they're out buying. It's like, I'm not I don't really buy any. I just like dot app was launched. I was like, this is a good domain for tech stuff.
I just bought ones that were available right from the beginning. And I've basically just been holding them. So most of them are dot apps other than the ones I bought for personal project of things that I'm never gonna actually build. And so then I'll put those over sale too if it's like a .com or Mhmm. Dotio or whatever.
So, yeah. So that's my little story. I hope
Aaron
you get your 19. That would be awesome.
Ian
I hope so. That would be awesome. That would be a nice little little, keeps me in business for another year on the domain business. It's like I could pay to hold the other real. Like it just feeds the beast.
Alright. So my other news for the week here is that we're hiring a dev. Yeah.
Aaron
This is big news.
Ian
Hiring a lab called dev.
Aaron
Time employee.
Ian
If you're out there, you wanna work at UserScape, working on HelpSpot and Lara jobs. And the thing I talked about last week, in terms of this AI proxy thing, we were discussing all that stuff. We have a job opening, which is pretty rare. We don't have a lot of job openings. Most everybody stays there a long time.
Aaron
What's driving the the need here? Because you you haven't hired a full time in a long time.
Ian
Yeah. Not in not in, for a software developer anyway. So, basically last year, Eric Barnes runs Laravel News, decided he was gonna go pretty much full time on that. So he still works some hours here, but not full time hours. And that's coming to end.
He's gonna go full time, full time on Lara Jobs in September. And so this past year is kinda like I could have hired somebody at that point even last year, but I was like, you have all the section 170 4 stuff. And I kinda wanted to see how that
Aaron
was gonna
Ian
shake out. So we just kind of went through without a full sort of, sort of dev setup. But with Eric dropping off all of his hours here soon, it's like, alright. Well, we gotta hire a software developer. So that's pretty much it.
So we're hiring a software developer. And I don't know. We'll see. It's, like, kind of interesting. The market's kinda interesting right now.
I feel like there's it's not, you know, a couple years ago, like, it was crazy. Right? And, like, every, like Yeah. Couldn't even hire developers. So I feel like there's more high quality developers out there.
We're also gonna broaden the search more than we have in the past where it's only been US in the past, but now, I'm on the go outside the US, probably not all the way to, like, you know, other side of the planet, but if you can work some east coast hours,
Aaron
Fully or overlap?
Ian
Overlap. Yeah. No. I wouldn't want anybody to, like, pretend to work east coast hours. That never works.
Aaron
Picking up at midnight or whatever. Yeah. That never ever works.
Ian
Yeah. So just the overlap of a couple hours just so we have to hop on a call or whatever.
Aaron
And half day Fridays
Ian
all year? Half day Fridays all year. Obviously, profitable, been in business forever. No start up y gimmicks and stock you're never gonna get and all that kind of stuff. You know about that stuff.
Aaron
Oh, let me tell you. Well, I guess, legally, I can't, but I understand that, that is a reality. Yeah.
Ian
That's interesting. So, I think, you know, there's some interesting things. You know, we've always had this trade off. We're definitely not at the top of the, pay range for sure. But on the flip side, you're half day Fridays.
You're working fully remote. That's never gonna change. You're kind of
Aaron
in the mix office budget.
Ian
You get money for computers and so on. You get time off. You get, you know, you're in the Laravel mix. Like, everybody who's been in dev here has talked to lots of Laricons and all those things. So I think there's some advantages there if you're interested in that part of your career, growth.
So, yeah, we'll see how it goes. I don't know. I think there's I've tried to put it at, like, a specific dollar amount because I'm sort of I've never done that before. Mhmm. So it's like a little experiment.
There's probably a little bit of flexibility in there for listeners to podcast, for example, potentially in the right scenario. But
Aaron
So the number on the site can I say it can I say it out loud? Yeah. It's on the site. The number on the site is a $120. Yeah.
I didn't I read I read it all, but I don't remember are there benefits for US based employees?
Ian
Yeah. So that's also something I wouldn't I was gonna try, like, whatever. There was, there's some different scenarios where, like, people could be contractors or not or whatever. But the US based would have healthcare benefits, 401 ks, 3%, auto, Match? What they call it, but it's not a match.
