Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:Hey. I'm Gavin Tye, cofounder of Six Sides and head of sales and marketing.
Mitchell Davis: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. How you going, mate?
Gavin Tye:Good, mate. So what for those who might be listening for the first time, our user base or listener base is growing. What's our mission here? Why are we doing this, mate?
Mitchell Davis:We wanna help people connect, more strongly. No.
Gavin Tye:No. No. The podcast.
Mitchell Davis:We're doing this for I guess there's a few reasons behind it. One, it's for us to have, like, a bit of a history there, something that we can look back on. This is an artifact that we can look back on hopefully in a few years time when this thing is incredibly successful and we could say, that's right. Remember when we were going through this? So we were talking to that customer and now, you know, we run 500 events for them per year or whatever.
Mitchell Davis:Like we can we've got a record of it. That's one reason. Another reason that I really like is it forces us to sit down and focus. Phone's off and, you know, this is it. We're here.
Mitchell Davis:We're talking about the show sorry. Talking about the business for the next hour or so, and we do that every week. So Yep. Those are the things that I get out of it. And podcasting's fun.
Mitchell Davis:So if you're running a business, maybe look into it. It it's pretty fun. Yeah. Why do you do it?
Gavin Tye:Look. I think it's really important for us because we don't work in the same, city. We work remotely from each other. It's, yeah, having this hour to connect and, you know, go, oh, look at what we've done in such a in a period of time. And I have worked with a number of founders, and I've learned that people have short memories.
Gavin Tye:They they do really amazing things, but they're only really focused on the last one or two months or something and seem to forget. So Yep. We have made a collective decision to be honest about our journey. So for those who may be on a similar path or maybe a little bit behind or a little bit ahead, maybe wanna give us some advice. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And I think it's for our future employees. It's for people to go back if they're interested in why we make those decisions and things like that. So here's a few different things, but at the end of the day, it's fun. Right?
Mitchell Davis:It's It is fun. Yep. Yeah. Really enjoy getting on and knowing that, okay. Like, we record these on Fridays.
Mitchell Davis:We release them on Tuesdays. It's perfect. It's great at the end of the week. Can catch up on what we got done and talk that all through, and we don't really plan too much for the week ahead on these calls. We also have a a standing call on Monday mornings.
Mitchell Davis:So we we get on and we'll chat basically first thing Monday morning and go through, okay, what's coming up for the week. So this is a nice way to kind of recap that at the end of the week and share it with all of you. It's really fun. So
Gavin Tye:Cool. Yeah. Mate, so I wanna brag a little bit about our, you know, SEO titles. We've had a Okay. Almost doubled our listener growth, this month.
Mitchell Davis:It is true.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Tuesday, which is when we release, is actually on the first of next month. So we have a decision to make. Do we push a release on the Monday and try to go for double growth, or do we leave it to Tuesday? Do we fudge the numbers?
Mitchell Davis:No. We leave it to Tuesday. No. I won't let you. We have a standing Tuesday.
Mitchell Davis:This is our cadence, and it's just unlucky that it's in the next month.
Gavin Tye:So Whatever. But I'm just looking at the numbers. I think the SEO stuff is really interesting. Our biggest or our apart from our first episode no. Not even that.
Gavin Tye:Our the most listened to podcast that I can see is the keywords in it are Cloudflare and AWS. So it's really and it's got the long tail listening. So maybe that's a interesting experiment for this week because we're gonna talk about a few specific platforms that you've decided to implement, WorkOS being one of them. Yep. And maybe we can talk about putting some other keywords like B2B SaaS sales strategy update or, you know, things like that.
Gavin Tye:Long title, but yeah. Clear clearly. Well, your other one was how we are using CloudFare and AWS to build a freemium solution without blowing the budget and visiting my wedding venues and how I have a little hat for a big head.
Mitchell Davis:A little hat?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I
Mitchell Davis:don't know. I don't know. Anyway, we'll see. But, yes, I I agree with you. Something is working, which is great.
Mitchell Davis:We're very happy to have any new listeners. And I guess call out to if you are listening, you have anything that you wanna tell us, let us know. So you can send us an email, [email protected], or you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or Blue Sky or Twitter or YouTube or GitHub, all of the above. Alright? So just reach out.
Mitchell Davis:If you're listening right now, just do us a favor. Just send us a little message. It'll take two minutes and it'll make Gavin ecstatic.
Gavin Tye:Just let us know you hear
Mitchell Davis:us. Yeah. That's right. We just wanna know clearly, you are out there because our numbers are seriously growing, but Yep. It would be great to hear from more of you.
Mitchell Davis:So, anyway, all of that aside, yes, we've got lots of stuff to get into today. This has been a huge week. So you've had quite a bit going on with sales, and we'll get into that. I've also had a lot going on with the technology side of things. So why don't we stick to our usual format of doing technical stuff at the end?
Mitchell Davis:Okay. That works fairly well. So, yeah, do you wanna tell me about I put this intro. Gavin's amazing sales call.
Gavin Tye:I did, Jeff.
Mitchell Davis:That was yeah. Go go ahead. What what's going on?
Gavin Tye:So we have a challenge with the business. Right? We're trying to develop the platform that's not quite ready for the market, but we'll be in a few weeks time because we got our first event in August. But we had we don't have much to show someone because we're completely doing a rewrite. Yet we wanna talk to people who may be having events who were making decisions now for the end of the year or early next year.
Gavin Tye:So it's actually it's really complex when it comes to selling something that doesn't really exist. Right? Yes.
Mitchell Davis:So It's vaporware. It's on it.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Well and so, really, you're selling a vision or a or aligning to someone's vision or someone's mission and then painting a picture on how you can actually paint that, how you achieve that. So today I had a call. It was actually only half an hour ago or an hour ago with this company that I've been following for a while. And I had a chance to observe their event recently, and I I found a real play.
