Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:And I'm Gavin Tye, sales and marketing, I think.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Mostly sales. We're we're working on your on the marketing and how that works.
Gavin Tye:Marketing messaging. Sales strategy and marketing messaging.
Mitchell Davis:How about that? That's refined. That's good. We are building sixsides.co. It's an events platform that helps you build a stronger community through events, and this is our b to b SaaS journey.
Mitchell Davis:Mate, how are you going?
Gavin Tye:Mate, it feels weird. We've gone back online. We spent the la the weekend together almost. Like, from Friday, Saturday, hanging out and just getting to know each other. Now we're back online.
Gavin Tye:It's yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Well, you've seen my space now, and you said it was what'd you say? It's it's smaller than it looks on camera. So yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Absolutely. And And
Mitchell Davis:I'm I'm upgrading office soon, so I'm looking forward to having a bigger space. Anyway, that aside. Yes. It was awesome. So that was our first time actually meeting in person.
Mitchell Davis:We've known each other now for four years, I think, something like that, and all of that's been entirely online. I probably could have met you in when I was up in Brisbane at LariCon last year, but with everything going on, I just opted out. So I didn't even reach out to you until afterwards. So that one was on me. That was probably our earliest opportunity to to catch up, but you've made the trip down now, and it was awesome.
Mitchell Davis:It was great. So we spent when did you get in? You you surprised me with how early you got in on Friday. I had planned to do some other work, and then you give me a buzz and you're like, mate, I'm on my way. And I'm like, holy shit.
Mitchell Davis:I better get in the car and get going.
Gavin Tye:But out of the both of us, there's one person in this relationship that's consistently early and then one that's consistently late. At time of recording, we are ten minutes late recording because someone was like, I'm not saying who it is. I'm not pointing. Yep. It was good.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It was awesome.
Mitchell Davis:No good, but I'm working on it. So, yeah, you got in on Friday morning. We then spent a couple hours on Friday. I booked out one of the meeting rooms here in the coworking space. I got to see you use a whiteboard, and you were totally in your element, which is your your thing.
Mitchell Davis:That was really fun. We what did we do? We sat down, and we went through some strategy of what we're thinking about over the next twelve months in the business. Yeah. That was fun.
Mitchell Davis:And then what do we do in the afternoon? At what point what time of day was it? And then what did you ask could we go do?
Gavin Tye:Oh, well, I think first and foremost, I think we didn't really have that much of a an agenda. Like, we had an agenda months ago, but then we've crossed that off over the next over the last couple months. Right? So Yeah. I think the most important part of it was just really hanging out and then just going backwards and forwards on conversation that's not time bound by thirty minutes or forty five minutes.
Gavin Tye:And Yeah. I thought it was really I thought it was really productive. And then to answer your question by, I think, about 02:00 or 01:00, we went to play golf. Yeah. That's right.
Gavin Tye:So we went and played x golf and just hung out and just, yeah, got to know each other. Right? Like
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. For those that don't know, it's like a golf simulator. And I I actually had no idea because I'm not that into golf. My last time I actually played golf,
Gavin Tye:you can tell.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I didn't do too well for those wondering. But Gavin beat me by four points over nine holes, I think.
Gavin Tye:It's four shots, mate.
Mitchell Davis:Four shots, is it?
Gavin Tye:But it doesn't matter. It does it does that doesn't matter. It was just luck. It was yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. We hit the mulligan button quite a few times between us, didn't we? So Quite
Gavin Tye:a few times. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, that was fun, and we we had a beer or two at this place, and, man, I was wrecked after two beers. I had two beers and then came back here, and I had to just stay in the office for, like, half an hour because I I don't know. It just went through me. We we had only a small breakfast and no lunch. So, yeah, it just it rocked me a bit.
Mitchell Davis:So I was I went home and I had a nap.
Gavin Tye:And then on Saturday morning, we just did a just some planning. Right? Like, I think I think it's one thing when you're meeting online every now and then, but I think it's really hard to share a vision when you're meeting to thirty minutes on a topic. And we spent, I think, two hours just talking about the structure of six sides and how people will interact with the platform, and it seemed like you had a a light bulb moment.
Mitchell Davis:Had a huge light bulb moment. Yeah. So we talked through I guess, like, yeah, we'll just get into it. Right? There's no we're not hiding anything back.
Mitchell Davis:We talked through this this approach that you basically had always had in mind, but I thought something totally different. So to set the the context, last year for the LariCon Australia app, the way that attendees logged in was using a ticket code that Michael's ticketing provider had had given them, and that uniquely identifies each attendee, speaker, sponsor, whatever. And I had kind of been thinking, okay. That's the way that we will identify our users moving forward. We'll all be based on these ticket codes.
Mitchell Davis:And through conversation with you on on Saturday, it became really clear that, no. Okay. They need to be our users first. So they need to be registering or, like, we need to make it as easy as possible, but they need to get into our platform and accept our terms and conditions and all this sort of stuff that you have in of any app or website, you know, that you're using. And I just didn't really have that in mind.
Mitchell Davis:I thought, okay, the gateway in is just this ticket code, and that is that is all that they will need to provide to get into any of the events that we're running through the platform. But Yeah. We can think of them as they're our users as opposed to just an attendee of one event that's running on there. Yep. So that was really enlightening, and it it unlocks a bunch of other things that I I'm not really ready to get into just yet, but it's I think it will be really powerful for us to be able to then track people through different events or make it easier to share past connections and people that they've met and things like that, and all of that will just flow from having a a user account.