You get 3% of your salary no matter what. Oh, cool. And you should you should also contribute to your 401 k, but, you'll get 3% of your salary regardless if you're in the US. That that would be those 2 are US only. If you're outside the US, then you would be a contractor for sure.
Right. And you wouldn't have those, but you would probably also have health care because you're not in the US. US.
Aaron
So live in some other country that does that for you.
Ian
That does that nice stuff for you. So
Aaron
But you don't have freedom. So You don't have freedom. You. So how did you come up with 120? Vibes?
Ian
You know, that's always there's always that element of vibes to the salaries. I also think it's like, I'm willing to have like more of a mid level person, which I think that's a pretty fair salary for given the current market, Like a more senior person would be great. I think in the US, probably not quite senior level person, like on the raw numbers, but I do think there are scenarios where the other benefits and the flexibility and things like that make up for that in some people's circumstances. So that's fine. Outside the us.
I think it's a very solid number for a senior Lara developer. Yeah. You know, I do run Lara jobs. I don't know if you're aware of that. And so I always keep an eye on, yeah, keep an eye on the, salaries and That's true.
It's pretty
Aaron
remarkable what people
Ian
are offering. Yeah. Like, I mean, then, like we're way above a lot of the jobs with Lara jobs. So, so I even thought about going less, but I was like, you know, I don't know. I feel like I want to be a solid number.
Yeah, you're not like blown away, but you're also, It's you know, there's so many factors like where you live. It's a ton of money in some places. It's not a lot if you're in New York City. Right? Like, so there's a lot of variability there, but even like DHH hero of the show, DHH, they just had to program a job up that starts at like 170 something and like has, you know, more restrictions than we have.
Like you can't have a side gig there and different things like that. So there are also things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Base camp, you can't have any side gigs.
Wow. So, you know, we're not like crazy far off of even people's dream job with D HH is like,
Aaron
right.
Ian
You know, we have some, advantages there. So, and I, I like to hire people who have side gigs. I think one of the things with working here is like, you kind of need to be pretty entrepreneurial in your nature because that's part of what we ask of you is that like, you're gonna be willing to talk to a customer. Like you can't just be the basement dweller dev. Who's like, I'm never gonna talk to a customer no matter what.
Like I'm not doing it. Like, so no matter talk to a customer, you're gonna have a lot of responsibility to, like, make decisions about the products and things and have at least some ability to have that mindset of, like, what the customer's thinking, how the customer uses it. So people who've either tried to do their own thing and maybe it didn't work out or who are interested in doing that in the future, I feel like I've tended to be pretty good fits, and pretty much everybody who's ever been a software developer here has been in that mold. So yeah. So we'll see how it goes.
I'm interested with, it's been a while since I hired a software developer, so it'll be cool to kind of go through the process and it's nice that Dave's here now. The producer Dave is, you know, involved heavily in the hiring process for this role. And, he's gonna be able to do the first half, so I don't have to be totally disheartened by, like, the hundreds of just, like, people who don't follow the very basic fractions
Aaron
I put in there.
Ian
Like, yep. That's gonna be nice to have somebody filter those. So I don't feel so bad about society. And, Yeah. So if you're in the market, give it a look.
My little ad. It was a well written
Aaron
it was a well written post. I liked it. It had all the stuff that, like, you would have worked on or you will work on. And Yeah. The pretty compelling, like, hey.
We've been remote for 20 years or whatever it said, and we're that's never gonna change. Because I do think that is a fear of people getting these remote jobs, and then there's a return to office mandate. And it's like, well, f. Like, I live in, you know, BFE, and I'm not driving into an office. So I thought that I thought that was pretty compelling.
And the half day, Fridays, every, like, every week, we when I was at the property tax company, I instituted half day Fridays on summer during summer only Yeah. Or not nonbusy season, I guess. It wasn't summer. It was non busy season. So, like, started in August and went through, like, January
Ian
or something.
Aaron
Mhmm. And people freaking loved it. But all year
Ian
long, they do love
Aaron
the ticket. That's the ticket.
Ian
We started summers. But then 1 year I was like, let's do it. We'll do it all year long. And it's actually like, I I mean, it's a pretty massive benefit. Like, if you add up the number of days, it's like 20 whatever days off, like Yeah.