Gavin Tye:It was really eye opening, to see where we could actually add value. And, so what I did today was or the last couple days is I created, what I see their vision. I did some research on the business, looked at their annual reports, their strategic vision for the next three years. Excuse me. And then I made some assumptions from my observations about where I think their their pain points are and what's stopping them from achieving it.
Gavin Tye:So I put this all together in a meeting today, and I went to them. And I spoke to them about what I observed, and I was actually right on the money with a lot of these things. And then I spoke to them about where our strategic vision of the business is and why it would align to help them achieve theirs. And it went really well. Like, it's only early days.
Gavin Tye:Like, we are this pitch, this change in strategy goes from us helping facilitate an event to us helping them achieve a strategic vision within their business through events. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And the really, that vision and that mission or that objective over a period of time has to be around growing a community or involving a community or strengthening their community and through and events must form part of it. Otherwise, it won't work. So it it actually went really well today, us having that time last week with each other just to talk things through. And I think I got up on the whiteboard and just did a rough sketch. I I put that a lot more detail into that today.
Gavin Tye:And It looked great. Yeah. And it seemed to go really well. And this changes it changes price points. It changes complexity.
Gavin Tye:It that there's a there's a change to it, but it doesn't change the core it doesn't change the principle of what you're building. Yeah. It just change how it changes how we Positioning. Yeah. Position ourselves.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. It was fascinating to watch. I because the call was so like, it was only this morning, and then you sent me the recording, and I was on another call right up until, like, half an hour ago. So I had to quickly watch this thing on, like, two and a half times speed to try and get the gist.
Mitchell Davis:So it was funny. Your voice sounded a lot higher on the on the recording. But
Gavin Tye:what do you mean, babe?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Exactly. It was like that. So, yeah, it was it was very interesting. I think that was probably the best call that I've seen you on as far as just your general vibe and the connection that what you were saying was having with this prospect.
Mitchell Davis:It was awesome. So, yeah, I think you were really on, and it that's why I put it in here as Gavin's amazing sales call because it just it's not like you've ever shit the bed, you know, on any of the other calls that I've seen, but this was like, wow. Okay. This is really connecting very well. So it was great.
Gavin Tye:For anyone who's listening and who who's gotta do sales, to everyone has to do sales if you're a cofounder. It genuinely has to come from a place of really wanting to help. Like, I really wanna help them achieve their goals. Like, it is important how they support their community. And I'm and so but the the challenge comes from is some of these businesses around a long for a long period of time and how they think about helping is comes from many, many years of doing things in a very similar way, and they're entrenched in that thinking.
Gavin Tye:And understanding that technology can play a different role, but not for technology's sake. Right? It has to facilitate the outcome is is the I guess it's the nuance. Right? Like, it's it's letting they've gotta trust you first and foremost.
Gavin Tye:If if they go down this path, they're gonna trust that we can deliver and trust that we'll we'll have their best intention. Right? Because it could be scary. Change is scary. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So For sure. Time will tell. But that I think there's a new way of if we can go and observe an event and make some observations and then connect, like, that's a that's a that's a making a recommendation based off our assessment. That is not trying to sell something.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It certainly positions us then as stronger, like, subject matter experts as well if we can go to them and say, hey. This is maybe something you wanna consider that might benefit you.
Mitchell Davis:Like Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's not just sales. It's it's helping them.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. You
Gavin Tye:know? So Because people can. Right? If if so if a business has an objective to, like, a community organization to raise an extra $2,000,000, it's not necessarily hard to do. But if you're willing to throw $3,000,000 at it or a million and a half dollars at it, right, you can do it.
Gavin Tye:But it's Yeah. It's do it to the degree where you can maximize the return on investment for your stakeholders that you're trying to achieve, or you can maximize the amount of money raised with by lowering or not increasing administration burden. Right? Yeah. And what we wanna do is basically raise awareness for their cause to help them, yeah, to help them achieve their outcome.
Gavin Tye:So it was it was actually really good, and it felt really genuine. Yeah. So we we gotta we gotta we're connecting two weeks at the same time. So before our second next podcast, two weeks time, I'll have an update of what that was. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yep. Well, it's fantastic. Yeah. We there's a on the sales side of things, there's a lot going on at the moment.
Mitchell Davis:So you had was it two? Yeah. Two people this week that stood you up. Yep. This is the the nasty side of of sales, I guess.
Mitchell Davis:These things happen.
Gavin Tye:It's not nasty. It just is what it is. Yeah. We're not important to people. Like, they got other things going on in their world, and Yeah.
Gavin Tye:They don't know us. They don't know us anything. So Yeah. Yeah. It's just the price of buying eggs.
Gavin Tye:Right? Yeah. That's it. But they've re rescheduled. I just checked into I've got one this afternoon.
Gavin Tye:I he Oh, cool. Has supposed to have rescheduled this afternoon. He told me that. So he's a bit busy, and then I've got one on Monday. So
Mitchell Davis:Oh, okay. So getting right back on it with these people. So that's awesome.
Gavin Tye:The one on Monday, that's fantastic. The one on Monday is a it's way it's as big as if not bigger than the one
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay.
Gavin Tye:So and this is same principles will apply.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. So, yeah, that's something about you that impresses and has impressed me quite a bit is that, like, tenacity to just like, yep. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Nope. That's alright. This meeting didn't go ahead. Let me reach out. Put it in for next week.
Mitchell Davis:You know? And that's the type of thing I hate doing, to be totally transparent. That's the reason I'm not the salesperson. Right? So, yeah, that's, that's your wheelhouse, and you do it really well.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. So that was interesting, to see through the week, but both of those calls, like, originally getting scheduled, do you know where they came from? Was that as a result of Outreach? Yep. They
Gavin Tye:just Well, the first one is the one this afternoon is the the gentleman. Yep. I have looked at I have reached out to quite a few people at the other organization, so I would imagine it's been probably pushed down.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay.