Mitchell Davis:So we can talk more about that in future recordings. Well,
Gavin Tye:I think that's really important because our mission is to build a stronger community through events, right? That's and people are part of a community. So one, you wanna make sure that whoever's running an event through Six Sides understands who's interacting with their community. Right? And I think it's a security I think it's it's it's around security.
Gavin Tye:You just can't have random people in there. You wanna know who they are. You wanna be able to engage with them further to track community growth and community interaction. Yeah. And I think it's really I think that was a big, big unlock there for us.
Gavin Tye:Right? Because you want to be able to over time, if we can represent the strengthening of of the community and the growth of a community somehow, we don't know how to do that yet. But Yeah. And it starts with making sure we are interacting with, well well, making everyone who joins part of a part of the community. That involves being part of the Six Sides community and any event that they're attending or if they wanna run their own event.
Gavin Tye:Right? So
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. Yeah. And that's part of a larger, like, growth strategy that we've got. So it was great. Like, that to me was apart from just meeting you and hanging out, that was by far the biggest, like, wow.
Mitchell Davis:This was a huge benefit of having you here, and I don't think it's it's possible that we would have had that conversation and realized, oh, we're actually misaligned on this. It's entirely possible we would have had that just through talking online, but sitting down and focusing and going, okay. I'm not answering other calls. I'm not getting emails or whatever. This is it.
Mitchell Davis:We're here. You've come all this way. Let's just focus on this. Yep. And we did.
Mitchell Davis:We got through, yeah, two, I don't know, three, four hour sessions of let's focus on this business. So Well,
Gavin Tye:it it really
Mitchell Davis:was awesome.
Gavin Tye:It took us three hours to get to that point after just going backwards and forwards. And I don't see we may have got there. We may have got there in another six or seven hours, but Yeah. I think you can't I I don't think I just wrote a post about this on LinkedIn. I don't think you can understate catching up and just spending time in person, just getting to know each other.
Gavin Tye:Like, I got to know a little bit about more about your wedding plans, about Yeah. Your personal inter like, your personal relationships. You got to meet some of my friends. We went out to dinner on Saturday night, and and I actually probably had the best laughs I've had in years at that dinner. That was it's one of the funniest one of the funniest dinners I've ever had.
Gavin Tye:It was hilarious.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Hey. It it was awesome. It was great seeing you in your element with you and your best mate from school. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. We also we also had Rowley who has been on this show before
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Who lives fairly close by. And so that was great. I got to drive him home, which was awesome. He was like thinking, oh, I'll just call an Uber. I'm like, mate, we live ten minutes from each other.
Mitchell Davis:I'll give you a Lyft. It's all good. Yep. And then we were chatting in the car and yeah. It was great.
Mitchell Davis:I had an awesome time. So yeah.
Gavin Tye:He one of the a person that just keeps on giving with his Yeah. He's so interesting. Like,
Mitchell Davis:he's such
Gavin Tye:an interesting man. And yeah.
Mitchell Davis:He is. So shout out to Rollie. How do you say his last name?
Gavin Tye:Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Excellent. Chirp.
Gavin Tye:That's how I say Chirp. I don't know if it's right.
Mitchell Davis:He'll let us know. Apparently, he listens to the show. So K. Anyway, so that was awesome. And then we considered having breakfast on Sunday, and we're like, nah.
Mitchell Davis:Scrap that. It was too much. Two days was was enough. So Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I was running out of time, and I needed to go see some family friends.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. That's right.
Gavin Tye:It's when I was sitting at dinner on Saturday night because I live in Queensland for people who don't know when you're down in New South Wales. Yep. I've moved to Queensland, and you and I we're back in Campbelltown, which is where Yeah. Kind of around where you live, where I used to go. I lived there for ten years at school, and Dean's going, you've moved all this this distance away, and you've met two great guys that are from your neighborhood anyway, and we're right back to where we started.
Gavin Tye:So Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Where I started.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So it's really
Mitchell Davis:world. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. It was really productive, and we need to do it more than twice a year. I think we need to do it once a quarter, to be honest. Really?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Well, I was thinking we'll have this natural cadence because presumably, LariCon will continue to be in Brisbane each year in November. Yep. And so, therefore, if we did this on a six monthly basis, that would work really well.
Mitchell Davis:But, yeah, I'd be I'd be really happy to. Like, this was great. This was honestly fucking awesome. So yeah. Turns out we are very similar height, which we weren't I wasn't too sure about before you got here.
Mitchell Davis:I was like, maybe you'll be a giant or not. I'm not sure. But, yeah, you I think you've got me by an inch somewhere around there. And, yeah, fuck. It was it was really good.
Mitchell Davis:I I shouldn't swear so much, but it was a great weekend. So, anyway, you're back home now.
Gavin Tye:And a side note, I hired electric cars. I went for a bit of a drive to zip around onto on sport mode and made you a little bit sick. You got motion sickness. So he's like, don't do that again.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. It was giving me a headache. Because you did in fairness, you did it a few times, and it's like it it was full, like, head getting smacked back into the seat. And if you're not the driver, I'm not in control of that. So, yeah, you might be telling me it's coming up or whatever, but then I'm not you know, it's not the same.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah. Was like, please don't do that again.