Built into the built into the year. So, yeah, so it's really cool. I mean, it's awesome to be able to leave at noon and like, go hang out with your kids or do whatever you'd like to do and have that just do running around. I mean, like, I use it a lot just for, like, not fun stuff sometimes, but it's still cool because, like, whatever. I can go to the DMV when people aren't there at 2:30 or whatever and not, have that be like, I have to go after work or whatever where it's a nightmare.
So, yeah, it's it's really cool. Then I mean, that's the other thing. It's like it's like a huge impact job. Like Mhmm. You're gonna be writing code that's in the core of the app that pays everybody.
You're gonna be writing these new doing all the AI stuff coming up over the next I mean, starting heavily pretty soon here, but then over the next year, I think there'll be quite a bit of AI stuff. Well, there will be quite a bit of AI stuff. So, yeah. So it's gonna be a lot of kind of cutting edge ish, code work in, in the Laravel space. So, yeah, that'd be cool.
Aaron
What's exciting.
Ian
We also deal with on premise installs and we also deal with all kinds of other stuff. But it's a 20 year old app. So there's a lot of different sort of interesting aspects to it, I think, for the for the right personality. If you wanna just be in a Laravel 11 app that's squeaky clean and everything's perfect and brand new, this is not exactly that either. It's like this ain't it.
But, it's getting there. It's getting closer to that, but we are still we're still a ways away, but that would be part of this role of, like, continuing to push that forward. So a lot of cool, like, refactoring things, new dev, you know, worked with Matt who does development, worked with me as I do development. And, yeah. So I think it'll be a good gig for the right person out there.
Hopefully, you're listening. That'd be cool to hire a a show listener.
Aaron
That would be cool.
Ian
Slightly different topic. I've emailed 2 people over the weekend 2 companies over the weekend, and both of them Yes. Emailed support. And both of them were like, hey, friend of the pod. Love the pod.
Oh, we've made it. That's great.
Aaron
Yes. That's
Ian
great. When people I love it. Like, hooked in to the pod. I can give you your support.
Aaron
Love that.
Ian
Really cool. I was enjoying that.
Aaron
Love being special, Ian. That's all I want. I just wanna be special. I love being special.
Ian
You are very special.
Aaron
I am. I have I was born on Valentine's Day. That's special. I have 2 sets of twins. Good.
That's special. That's crazy. I got 2 special things.
Ian
Oh my gosh. That's awesome. I got a lot of special stuff going on. You, have a very special flower. Born on Valentine's Day.
I think I forgot that.
Aaron
That's crazy.
Ian
My anniversary. My real anniversary.
Aaron
Oh, wow.
Ian
1st date anniversary, which I consider the real anniversary.
Aaron
Oh, yeah. Mhmm. No. I don't I don't even remember our first date. I think, actually, our first date's on the calendar, but I don't
Ian
remember it at all. Yeah. Being on Valentine's Day helps Martin a lot because it, like, sticks in there. You know? Mhmm.
I can't really forget that. All right. I don't know. Anything else you got here?
Aaron
I don't think so. There's there's one more on the list, but we can save that. We can save that for later. That feels that feels like it could could spiral, so we we should probably say that.
Ian
Yeah. We'll save that. It's been a few weeks. We'll give it one more.
Aaron
Yeah. No. Nothing else. Go buy my course. Go apply for Ian's job.
Just give us all the money you have, and that'll be great.
Ian
I don't think I have that for you. Job post. Like, I don't know. For you, I guess, technically, you're
Aaron
giving them the money. So that last part just applies to me.
Ian
If anybody out there is very qualified and would like to pay me to work here, I am open to that sort of arrangement. I'm not against that. So Yeah. I'm flexible. We could work something out with that.
But yes, go buy a course. You know, you need to know sequel light. I've just been using it myself a bit. You gotta get in there. It's all the future of a lot of things, not about everything, but a lot of things.
You could everybody's defaulted to it now. I mean, that rails defaulted to it.
Aaron
Rails and layer values defaulted to it.
Ian
Yep. So, it's very cool, Tom. And you're right there.
Aaron
I'm right there. Tip of the spear.
Ian
Tip of the spear. Alright, man. Have a good week. Thanks everybody for listening. Follow us on mostlytechnical.com, mostly tech pod on Twitter and email into mostly technical podcast atgmail.
And definitely give us a like, subscribe, all that stuff. We really appreciate it, and, we'll see you next week. Thanks.
Aaron
See you.