Gavin Tye:But I will confirm that next week.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm I don't know how much we'll share on the show, but I'm very interested to hear. Yeah. How how are people hearing about us?
Mitchell Davis:You know? So Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Maybe share a podcast.
Mitchell Davis:I think so. Clearly, our numbers are almost doubled. So yeah. But
Gavin Tye:So, Brooke, if this if this is you and you are listening, I won't say where she's from, Leave us a review or send us a message to Journey and go. This is where our journey at Six Sides. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:That's it. Yeah. That would be great, Brooke. So thank you. That's funny.
Mitchell Davis:What else? We've got we we have a call with our Denmark client tonight. It's quite a late one for us because, somehow we kept our work hours quite open. So it's a 6PM call on a Friday, but that's okay. We, this client is obviously very this customer is very important to us.
Mitchell Davis:So, but maybe we can hone in the the meeting hours on our SavvyCal.
Gavin Tye:Unfortunately, they they're starting the day. It's only 08:00 for them, so it is Is it? What it is. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's 08:00 first thing in the day, so it has to be that way for Denmark.
Mitchell Davis:Right. Okay. I I hadn't checked the time zone conversion.
Gavin Tye:There's been a lot of we're at about the six month mark. Right? It's amazing what happens. I don't know if I've I've don't know if I've told you this specifically, but crazy things happen at six months. Like, all of a sudden, your phone starts.
Gavin Tye:It switches. You do so much effort out with not a lot of return. You hit the six month mark, and then all of a sudden, things start coming back in. And when you wait till you get to twelve months, things will change again. But we are almost six months to the day, if not because we started in early December.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. So we're we're we've hit our six month mark then.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Take away
Mitchell Davis:take because it was around this time in between Christmas and New Year's that we were having some of those conversations. Mhmm. And, yeah, that's six months ago now. So
Gavin Tye:Yep. And and funny that they've come back, and so we're having a meeting. And it's just an update. I don't expect anything come from it. But six months has changed.
Gavin Tye:So you do you people stop.
Mitchell Davis:Like Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And they go, it's not working, but you just gotta keep going. There is funny things that happen. You wait till there's a real I don't know if it's psychological or it's a real thing. It's definitely real. But after you've known someone or you've been in contact with them for twelve months, you automatically slip into being a friend.
Gavin Tye:I've known them longer than twelve months. The relationship changes. And I I think that must be a subconscious human thing, but because it it becomes really apparent over like, you'll you'll find out in time once I've known you for more than twelve months. Alright? So It's
Mitchell Davis:cool. It's working. Yeah. I'm I'm just really happy, and I'm we will get into it a little bit later in the episode, but I'm very pleased that the technology side of things is moving as well. Like, I feel like I'm keeping up, which has been something that I've kind of struggled with a bit in the past and I know, like, our priorities shift and have shifted and will continue to shift constantly where, okay, we've gotta work on something else in another business or no.
Mitchell Davis:Now we've got some time to put into this. It's kind of like a we're running a two man race kind of thing sometimes it can feel like for me. Yep. You've been making a lot of progress on sales side of things and I feel like similarly over the last few weeks, I've made a ton of progress as well. And and I can see this very first checkpoint of, okay, I think it's the July 8, Monday, not this coming Monday, but the next one.
Mitchell Davis:I think that's the eighth, and that's our first checkpoint of, okay. We gotta have this ready up in test flight, and, we're gonna meet that. And, yeah, things are going really well. So this is we should take note of this that, like, yeah. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:This is it might be the calm before the storm.
Gavin Tye:Right? But It's always gonna be it's not gonna be plain sailing. We're gonna have a busy yeah.
Mitchell Davis:But it it's a good time. Like, things are going pretty well at the moment. So
Gavin Tye:I think if I I think we're like, where I think the problems come from is with we ever become misaligned. And I've seen this with other businesses where I don't have a where the founder or the salespeople don't have a clue what the technical people are aiming for or where they are. Yeah. Right? So they end up promising something, they end up promising something that is not achievable or it's not gonna be there for a period of time.
Gavin Tye:But we are talking a lot about it, and we know the vision we're roundabout. I don't need to know the full details, and and I want to know the full details. But as long as I know where you're aiming. Yeah. So in that call today, one, I said I don't wanna promise anything without you on the
Mitchell Davis:call because I saw. She's on
Gavin Tye:the phone.
Mitchell Davis:Thank you.
Gavin Tye:But I also know where you're aiming for. So I'm like, oh, I can shoot for that because I know we'll get there in a couple months. The timing, not so much. It's only, like, a period of time. But so if I kinda know where we're going, I can shoot for that point in time knowing that we'll be there more or less.
Gavin Tye:And, it's when
Mitchell Davis:you them down and you won't overcommit me. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's right. And it's you and I, we we're heading, hey. I'll meet you at that point in two months. Great.
Gavin Tye:Well, I'll get some people there in two months or or twelve months or three months or whatever. I think it's where, like, even that, she said, I'm glad we didn't do that in a Yeah. Couple months ago.
Mitchell Davis:I was
Gavin Tye:like, yeah. Kinda we are too.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I think that worked out in our favor.
Mitchell Davis:That's what we were talking about it when you were down here and we hung out in person. Yeah. Man, I'm so glad because that would have been awful, the the amount of stress. Like, already, I'm putting in a lot of work. I'm putting in overtime at the moment.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Sticking around here till, like, seven, 07:30 some nights, like, to just try and get as much done to meet this deadline, and, yeah, I cannot imagine. And that's fine, to be clear. Totally fine. Yep. I cannot imagine what that would have been like if we had to have that deadline a couple of weeks ago or whenever.
Mitchell Davis:You know?
Gavin Tye:I think I was gonna go do another conference for my other side business in the November. I think I think I should go to this conference over in Perth. WA? Yeah. WA.