Gavin Tye:The conclusion I've come with you, Mitch, is you like to control your whole world and you anything that's outside of what you predict, you you are not comfortable with and you do not like. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:I don't love it. Yeah. I'm not
Gavin Tye:surprises. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:No. That's right. I'm not a big surprise guy, but that's Alright.
Gavin Tye:Anyway So what are gonna talk about this week, mate?
Mitchell Davis:Well, let's talk about your beanie. So for those that don't know, firstly, YouTube is up to date now. So we have a lot of videos on there now that you can go see. I spent half a day getting them uploaded last week. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:So they're all on there now, and we're gonna have these episodes out at the same time, both YouTube and and on the podcast. Yep. Okay. Back to the beanie.
Gavin Tye:Awesome. You
Mitchell Davis:are wearing a beanie, which you can see if you check it out on YouTube, And the beanie says CEO sleep out. And that's because where were you at on Thursday right before flying down to me, on Friday morning?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So I did the CEO sleep out on, Thursday last week, which was, it was really great. And thank you to everyone that that donated. We raised $3,351. That was amazing for my first for first sleep out there.
Gavin Tye:It was fantastic. It was it was great. It was really interesting. And I have a different perspective of why people could be homeless. Like and and I don't think I'm not sure if I said that on here before, but there was a time when I was a child that just some things didn't go the, the right way for my family.
Gavin Tye:We ended up being homeless while we're living in America for a period of time. And just things just sometimes just don't go well for people. And, I'm glad my eyes were open to that a little bit, and I can plan to can support that more. Yeah. It was really it was really good.
Gavin Tye:It wasn't that particularly wasn't cold. We did it at Sea Bus Stadium, which is a home of the Gold Coast titans, but we did it on the is it the concourse where you walk between when you're going into the stadium? So we were undercover.
Mitchell Davis:Think so.
Gavin Tye:But it was just on concrete. It was bloody hard on the hips. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. It was good. It was good.
Mitchell Davis:That's awesome. And and you got to meet a couple people?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I did. Yeah. I met met a few people. Not as many people as I would have liked, but, you know, there could be an opportunity for some type of software platform for building community.
Gavin Tye:I don't know. Like At events. Yeah. At events. Right?
Gavin Tye:Like, I don't know. So But it
Mitchell Davis:might be an opportunity.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It was, it was great. It was great. And, yeah, thanks to everyone's support.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. You didn't smell as well as much as what I was worried you might. You would ask me like, hey. Could you bring a towel and stuff for me? I'll shower at the office, and you didn't end up needing to use it.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. Yeah. Mate, it's cold. Been too bad.
Gavin Tye:I don't sweat.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:It's bloody hot in here. You you as soon as you walked in here, you're like, jeez, it's hot in in this office because they pumped the heater. So Yep. Yeah. It was night and day.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, so that was awesome, and the beanie looks great as well. You're rocking it. I like it. I might have to start thinking about beanie weather soon. It's getting cold enough for me.
Mitchell Davis:So
Gavin Tye:It was freezing there. I'm glad I wasn't doing it in Canberra or Sydney or Melbourne. We were did it in a balmy 10 degrees down there. It was, like, minus two when I was there on Saturday.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bloody cold here. You've also had some other things going on.
Mitchell Davis:You went to Fiji. I did. And I know now for you, that probably feels like a while ago. It was how long you've been back? Is it two weeks?
Gavin Tye:Weeks. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Two weeks. Yeah. But just with the the timeline of the recording and everything, we haven't heard from you on that yet. So Yeah.
Gavin Tye:How was that? I mean, man, it was really good just to get away, with, with the family. Like, you know, I've got young kids, two and six now. Harper just turned six. One thing that I really wanna do is is I don't want to build anything at the sacrifice of my family.
Gavin Tye:So it's really important that we take quality time, away together. And and part of that, to do that, I get up at four in the morning to to able to to do the work that I need to do, but also spend time with everyone in the afternoon. But insane. Just going to Fiji with the family was, was really good. Got a got a little bit sick on a Wednesday.
Gavin Tye:Me and, Mel had a a lot of cocktails by the pool, and then we ended up getting food poisoning, and that kind of put her out of action for a day. Yeah. And But I'll that. Yeah. It does.
Gavin Tye:She took her took her a while to bounce back. I was sick for about twelve hours, and then I could still go. It was Harper's birthday the next day, so we went on a bit of a an adventure. Nice. But it was great.
Gavin Tye:We're starting to plan our next one now. Like, we're trying to do one every twelve months or something. Yeah. It was good.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Well, I guess now we can return back to the recording last week with Michael. So I had Michael Dorinda on the show. He's the organizer of LaraCon AU, our very first customer, and it was such a good time getting on and recording with him and just hearing a bit about what's going on on his side of things with this year's Laricon AU, but then also you reminded me when we were in person, like, took you twenty five minutes or something to even bring up six sides.
Gavin Tye:That's okay. Michael's passionate about About what he's doing. Yeah. About LariCon. Right?
Gavin Tye:He's he's really working hard to provide an amazing experience for for attendees and to really add to the community in Australia. And, and it aligns with our values of a business. So, yeah, like, let him talk as much as he wants to. We saw the talk tracks when you were editing, and there was definitely one-sided and, it was funny.
Mitchell Davis:So He did have a lot to say, but it was all really good stuff. So I'd I'd encourage you to go go check it out if you missed last week's episode.