Gavin Tye:Okay. Because I think it'd be a strong business development opportunity. Yeah. Because there'd be other associations that were there. And I have a theory that one event would turn into many other events.
Gavin Tye:And, but I wanna go there and meet some people. And then, you know, even I can even talk to him about maybe doing a doing a talk about, oh, I'm gonna do that.
Mitchell Davis:This is how it happens, folks. Very exciting. Okay. Cool. Well, let's let's not commit you on this call, but let you and I can talk about that separately.
Mitchell Davis:But, I mean, it sounds great. So
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Maybe we'll circle back to that another time.
Mitchell Davis:But yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I'll I'll I'll go and do it because I've got other reasons to go there too, but, yeah, it'll be yeah. Cool. Awesome. So in summary, where possible, I think this will set another direction, like a new direction, the ideal route for big clients because this is a these would be big opportunities.
Gavin Tye:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Mate, it's great. Alright. So that kinda covers the sales side of things. So why don't we start transitioning to technology? So when you and I got together, and I think I talked about this on our last recording As friends.
Mitchell Davis:Kind of,
Gavin Tye:What was that? As friends. As friends. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:You're an idiot. When we got together as friends and cofounders and we hung out in person specifically and came to the realization that there was some misalignment in terms of our like, people using our app, and you had in your mind that, oh, these are our users, and I had in my mind, these are the events attendees, and there's a difference there. Right? I was thinking, okay. You'll just log in using a ticket code.
Mitchell Davis:There's no, like, give us your details or whatever, but I came to realize that for good reasons no we we should capture that information. They should sign up for six sides and we'll make this as easy as possible like literally two or three taps of a button on the screen right but they should sign up for six sides, enter a ticket code, and now they're in. And some of the benefits are then, you know, through some events, they may not have information about the attendee. It might be a ticket code that was bought by an employer. They bought 10 tickets and that's it.
Mitchell Davis:The the event has no idea who those people are. Right? And without a solution like ours, they wouldn't know that information. That these are all just nameless people in a room and and that's it. Right?
Mitchell Davis:So by us getting involved and and having an account registration process that's again really simple, now we have that information and and that can go towards the event organizers. Right? And they can use that information for growing their event next year, you know, things like that. So I think it comes
Gavin Tye:down to security too. Right? You wanna know who's there, who's accessing stuff. Right? So I I I think I think it's a security measure also.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yeah. Absolutely. The security is a part of it. And this is going to help us kind of tie attendees between events.
Mitchell Davis:So you can imagine as well, like, someone coming back the next year, get going to the same event next year. Of course, it's gonna be a different ticket code or even for events that are not ticketed. Right? Like local meetups, things like that. You're not gonna have a ticket.
Mitchell Davis:So this gives us a way to kind of start moving towards that where it's based on users. This is the same, like, flow that Meetup has, you know, meetup.com or whatever, like, exact same type of thing. You have an account. You go, yep. I'm attending this event or whatever.
Mitchell Davis:So that's the path that we're going down now. And because we're on this reasonably tight timeline, like now we're talking about a week and a half until we need to have this very first version up of the app for some of our early customers. So a tool that I have heard about in the last year or so is WorkOS. They're at, workos.com, and they there's a lot of these types of tools out there that do bay basically authentication as a service. So in Laravel, for example, which is, you know, my bread and butter, we've had the ability to build great authentication flows.
Mitchell Davis:So that's logging in, registering, logging out, doing two factor auth, and sending email password resets and all this sort of stuff. You can totally do all of that from Laravel for free. Right? It's it's all open source. You can do it yourself.
Mitchell Davis:But because we're on a tight timeline, I just thought, okay. I wonder if we just give one of these authentication as a service providers a go. And, in the Laravel community specifically, lately, there's been a lot of movement towards WorkOS. I'm hearing about it. Ian Landsman's talking about it with his new product that he's building, outro.fm.
Mitchell Davis:He's looking at using WorkOS for that. Laravel specifically is in some of their starter kits now. I think they've got it baked in with, WorkOS. Yep. There's a lot of stuff happening with this.
Mitchell Davis:And, specifically, what's old me is they're incredibly generous free tier. So we could have if we don't look to have any bells and whistles with single sign on using SAML, which is like a way for enterprises to authenticate into different apps and stuff that I have done stuff with SAML myself before. I've built it. I could leverage that code, but it's a bit of a pain in the butt, to be honest, and, WorkOS just has that stuff kind of ready to go. They have it all documented for you.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, their their free tier is, doesn't include any of that specifically enterprise stuff, but it includes up to a million monthly active users for free.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And if we get to a million users, act active users, mind you, we will have the money to then pay for the next tier, surely. Right? Or otherwise, something's gone wrong. Gavin hasn't been doing his job in sales. So
Gavin Tye:They've got some pretty big brands, Cursor. They've got
Mitchell Davis:They do.
Gavin Tye:Indeed, Perplexity. Right? So they're they're not small fry.
Mitchell Davis:No. They are legit. Yeah. And the developer experience is awesome. So I signed us up.
Mitchell Davis:I after thinking about it over the weekend and you and I talking, having this discovery on Saturday, you and I then recorded on Monday, and I was sitting down and I was thinking on Monday afternoon, like, how am I gonna do this? Because I don't wanna have to build the social connections and stuff into LinkedIn and Google and Apple and all this sort of stuff. I could do it myself, but could I do it with, at that point, two weeks to go plus build out the rest of the app and get everything up and running? I thought that's probably a bit of a risk. So I then got on to WorkOS, and it was at, 08:00, 08:30 at night, something like that on Monday night.
Mitchell Davis:I got got out my laptop at home, which I basically never do. And I was like, I think this is the move. So I got it signed up. You then sent me a message at 5AM or whatever the next morning. Mate, what's WorkOS?