Gavin Tye:And I think it's really important. What we wanna do is build strong relationships with our clients. And and clearly, you two have a strong friendship, and we frankly, we wouldn't be here if he didn't invest the time into helping build your first version of, you know, Six Sides, which was Event Kit back then. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So that was really awesome doing that with him.
Mitchell Davis:It's kinda nice and different doing a recording without you here, and it will be for, like so next month, I'm going away to Bali for a week and a bit. So you might have two episodes. Maybe we pre record one, but you'll have at least one episode on your own, or you and a guest or however you wanna do it. And it's quite interesting to get on and have just a different dynamic, and then you were telling me you were listening to that episode, I look forward to hearing whatever you record with whoever you get on. So, yeah, it's it's it's a little different, but it's really nice to be back and just in in the norm.
Mitchell Davis:We wanted to do the recording of this episode in person and have us both set up in the same room, but just some other things transpired that kind of meant I wasn't able to make that happen. But maybe next time. Because I think that would be fun to sit down and do it at a table and, yeah, just be sitting around the same mic or something. I I think that'll be good.
Gavin Tye:So, mate, what's been going on in your world? You've made a couple of key decisions for in your personal life last week, so why don't you share that with everyone?
Mitchell Davis:Sure. So we do have a wedding venue. I don't know how much to reveal. I won't reveal anything specific yet in case anyone that will get an invite happens to listen to this earlier but yes very excitingly we do have a venue we do have a date and I'm so stoked. We almost pulled the trigger with this one place that which I'm happy to say so that was Burnham Grove which is the one I originally showed you and that I've talked about on the podcast before and then we got right to the eleventh hour on I don't know it was like Sunday night a week ago, and we're about to send the email to them to say, Hey, we're in, and I just had this like gut feeling that it wasn't it just wasn't exactly what I wanted.
Mitchell Davis:And so then we held off on it and I then took the I took charge of like okay I'm gonna find the venue and yeah did some research and then we went out and looked on Wednesday we had an enormous day it was it was like nine and a half hours of traveling between three different venues and yeah we found one that really just felt like it and so I think it was same day or maybe the next day Call them back and be like, Alright we're in let's do it. So yeah, so super excited about that. There's a lot to do as you know with the wedding but you were giving me some advice on the weekend and about how you guys got a wedding planner to help you just kind of smooth out and hey, it's their job, they do this all the time, that's all that they do, you know, so they're really good at it and they've got really good connections and all this sort of stuff. So it's funny when I then got home on Saturday after we went out to the dinner, Nicole was like, I think we should get a wedding plan.
Mitchell Davis:And I was like, oh, yes. I think so too. So, yeah, we're we're kind of starting down that pathway. We've got to tell, like, close friends and family and stuff. We gotta give them that, and then we'll send out invites to to everyone that's going to
Gavin Tye:Well, did I think what in my because I'm obviously married and obviously had kids. There's two things, weddings and kids, that you can go absolutely nuts with with cost. Right? And you hear these things, I've spent $80 or $50. You don't have to.
Gavin Tye:It doesn't have to be. It doesn't matter all the stuff on the day. It's just a fun day. It's everything leading up. So we had a rule with us that if we couldn't make we had to make a decision with one or two choices and we were and if Mel would often some she can get into really deep analysis, and then she gets paralysis analysis.
Gavin Tye:So Yeah. We were we were said, let's just make quick choices because we found that it's often the one first or second choice is often the one you go with. So it doesn't matter if you look at two or 20. You always pretty much go back to two like the one. So and I was like, okay, hon.
Gavin Tye:I will let you like, I will you do what you need to do. If I feel like you're getting into the analysis paralysis part, then I will I will let you know. And and she was fine until the gift ideas for people who are coming. We just went down a rabbit hole, and I said, hon, you this is happening. She goes, okay.
Gavin Tye:Great. And then we Yep. We stepped out. But I think we we we got away, and it was a great wedding for about $20 maybe.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay.
Gavin Tye:And and that was largely and a lot less stress because we put we helped ask the venue venue or the wedding planner to help. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Cool.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. Yeah. Well, I'll I'll keep that in mind. Yep. I'll try and keep people posted.
Mitchell Davis:Not every week. It won't be wedding talk. But, yeah, as as we get closer to it for sure.
Gavin Tye:It also kicks off a, something to think about too, right, is currently you are you're always critical, but currently everything starts. Productivity starts and stops with you. Right? We're on a timeline that whether it's now, whether it's one year, two years, three years, that you will, fingers crossed, one day become a dad. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Right? And we need to start working towards that time frame so you are not you can have the time away with your family that you need when the time Yeah. Comes in. It's even a wedding to not have to go, I can't afford to take time off because I'm we need to get this done with six sides. So I think it's a really, it's something to be conscious of is making both of us not, like, not the single point of failure in time.
Gavin Tye:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Because one of my mates had a had a child recently, and he it just puts so much it's surprising how much even knowing that you're about to have a kid as a as a as a man, it changes your responsibility focus because you're like, oh, on a sec. I've I just was fucking around.
Gavin Tye:Now it's Yeah. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. And, like, finding compressing, you know, six hours into two hours of, like, work time, cause that's all that you've got, and you just gotta smash through stuff. Yeah. Rollie was saying something about that on the weekend. And Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I totally. So we will have to work towards that to make it so that, yeah, I am able to take some time off and Yeah. Yeah. Whatever.
Mitchell Davis:The good thing with this business is that it's very, like
Gavin Tye:Sexy. It No. Wrong word.
Mitchell Davis:Hope hopefully lucrative. Oh,
Gavin Tye:sorry. I was I was
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. You're you're in a whole different area. I don't know. I learned a lot about you on the weekend. But but anyway, the it's very, like, hyper focused on certain times.
Mitchell Davis:Right? So an event that's running is a two day thing. Basically, 95% of the users are gonna use it across maybe a four day period or something like that. Right? So as far as needing to have, you know, everything running 100% and we can't possibly have any bugs and, like, all of the stuff that comes with software and running an an application like this, a lot of it is super tightly, like, time boxed.
Mitchell Davis:So that's helpful. It's not like we expect to have all of the attendees for any given event using this thing for seven months in advance. You know? It's it's not going to happen. So there's less stress there because it's not as mission critical, which is great up until the time when it really is.
Mitchell Davis:Right? So Yeah. That's handy. But, yeah, also as far as building out new features and things like that, it's like okay well there's time right now we you know we only have a few events in the system, we only have a few customers, it's early days so that's really helpful as well to be able to build towards certain timelines. We've talked ad nauseam on past episodes about how I work really well to deadlines.
Mitchell Davis:We've got one of those coming up, so two weeks from today when we do the recording we need to have a version of the app up and running on TestFlight to be able to hand that over to some of our early customers which is great and then probably within I'd say another three weeks or so after that we need to have it actually up and in the app stores and things like that so that everybody's comfortable with the timeline so yeah we're kind of working towards that. What else is going on from a technical level? I am continuing to make a ton of progress towards that timeline so we now have we sat down and we walked through on on Saturday morning when we were looking at all the, like, the users versus accounts and ticket codes, all this sort of stuff. We talked through the onboarding journey, and that was really interesting to see it from your perspective, and it did kind of align with what I had. We had some slight differences there of how we might wanna do it, but basically the process of someone downloads the app, how do we then get them set up with an account as frictionlessly as possible and then get them into their event within, like, you know, ideally five clicks or something like that.
Mitchell Davis:Right? If they're using a, like, login with Gmail or whatever. Yep. So we talked through all of that and what the onboarding screens might look like. That was really cool.
Mitchell Davis:So I'm going to be working on that in the next day or so. What else? What else? I'm then just continuing to bring over stuff from the previous code base, the LariCon Australia code base which had all of you know 90% of the features that we want to have moving forward so I'm bringing a lot of those across just sitting down and like literally copying and pasting code and then reformatting it to work in the the way with the new infrastructure so yeah that's kind of that's where everything's at on my side it's just heads down and getting some really solid work done and now it's a lot the position is a lot more clarified. I can see like the end goal now after this conversation that we had on Saturday.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Me too. So I think we've got a got a path there is now it's just building it out. Right?
Gavin Tye:We've got the structure of the framework for the house. That's just building it out properly. Right? So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right.
Gavin Tye:Now, mate, you met Matt Langbrook last week.
Mitchell Davis:Langtree.
Gavin Tye:Matt Langtree. Sorry. Matt Langtree.
Mitchell Davis:That's it.
Gavin Tye:Sorry. Shout out to Matt. So you're gonna have to answer some questions. Right? He
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. He so Matt Langtree from Entry Place. We'll have a link in the show notes. We mentioned him a couple episodes ago, and he's Laravel, Next.
Mitchell Davis:Js and iOS developer so he's been building apps and websites and all sorts for years and I hadn't heard about him until you mentioned him on the show because he reached out to you looking for some sales consulting right and so it was really great to like I'm loving it seems to be happening a lot more lately I'm hearing a lot more from people in kind of the extended network of Laravel developers. That's my circle, at least here in Australia, which is fantastic. So Matt was at LaraCon last year, and he's like, I regretted not going up to you and saying hi, and it's kind of funny because that's something that we're trying to address with the app, right? Is giving people that like social gateway to going and meeting other people and not making it so awkward and getting all up in your head. Right?
Gavin Tye:We wanna we're trying to remove that social friction. Right? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. So that was really interesting to get that perspective from him. But anyway, it was just great to to sit down and chat. It sounds like we have a ton of overlap in in some of the different things that we've worked on in the past. Entry Place is a system for entering motocross events and trials.
Mitchell Davis:I think he was saying he can run other types of events on that platform but he's kind of niching it down into this area and I thought that was quite smart. It was just really great to talk with him because I've got a bunch of overlap with that before, I've built a bunch of different event entry systems before doing like the ticketing and things like that so it's totally that something that's on our roadmap to look at, you know, next year or the year after somewhere there. But, yeah, it was really good. It was awesome. We got along really well.
Mitchell Davis:He did have a question for me. He said he he was asking about my choice of using Expo, which is a mobile development framework on top of React Native.
Gavin Tye:So I can give my answer on what I would think. Sure. Yes. Do it. No.
Gavin Tye:I don't I don't know what it I don't even know what you're talking about. No.
Mitchell Davis:So the choice to use Expo over, say, Flutter, which I think is something that Matt is using. Sorry if I've got that wrong, Matt, but Flutter or any other number of different like, there's heaps of options out there. And I kind of touched on this with a few people after my talk at LariCon last year, which was about building mobile apps as a web developer. So someone that's not I don't know how to write specifically an iOS app or Android app in the native languages that you write those in. I don't know how to do that, and I to be honest, I got no interest in it.