Mitchell Davis:And I was like, wow. Let me walk you through it. So I got you set up, and I got Chris set up who works with me at my development agency Mhmm. Atlas. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:And I got both of us all three of us set up and started configuring it on Tuesday. And by the end of the day, Tuesday, I had the ability to log in in the app using LinkedIn I had, and, also, I think I logged in with, like, a magic code. You can email, like, a six digit code or whatever. So I got all that working, and it's all hosted. So they manage it for you.
Mitchell Davis:You just supply them with your, like, your LinkedIn client ID and your API key or whatever, and they take care of it from there. So they can handle as well, like, if I log in with my LinkedIn for my first event, let's say, and then the next one I log in with my Gmail account, but the actual email address is the same, then they'll merge those accounts together. So Yeah. They take care of that. They take care of doing emails for the password resets and all this sort of stuff, and it's free.
Mitchell Davis:So at our scale, right, it's free. So this was, like, a huge unlock. So this has meant that we're able to get authentication, so users registering and signing in up and running in the app with literally a click of a button and works really well. We can then, the the way that you are authenticated is using, back to our Laravel application, the way that you're authenticated uses a a JWT token or a Dropped token, some people pronounce it as. And it's funny because as Chris and I were sitting down and kinda going through it, I realized, like, I haven't dealt with these in a long time.
Mitchell Davis:I have I have built other systems that deal with this specific way of doing authentication where you authenticate in some external system and you get a little token back, and the token has some built in security around it so that, you know, it says, oh, this is Mitchell Davis, and here's the proof of why you can trust in this token. So, yes, Gavin, I could spend a lot more time explaining this, but it's probably not important, so don't worry about it. Anyway, we just get a little bit of something back that says, hey. This is Mitchell Davis. Right?
Mitchell Davis:And you can trust it. And I we're going down this pathway of adding a kind of a Cloudflare worker wrapper around our Laravel API, and that's got to do with all of this database stuff that I've talked about over the last, like, few months and some different things that we're thinking about, and I'll expand on some of that in this episode. But
Gavin Tye:Sorry. I was gonna say, does that mean at the end, like, that you like, attendees can log in under, like, the Google, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn, whatever they want to actually we'll put a few up there, but whatever they want, they just we're trying to reduce the clicks, right, and make it as simple as possible for them to get in and start using Yes. Yep. While making sure that our client's event information and the event portal and event is secure, right, with no without anonymous users.
Mitchell Davis:Right? And we get all of that baked in. Yep. So, yes, there there's literally buttons for all of those now. Once you click the, like, get started button in our app, you then see I think that we've got, like, five different providers, Google, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and GitHub as well for the developers.
Mitchell Davis:And then you can also do email and password Yep. Or email and magic code. So send them a code. And all that's just done. It was literally like a checkbox that I had to press, and that was it.
Mitchell Davis:Really? So yes. Bigger mob
Gavin Tye:from, like, a week ago. Right? Like, last week, we were
Mitchell Davis:this time of yep.
Gavin Tye:Saturday, we were talking about it.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It hasn't even been a week. Right? So now it's great thinking about everyone that uses our app is a user and not just an attendee or a, you know, a whatever, but of some specific event, huge unlock now. So, yeah, I'm really pleased with it.
Mitchell Davis:It's going really well. We're able to optimize kind of getting back to the Cloudflare worker stuff. We're able to optimize. So Laravel doesn't even our our actual back end, which has all the information about events and people and whatever, it doesn't need to deal with the authentication. Instead, it can trust this gateway that's kinda sitting in front of it which receives this token from our mobile app signed by WorkOS.
Mitchell Davis:So we got the proof. Okay. This is who who WorkOS and who the the mobile app says it is. We can then verify that before it even hits Laravel and now send that through to Laravel and just say, hey. This is Mitchell Davis.
Mitchell Davis:You can trust this. It's done. Right? So that's a huge unlock. And then so yesterday, as I was working on this with Chris, he then hooked this up so that anytime we see someone new for the first time, hey.
Mitchell Davis:This is Gavin Tie. Laravel doesn't know anything about it yet. Your record isn't in our database. It can just go fetch that from WorkOS and say, hey. Who's this Gavin Ty?
Mitchell Davis:Oh, yep. Cool. This is Gavin. Here's his email. Here's his first name.
Mitchell Davis:Here's his last name. This is when he signed up. This is he's used LinkedIn or he's used GitHub or whatever. Now we pull that information in and we've got that. Alright?
Mitchell Davis:And then everything just works super smoothly from there, and Yeah. WorkOS took care of all of it for us. So if you are out there and you're like me, someone who a Laravel developer who likes doing everything yourself and you want full control over everything. And in the past, I've thought, man, all these idiots that are using all these auth services, why wouldn't you wanna control your own users? This is a really good tool that helps you with this stuff.
Mitchell Davis:So I'd encourage you to at least check it out on, like, you know, on your next toy project or whatever that you're working on, a side project. Like, it's really cool. Really powerful. Everything's done for you, and it's just gonna get you to market a lot quicker. And I believe there's a good story to migrate out of it.
Mitchell Davis:So I think the only thing you would lose access to if you decided, no. I don't wanna use this anymore and do it myself, would be users' passwords. In which case, you just do a password reset for them. Right? So it's not the end of the world.
Mitchell Davis:You can still access everything that you need to. So yeah. So that's my my shilling for WorkOS, but
Gavin Tye:it is got the title of the podcast today. I just put that in the my my SEO optimized.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Alright. Let's see where we land on it. Let's not say it right now on the recording, but see what the title is when the episode comes out.
Mitchell Davis:But I like it.
Gavin Tye:Alright. So, mate, we've got twenty minutes left. I've got a hard stop at 11:30. Yeah. What's what's next?
Gavin Tye:You've got Slack connect up here.
Mitchell Davis:Slack connect. So following on from WorkOS, I thought this was really cool. It's the first company I've seen do this. When I signed up for WorkOS on Monday night, Two minutes later, I got an invite to a Slack channel that was just for us, and it was like WorkOS dash six sites or something like that on their on their hosted Slack. Right?