Mitchell Davis:I recommended last year and it's the reason why we're using Expo now. Expo is just really awesome to use as a web developer because it's all written in JavaScript or TypeScript which I would recommend using, I've kind of come around to that since my talk last year so I'm now all in on TypeScript as far as our app goes, and it just kind of works. It does all the stuff that you would expect if you have any experience with React, the JavaScript framework which is predominantly for websites. It works really similarly. React Native works very similarly for mobile development.
Mitchell Davis:So if you're kind of on the fence or you've got an idea for a mobile app, I can strongly recommend using Expo and it's what I'll be using well into the future. I know that there are a final thing I know that there are some other new tools that are out there specifically native PHP that's a way to write your mobile apps using PHP which I think is firstly it's amazing that they've got that technology off the ground. We're still going to use Expo because I just think the broader ecosystem is there, there's a bunch of other companies that are using Expo, native PHP may get there and I wish them all the best with it, but we're making the choice to use Expo and continue to use it because it's already an incredible like market leader so there's a lot of support there, a lot of packages, lot of tools, lot of you've got EAS to do all your building, this is all stuff I talked about in my talk last year. Maybe I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well if you want to check that out.
Gavin Tye:Okay. So can I ask you a question?
Mitchell Davis:Absolutely. For the
Gavin Tye:last five minutes I had no idea what you said, Right? So how do we how can you explain that to me, for someone with a nontechnical background? Like, what are the options that people have to do explain to me what you just one, what you spoke about. And then two is what are the pros and cons for certain choices that people make, and what's the ultimate benefit of why you went down why you recommend expo over p PHP? I kinda got a sense of that, but I just I don't understand.
Gavin Tye:Right? So and I'm sure other people just may not understand either.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. So when you want to build a mobile app, you've got to make a choice of what technology you want to use because there's lots. There's probably like 20 different ways you could build a mobile app at least, right?
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:What I would recommend unless you are a giant company with a huge budget and a lot of engineers, I would recommend being able to leverage a single developer to work on multiple operating systems, so iOS and Android, right? Because the programming languages are different for each of those operating systems so you can either have one developer who can write a mobile app in a language that can then be pushed onto both iOS and Android or you can have maybe you've got one fantastic developer who knows both Swift and Java, right, or Kotlin or whatever it is. You see, I don't even know, I don't have to know. You might have someone who's really clever and knows both languages and can work in both systems, and that's fantastic if you do. What I have seen though is a lot of places will have an iOS developer and an Android developer, so they've got double the salary.
Mitchell Davis:Right? You can immediately get started if you use a framework like Expo, this type of technology, which allows you to write one code base and it goes out to both systems and works incredibly well, right? So that's already a choice that you're making up front and those types of different categories.
Gavin Tye:So what's the cost benefit analysis there is if you can afford to run a native iOS developer and a native Google developer, what's the benefit of that opposed to using an Expo?
Mitchell Davis:So you will get slightly better performance, potentially significantly more performance, it kind of depends on how you actually build your app but largely your the app that you produce will be as fast as possible if it is written in native languages for each operating system. Right. So that's one of the benefits you can also have it's kind of tricky because like you can bridge a lot of gaps so yes if you were to build a native app application for iOS written in Swift it's going to run as fast as humanly possible, it will probably integrate as best as possible with the operating system and you'll tap on this button and it'll open up the share sheet so you can share it to Messenger or whatever like, but you can do a lot of that stuff in Expert or in other like shared language models as So the the bridge that used to exist ten years ago where it was like if you were writing a you wanted to write a mobile application using web technologies like you would put on a website, you would use something like PhoneGap to do it or which became Cordova, and that was basically embed a website inside of an app, and that was it.
Mitchell Davis:So it was running a browser in like it was like your own version of Chrome you know or Safari or something like that and it was just running a website that all the code for was bundled into this app so it wasn't actually connecting to the web but that was it and so the performance of those was really bad if you're trying to put any animations in it or like little interactions that need to run quickly, were awful, right? The tools have come a long way since then so and that was a big realization and that was a big part of my talk last year was wow okay look at how far the technology has come along to the point where a web developer like myself can instantly be a mobile developer as well.
Gavin Tye:Sure, so you're saying it's more well one it's more economical in the early stages to do it. But Mhmm. Does it it sounds like if you get to a certain point of scale or a certain size and then you could afford it, then you would probably break them out into certain streams potentially to save a bit of time to say make it more optimized.
Mitchell Davis:You could. You don't have to. So there are plenty of big apps that are, like, huge apps that are running expo.
Gavin Tye:Like what?
Mitchell Davis:One that immediately comes to mind for me is Blue Sky, which is like the new social a newish social media platform very similar to Twitter. Sure. A lot of people that are a bit frustrated with where Twitter's at have moved to Blue Sky. Okay. And it's an Expo app, So they're doing all the same stuff that we are.
Mitchell Davis:Obviously, they're a lot bigger. Sure. But, yeah, that that's an expo app. They run as far as I know, they run on EAS, and they do the updates like what I did in my Laricon talk so they can push out new updates really quickly and now they fix a bug or whatever and now that appears on everyone's phones really quickly. So yeah Expo has apps using Expo page or something like that that you could just Google for if you want to check it out.