Mitchell Davis:So what this allows us to do I'm using this for a few clients under Atlas as well. So Slack Connect is this ability to basically have two completely siloed off Slack accounts. So in in my case, it's like one for Atlas and then one for, you know, a client. And, you can set up a connection so that it creates a shared Slack channel between the two workspaces. And the the way that Slack, sorry.
Mitchell Davis:The way that WorkOS is using this is it's like, Hey. If you need to speak with our developers or if this if there's some support request or something like that, you can put that into this Slack shared Slack channel. They then know who you are because they created the channel on their side, it can connect up to our account. I haven't actually used it yet to talk with them but it it really opened my eyes of like maybe we should be doing something like this too because I think about our Denmark customer that we're gonna have a chat with later today, I'm gonna put this in front of them and say like, at the moment, we're doing these emails back and forth. We're interfacing with just one of their team and and that's fine.
Mitchell Davis:That's our, like, our representative, you know, for us to to deal with. But if any of the other people on the team have questions or later, you know, in a in a month or two's time when the event is running and if they have any questions, they shouldn't have to go through this representative. They should be able to just reach us. Right? Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. So I'm I'm thinking about could we do something similar here? So I'm gonna I'm gonna put that in front of them on on our call later tonight.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. I think it might like, it's good. And then with all automation and stuff coming out now, like, I remember when we were at Redeye that we were having too many issues, so we wanted to shut that down. We didn't want that to happen.
Gavin Tye:But I think it's a really good partnership at least for now. And if it ever becomes an issue later, then we either figure out what the root cause of that is or maybe we wanna form strong partnerships. Right? So maybe then we hire someone to to look after that Slack channel or we have automation or we use agents to to Yeah. Prioritize or categorize whatever the those things are.
Gavin Tye:So, yeah, like, go for it.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. So
Gavin Tye:I think it's like, not frustrating. It's just the way it's set up is that you guys tend your community can't tends to communicate through Telegram or I think it is, but I don't have visibility, then we're back to email, but there's two conversations going on. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:So this is a way to get everyone on the same same page.
Gavin Tye:Right? Do it.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. So I think today, I'll set up a Slack, workspace for six sides because right now we're just using, my Atlas one. So I'll set up one for six sides and then, yeah, let's put this forward to them. The only downside that I can tell is it requires the, in this case, the event organizer to have their own paid Slack. This is only a feature between paid Slack accounts.
Mitchell Davis:So Okay. Potentially, they have that. Maybe they don't. It might like, we can evolve this later. Right?
Mitchell Davis:We can figure this out, but if they have it, then this would probably be a great fit. If they don't, then maybe we can ask them to or we can just say, okay. No worries. It's not a good fit for them, but we make
Gavin Tye:this part out. They need to have a paid version to do it?
Mitchell Davis:I think so. That's what I found out the other night, but I'll I'll take another look at it. But, yeah, this is meant for, like, enterprises being able to talk to each other securely Okay. Without having to, like, invite someone into your own Slack Yeah. Where they can potentially see all your, like, private stuff.
Mitchell Davis:This is just one channel that works between both workspaces. Yeah. Right.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Because if we're going for larger community based organizations, there comes a size in comes a switch over to some of those where they use Teams, and that becomes a pain then I dump Slack.
Mitchell Davis:Potentially. Yeah. So, mean, maybe we could do something similar like this with with Teams or I mean, maybe this becomes a a Discord thing as well, which is like another free platform that does this type of thing. It's not normally used for business, but I am in like, Stripe, for example, has and Cloudflare, like, a bunch of big organizations have at least large developer communities on Yeah. Discord.
Mitchell Davis:And so maybe that's something that we could do. I I'm not too sure. But this is just kind of the first draft. I think let's put this in front of them and say, this is something that we're thinking about.
Gavin Tye:I agree. Yeah. I think operational people don't tend to go down the path of Discord. Right? Like, it's a it's more of a technical thing.
Gavin Tye:So but I wonder if
Mitchell Davis:culture in, like, gaming as well. So it's not it's not being built for this type of thing, but a lot of, big businesses, like I mentioned, have taken that on.
Gavin Tye:But Yep. I wonder if there's a platform that does this that can collate, like, bring like, if someone uses Teams and Slack and puts it together in a common layer so it doesn't matter.
Mitchell Davis:Like Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Well, we can look at it a bit more, but I'll I'll just set this up anyway today and just say, hey.
Mitchell Davis:If you guys are using this and, you know, let's get you in there. But otherwise, we'll it doesn't matter. This is certainly not a super important thing for us. It's more just I mean, to get around this, we could just have a shared Telegram channel. Right?
Mitchell Davis:If they didn't have Slack, then, okay, no worries. We have a shared Telegram channel, and that would work fine.
Gavin Tye:But WhatsApp. Yeah. Yeah. Look. I I think it's a really good idea because it's we are not going to be sitting in their offices and and we want to be able to have a direct connection, and we want them to be able to talk to ideas and and stuff
Mitchell Davis:like that. So it's absolutely support during the event. I'm thinking like, this is the best way. It's a real time chat. I can go in and instantly reply, like, specifically for this Denmark customer.
Mitchell Davis:Their event is gonna start at, like, 6PM, I think, our time or something like that. And it's like, woof. I would much rather have a Slack channel than them sending me an email or something like that. It's just so much quicker and like, yep. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:I'm look. I'm on this, so let me check that out or whatever. Like, yeah, I think email is not the move there. So Yep. Good run.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway. Okay. Awesome. Cool. Alright.
Mitchell Davis:So that's that. Then we've got, what, another 15 or so. Yeah. So
Gavin Tye:we've decided to get some help like these on your side of the fence. Right? Because it's there's a lot to do. So what have you done on that side?
Mitchell Davis:So I have turned to my mate, Chris.