Mitchell Davis:But yeah, there are lots of these different choices that like other technologies that you could use that do the same type of thing where you write one code base and push it out to different app stores, but the the people that were coming up to me after my talk last year and asking like, so why did you settle on Expo and why didn't you go with this one or or that one or like looking at some of these other options? And I just don't have the time to go through and try and build an app 15 times. Right? So we've got to optimize. I'm running multiple businesses, and and we're building stuff for our clients as well as for us and six sides and so on, and and it's like, this works.
Mitchell Davis:This works incredibly well. Yep. I know you'll have a good time if you use Expo. I'm not interested in chasing the the 1% performance improvement that I can get over here, but it turns out it's gonna take me three times as long to build the app because it's not as well supported or Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Whatever. So Yep. This stack works, works incredibly well. And if you're looking to build a mobile app, I'd I'd encourage you to check it out.
Gavin Tye:Okay. So that that's really interesting, like, for a nontechnical founder like myself is understanding that. Right? Like, because I it's the first time I've ever heard that. So Mhmm.
Gavin Tye:Is knowing that platforms like Expo exist. Because I remember at my whole business I worked in 02/2015, they had to run two loads lots of developers, right, for native app. Yeah. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yep.
Gavin Tye:Okay. Thanks for that. That's interesting. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Hopefully, that helps answer your question, Matt.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Oh, I'm sure it sure it does. Yeah. So, mate, I've been looking forward to this next one.
Mitchell Davis:Go on. Drop it on us.
Gavin Tye:The SEO results for the, for the
Mitchell Davis:podcast titles. Yes.
Gavin Tye:Now week four, I think will be week four. This will be week four. And there's definitely month on month. We don't have a lot of listens, so thank you to everyone that's listening. If you have any questions or any feedback, please email us at [email protected].
Gavin Tye:We're studying that a couple of them through now. Yep. But it's, what would you say at in one or two sentences? Do you think the SEO title change has had an impact?
Mitchell Davis:In 25 words or less. I gotta do a ride in and win a competition. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Mitchell Davis:I think it is working.
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. We'll end the clip there.
Gavin Tye:Yep. That's done.
Mitchell Davis:I think it is working. What I'm curious about is if we do go back to writing more shorter titles that aren't SEO optimized, does it does the trend still continue? Because is it maybe we are having a moment quote unquote sounds so stupid to say but you get me. Maybe this is starting to work. We are like, we did share I I think a big part of this is you, myself, and Michael all shared last week's episode on LinkedIn.
Mitchell Davis:Right? So that has got a fair.
Gavin Tye:That would it's got an extra three three downloads. I'm looking at
Mitchell Davis:it now. But when you, like, when you consider
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Like, we're we're not getting huge numbers on our on our downloads. Right? So but what is true undeniably is the the graph of listeners is going up month by month.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So and we're still only recording four episodes a month, you know, one a week. So, something is working, and it might just be okay. People like current episodes, so then they're going back in the backlog and listening to past ones, and that boosts the numbers up. Maybe that's it. Right?
Mitchell Davis:So I'm not a 100% convinced that it's just the titles that are making a difference, but something is making a difference. No. You get the win. Like, I think this is great. These titles have been good.
Mitchell Davis:I would like to further the experiment by at the end of this six week run, let's go back to different titles and let's just see, is it an immediate drop? Because then if it is, okay, great. We've got our answer.
Gavin Tye:Right? About if we don't check go back, but what about if we go back to the earlier episodes and re SEO those ones and see if it has an impact?
Mitchell Davis:I don't love it. You don't love it? No, those are the titles. That's what we picked at the time. That was our state of mind.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. So I think I agreed to this under six weeks. I think I should then get I want another six weeks and then after that we will whichever one works, that's what we go with. But anyway yes, you get the point. These have gone better.
Mitchell Davis:So I'm I'm happy with that. I mean, ultimately, both win out of this. Right? So I can't lose. That's what I'm trying to say.
Gavin Tye:Fair enough. Fair enough. So mate, this week, what are you working on?
Mitchell Davis:I'm working on the mobile app. We've got fourteen days until that's got to be ready in test flight. So I'll be working very hard over that time to get it there. That's the main thing that I'm focusing on for my work on six sides, I've got some other stuff client stuff and wedding stuff and it's all going on but I'll definitely make this happen. We'll we'll get it over the line a 100%.
Mitchell Davis:So that's all that I'm working on. I don't have anything else.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Awesome. How about you? I'm I've got a couple of, calls this week with some client like like some, potential clients maybe. Building, DealBuddy in my other business at the moment, so I'm going to six sides will be my first client on that.
Gavin Tye:So I'll get them configured in there as a test case. So you'll come into that as well. I'm developing we had a plan for our sales strategy, how to iterate it.
Mitchell Davis:Yep.
Gavin Tye:And I'm I'm putting that into action this week. I've got a plan, for for a couple of things actually. And I'm really excite the the way I see it, like, why would they say no? Like, it seems like a no brainer, but that we're also, just because we see it doesn't mean other people will see it. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It doesn't protest.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I'm working on that. And if that works, I think we'll have a solid plan to go forward.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And that's kind of thinking longer term. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Okay.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yeah. It's a medium term plan. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:A medium to longer term plan, twelve month plan, but it should be very solid.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. It certainly it sounded good when you put that forward to me and then we kind of ideated on that a little when you were here. So yeah I'm really excited. We do have this call later today which I'll be on so that's interesting and yeah maybe we should
Gavin Tye:be on that call.
Mitchell Davis:-Yeah okay okay so maybe we should change the link in our email signatures I wonder if that's where it's come from or maybe it was on the website I don't know but any of the spots where we have like a book a meeting that should just go to you.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It should You can always add me in. Like, I'm I'm happy to be on calls, but, yeah, I probably
Gavin Tye:don't need to be on that first one. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Especially while I'm working on the mobile app.
Gavin Tye:Right? Yep. Yep. Through Expo. Right?
Mitchell Davis:With Expo.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's Expo. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:But it is going well. Like, it it is exciting what I'm just as we round out the episode here, it is really exciting. I'm having a ball working on the mobile app. Some parts of it can be a bit frustrating, but that's the the case with any development work, but I'm very excited actually to start on the onboarding piece that you and I sat down and went through on Saturday and to be able to hopefully come back to you with that like tomorrow and say, mate, I've got this done. This is what I'm thinking.
Mitchell Davis:How does this sit with you? Bounce some ideas back and forth. Yeah. I'm really excited for it. Like, it's it's fun.
Mitchell Davis:This is the enjoyable part of building a software business for me is this bit here. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:What's your got a question for you. What's been the highlight so far over the last six months for you? What's your been your number one
Mitchell Davis:highlight? Within this business? That's a good question. I think certainly up there maybe I can give you like top three. Getting our first customer signed.
Mitchell Davis:Well they basically happened within a few days of each other so that week where we had we got both of our first two customers signed up that was huge because that was like well okay, we're off to the races here, right? It's this is real. Seeing you in person for sure would be in the top three because yeah, you and I have spoken for four years now but getting to see each other in person that's a big win and then probably doing this podcast. It's I'm still having a ton of fun with it, expect to continue to have a ton of fun and I really like that it forces us to sit down and focus on this, know, and there's no taking other phone calls or emails similar to when you were here on the weekend, like this is focus time, get in and we're just having fun with it as well, it's really fun so yeah, those would be my three. What about you?
Gavin Tye:Well, just on that podcast, think we should commit to this for the next three years to be honest, like every week for them. Well, I
Mitchell Davis:don't focus on twelve months.
Gavin Tye:Well, no, no, I just think we should keep doing it. Right? Let's, keep doing it.
Mitchell Davis:I think as long as there's stuff to say. I think all the vast majority of things in life probably have like a best before date or something like that right? Where it's like okay keep doing this for as long as it makes sense as long as it's fun as long as we're enjoying it and listeners are enjoying it but yeah I do think that is likely years I've got no plans to stop doing the recording you know six months from now. I think that's when we'll just be kind of hitting our stride. Right?
Mitchell Davis:So thank you for the people that are along for the journey. But, yeah, I I don't want to commit now and say, yeah, we'll still be doing this in three years because who knows what what will happen in three
Gavin Tye:years. Right? Well, there there you go. I'm as trying to form a long term partnership, and you're like, hey. Let's just take it easy, buddy.
Gavin Tye:I get it. No. No. No. That's I get it.
Gavin Tye:I can rip it on.
Mitchell Davis:I got commitment issues, I guess. Yeah. Right.
Gavin Tye:Top three bad moments was just now. Yeah. So so the first the top three well, the top moment for me, I think, would be hands down was, volunteering WA. Right? Because it because they were I got I got teary, I think.
Gavin Tye:I think that was the first one. Right? Like, I always knew LaraCon would probably be a client just because of the relationship that you had, but that one was, coming in was a was a really good one. Yeah. Second one is you you sending through some screenshots while I was at dinner when you when you started using cursor and you changed the structure really quick.
Gavin Tye:And I was like I was like, ugh, having, I was having dinner with someone. Actually, I remember I I was where I was exactly, and I was like, oh, how good is this? Like, his strengths are look at this. And my mate was like, that's amazing where
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I just don't have those skills. Yeah. So I think yeah. And then meeting each other on on on Friday was awesome as well.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Well, here's to more of that stuff happening. Hopefully, we've got some more big highlights that'll Only for the
Gavin Tye:next six months apparently, but not I don't wanna commit for We'll just
Mitchell Davis:we'll just keep reviewing it. Yeah. Six monthly cycle. See, are we still enjoying it? Do we like working together?
Mitchell Davis:We shut the whole thing down.
Gavin Tye:Who knows? Shut the whole thing down if you do it just a monthly podcast. So wrongly.
Mitchell Davis:That's right.
Gavin Tye:Alright, mate.
Mitchell Davis:Cool. Alright, mate. If you have any reviews, any questions, anything you wanna leave us, we'll have links to everything in the show notes. We'd love a review. We'd love an email.
Mitchell Davis:Check us out on YouTube. Find Gavin on LinkedIn and me everywhere else, and we'll catch you all next week.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So, yeah, if anyone does wanna leave a review, it'd be really appreciated. I'm just looking. We haven't had any reviews for a while. So, yeah, anywhere that you could leave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, that'd be really appreciated.
Gavin Tye:And, mate, until next week. Keep coding. Narrow.
Mitchell Davis:Keep coding? You gotta
Gavin Tye:That's my catchphrase.
Mitchell Davis:I'll keep coding. I don't know about you. You do something else. But yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's what I'm saying to you. You keep coding. Yeah. It's your it's your catchphrase.
Mitchell Davis:You've completely butchered the address. I haven't.
Gavin Tye:That's
Mitchell Davis:awesome. Yeah. Maybe.
Gavin Tye:We'll let
Mitchell Davis:the people decide. Put the alright. We'll catch you all next week, and keep coding.