Gavin Tye:Hi, Matt.
Mitchell Davis:Shout out to to Ian.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Hi, Matt. Matt. Sorry.
Mitchell Davis:So I have enlisted the help of Chris who works with me at Atlas as I mentioned earlier. And for he's gonna do, I think, six days of work on six sides. He's already finished two of those. So next week, there'll be four, and that's going to get us Chris oops. Sorry.
Mitchell Davis:Chris is working on the back end side of things for the Six Sides application. So Chris and I there was a bit of onboarding work that I had to do to kind of get him up to speed with all the new technologies and things that we're using. So this week has been a bit of a we've done a lot of pairing on Tupal. We use to share screen and be able to type on each other's computers and stuff. We've done a a lot of that over the last two days, but I'm really pleased with where we've gotten everything to, and Chris has largely spearheaded that.
Mitchell Davis:So K. Where we have got it to is we now have databases in both Sydney and Frankfurt in Europe, and that's going to help us obviously with this the Denmark event coming up. And so, the the some of the work that we got done yesterday is we set up a it's called a global database on Amazon, on AWS so that, we can have information about all of our users, about our events, ticket codes, things like that. It's all shared globally between those two regions. And then as we have a need for it, and we expand out into other markets, we can then spin up other regions around the world.
Mitchell Davis:And then in addition to the global databases, we have regional databases, and so that's for data that just lives in Sydney, let's say. So a list of attendees for LARACON Australia, that doesn't need to live in Europe. Right? That's just in Sydney. So and similarly for this Denmark event, that would just live in Europe.
Mitchell Davis:And then if if someone here in Australia needs to access that information for this event in Denmark, they would be able to. It would just be a little bit slower to go and connect to that data that database over in Europe. Right? So we've had to be really clear and and have a good, like, model for this of what data belongs globally and what data is specific to each region that we deploy to. So that's gone really well.
Mitchell Davis:Chris, got that basically all up and running yesterday, so we now have a few databases in different regions.
Gavin Tye:So you can get all that up and running in a day, like, very quickly?
Mitchell Davis:Took about a day and a half, but yeah. Yeah. So and like I said, I've been working some pretty long hours, so I got in and I did a bunch of stuff even after Chris wrapped up. I spent probably another two hours on Wednesday afternoon in the office. But, yeah, he then I had to go I had to leave work early yesterday, and then he we track everything that we do in Linear.
Mitchell Davis:It's this, like, developer y project management tool. And we just created a few tickets for him in the afternoon to to work on while I was out. And, yeah, I come back, and he's like, okay. I've rolled the application out to over to Europe. We've got a database over there.
Mitchell Davis:He's verified that the connection's working. We're replicating data that's written in Sydney, gets written over to Europe for the global level stuff, and then also verified that anything that is regional and should just stay in Sydney is only in Sydney and vice versa. So I was able to get all that done in a couple hours yesterday afternoon. So, yeah, it really helps working with people that know what they're doing. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And Chris and I now have, like, shared language basically of, you know, I know each other's strengths and weaknesses and all this sort of stuff. So I kind of can tell now, oh, this is something I really need to, like, flesh out with Chris so that he's gonna understand what the goal is here, you know, and then he can kinda fill in the gaps. So, yeah, it's fantastic working with someone that knows what they're doing and someone that you're really familiar with. So Yep. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So that's all been going really well. Go
Gavin Tye:on. The intention is here is we wanna just we need to hit our deadlines and but we wanna not only just meet them, we wanna really be set up and blow past them. Right? So, and it's it makes sense to bring in Chris for a couple days, a few days to to do this. And Yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. It's going really well, and I think it's just it gives me a bit of a buffer there so that I don't necessarily have to spend every minute right up until this this deadline on the eighth. Yep. I'll still be working my butt off on it, but, yeah, I can I can relax just a little bit because I know he's he's working on this? So what I've gotta do to try and set him up for next week is to go through and figure out, okay, what exactly do I need him working on next?
Mitchell Davis:Because a huge part of this was the databases and getting us, like, our infrastructure in place. It's now largely in place, so I've gotta then figure out, okay, what could he take off my plate and then get get all of that, like, documented ready to go for Monday. So that's something I'll be doing over the weekend. So Yep. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It's it brings up our, like, like, the possibilities of how to take this business forward, like, growth possibilities. Like, do we do we try to bootstrap it, which means do we just try to win clients and use that revenue accordingly, which with the upside of that is we we maintain ownership. The downside is it's a lot slower. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Or do we do we look at funding the business? And then if we do look at that, then what does that look like? Because we're both got other businesses going on, and we're but we're not full time in the business. We're just we have distraction. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:So the it does I don't think there's one way to there's skin a cat. Right? There's there's a few different ways.
Mitchell Davis:As the expression coach. That's right. Yeah. There there is. I think for now, like, we are continuing on the path of bootstrapping this.
Mitchell Davis:I will not need Chris's help on this forever to be clear. Like, this is okay. He's helping us get towards this deadline, and then I'll I'll then be able to work on this at my own speed to to continue to evolve this. But who knows? We might be bringing in help in the future, development help specifically.
Mitchell Davis:We might bring some in. We've got lots of different ideas. But Yeah. It's all just nothing is, like, set in stone yet. You know?
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. Yep. We'll see.
Gavin Tye:I think I think a key part of this is is that we can achieve product led growth. And then if we can help these bigger organizations with helping them achieve their strategic goals and they have big networks, and those networks, if we've achieved product led growth, will expand out into other ones. We we might be very well be able to sustain
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Bootstrapping front like, structure, like, whatever it is, funding structure with high with high growth relatively high growth rate if we get it right. And I feel like I can see the pathway of that happening. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Ditto. I I've never taken funding on any of the projects that I've worked on. I would love for us not to. I mean, if we happen to get this grant from Advance Queensland, is that who the that's them?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So if we happen to get that, amazing. We talked about that couple episodes ago. Yep.
Gavin Tye:Funding and investment are two different things. Is that right? So Yes.
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. Sorry. We talked about that on episode 13. I was just going back to Trellet. But yes.
Mitchell Davis:Definitely. So if we can avoid bringing anyone else in, fantastic.
Gavin Tye:Why? What what's your mindset around that? Why?
Mitchell Davis:Well, I think it complicates things. It changes our like, you and I are busy with our other businesses as well. Right? And so if someone is going to invest in us any significant amount of money, they're probably expecting we're working on this full time. Right?
Mitchell Davis:They wanna get paid.
Gavin Tye:I think it's fair or or very much. Exactly.
Mitchell Davis:You have to reduce
Gavin Tye:the distraction right down. Right? So
Mitchell Davis:That's right. So that's already a huge change. You know, we have a lot of commitments and, relationships in place already with our other businesses. And so, yeah, I mean, who knows? Potentially, that is the future, but it's not what we're talking about right now.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. That's a big deal. Plus then it it changes a lot of things about our obligations, you know, all the reporting and everything that we'd have to do to investors. And Yep. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And it's just it's like a whole different business. And I'm not saying I'm against it, but I'm certainly not, like I'm not advocating for it. If we can bootstrap this, I would much rather do that.
Gavin Tye:You know, I I don't know too much about that side of it. Right? And I have seen people who take funding, and then they're not the business model hasn't flushed out, and then they're under so much stress. And then they're like, I don't ever wanna get in that position. Right?
Gavin Tye:Because my family comes first, right, at the end of the day. And you haven't started one yet, and yours will come first in a couple of years' time. Yeah. And I always wanna maintain that, and I think it can be done. Yep.
Gavin Tye:What I don't know is I don't know how it'll work. So I'm trying to, with my other business, go into it. It's not an accelerator, but it's a challenge to learn how to make businesses funding ready so we can go off. This is for us. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:What I do suspect will happen is we will get some traction, and we will have to make a choice. Do we want to do we what is our goal? Do we want to aim to go? Do do we wanna go for it? Like and I think that's a different conversation.
Gavin Tye:We we don't know yet how that will play out. But if we're gonna go for it and we decide we wanna go for it and aligns with our goals and we fucking go for it. I'd rather have I'd rather have 60% of 300,000,000 opposed to a 100% of a 100,000,000. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Gavin Tye:Business. Yeah. Well, those numbers don't quite work out, but, you know, they're almost part the same. But
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I'm with you.
Gavin Tye:We have so much to to think that we have so many options. The main thing that I wanna do is get our sales right first. And then we have so much more control and power on whatever we wanna do. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. And I don't see there being any immediate need for Yeah. Any investment at the moment. Like, we are doing fine.
Mitchell Davis:We are still basically prelaunch, and we've had three paying customers already at a fairly decent ticket price. Right? So we're we're happy. And, hopefully, we will be able to find more of those as the product actually becomes ready.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:So and we're only, you know, a month away from that. I mean, we're, what, nine days or something like that away from having this first version that you can at least then start showing on calls. Yep. We'll just see. Right?
Mitchell Davis:I'm very happy, though, with the with the cadence. I'm very happy. This is going at the right pace for me.
Gavin Tye:I would love to have 10 clients at $20.20 grand a year, and that would be, ugh, like, the that gives us so many more options. Right? Like, gives us so much more Yep. And and growing. So that'll be
Mitchell Davis:Hopefully, we'll get it there. Anyway, well, I don't have any time. What's that?
Gavin Tye:We will get there. It's just with the time when Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. We speaking of time, we are out of it, for this recording. So next week, when we are right before having this first version available, I'm gonna go into a bit more about Cloudflare because there's some really interesting stuff that we've done that I wasn't even able to get into on this recording. So we might get a double hit for our SEO titles.
Gavin Tye:Yep. We also we also have a topic that we're gonna explore, which is, like, the option of using offshore workers, right, which we don't know. So we do have a we do have to go back, and we've been introduced to someone who has followed us up in a in a period of time. I don't know if you've gone back to him.
Mitchell Davis:I haven't. No. I've been so flat out with this stuff.
Gavin Tye:So So we do need to go back to him and maybe set up a time to have a call and see what the options are, and then we can maybe lay that out of of our options because clearly you have a great relationship with Chris. Right? Yeah. And you are at a level now where you don't have to lay everything out.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah.
Gavin Tye:But then is there a benefit of other things? So, maybe we look at that in the next couple of weeks, and we can report back our findings and all that kind of stuff. So
Mitchell Davis:Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I would like to at least have a call with them for, even for some other things that I'm doing in another business, not even Atlas and not Six Sides, but I have so much going on. And I think someone else offshore could probably help us with that really well.
Mitchell Davis:And then if there's any flow on effects that benefit Six Sides, amazing. So Yep. Sure. Yeah. And We will.
Gavin Tye:And if you wanna release on, Monday just to pump up those numbers, mate, go for it. Like, no. I'm not
Mitchell Davis:I refuse out of out of principle. We release on Tuesdays. That's what we set. So Well,
Gavin Tye:that's okay. So give me the details. I'll do this week's one. Okay? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:I'll send you the login. No worries. Alright. If you're out there, leave us a review. You can find Gavin on LinkedIn at Gavin Ty.
Mitchell Davis:I'm Mitch Dev, basically, everywhere. We got links to all of it in the show notes. Have you got any slogans for us this week, Gavin?
Gavin Tye:No. No. You put me
Mitchell Davis:on Keep coding.
Gavin Tye:Well, the one that I have is snap snap and necks, cash and checks, but that's not appropriate.
Mitchell Davis:Oh, that's different. That's a whole other thing that we'll have to get into one time. But Yep. Anyway, we will catch you all next week, and thanks for listening.
Gavin Tye:Have a good weekend, mate.
