Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:Good day, Mitchell. I'm Gavin Tye, sales and marketing, the other cofounder of Six Sides, and welcome to our b to b SaaS journey.
Mitchell Davis:Excellent. Okay. New intro today. I like it. How are going?
Gavin Tye:I'm very well, mate. How are you?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I'm good. I'm good. We'll we'll get into how I'm going in a in a minute, but first, a couple shout outs. So we've been looking at all the numbers, all the metrics.
Mitchell Davis:We've got all the analytics in Transistar, and we wanna give a shout out to some of our regular listeners in Taiwan, Missouri in The US, The Netherlands, Portugal, Macedonia, and Spain. So that's that's a pretty good, like, global reach for two idiots out of Australia. Right? So Yep. It's not bad.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. We're starting to get, you know, get our name out there a little bit. It's a slow burn run. So
Mitchell Davis:It is. But it's fun, though. It's a fun slow burn. So, we appreciate you being along for the journey. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Then Yep. Also, I'd like to give a shout out to Michael Drinder from, Laricon Australia for two things. He gave me some feedback on using Expo. So, clearly, he's been listening, which is great. And then he also, off the back of last week's episode where we sent a Slack connect invite to, the guys over at Laravel Live Denmark, who are one of our first customers.
Mitchell Davis:He, just before we started the recording, sent me a Slack connect invite into his own, Slack instance. So that's cool. He's clearly still listening. Gavin missed out, though.
Gavin Tye:I haven't got one.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Well, maybe Michael could send you one after this episode comes out. I won't say anything. How about that? Let's see if you you end up getting an invite.
Gavin Tye:Come on, Michael. Yep. There's there's Mitch is a cofounder, not the founder.
Mitchell Davis:That's right. Well, he's kinda got the inside track. He was he was there all along. Right? So maybe it's on purpose.
Gavin Tye:And I was speaking to Hirilee, if anyone's listened back, I think episode three right at the beginning.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It's early days.
Gavin Tye:Very far back. He was, he was saying he listens to it every week as well, and he is trying to be consistent in his follow-up and tenacious with sales. He's like, I just listened to what Mitch says. Apparently, you're pretty good. I don't agree with that.
Gavin Tye:But, he said agree with that. That I'm good. I'm just a normal salesperson. Please. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And so he is, yeah, he's been listening to and applying some of what we've been saying. Right? And, he's he's given me some feedback on some stuff today too, which we might if if it comes up, I'll we'll talk about it later on. So yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Cool. So shout out to Rollie as well.
Mitchell Davis:Shout out to Rollie. Excellent. So, Gav, have you got any sales updates, progress updates for us?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I do actually. So last week, we briefly spoke about the change in strategy instead of trying to sell, go and make an observation at an event and then make a recommendation. So I've actually implemented that on I think I had three meetings last week. Every one of them are very receptive to it.
Gavin Tye:I'm actually going to a conference here in September. Massive conference. This will be a step change to what we are used to. And, they were really they like the core functionality of what we're doing and the and the mission and and everything that we're doing, but they don't quite know how to apply to them. So I'm gonna go down there.
Gavin Tye:I'm gonna create a what's the word? A checklist. So I'm gonna interview some sponsors. I'm gonna interview, you know, some speakers. I'm gonna aim to interview them more, make some observations, and then recommend that they how we could help them and what outcomes they could expect.
Gavin Tye:And they were really receptive to it. You would have seen an email not long ago possibly about one of the biggest events in Australia that's been running for a long period of time, is they're interested in picking up the conversation, in August. And, you know, some of these things are flagship events that are well known today. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:This is
Gavin Tye:big deal stuff. So, yeah, it feels like the universe I'm always looking out for signs when it comes to, sales, especially b to b enterprise sales or or high like, big ticket sales. Because a sale doesn't just happen in that instance, but what you will get is feedback from the market that's a indicator of you're on the right track. Like, you will get signs, signals that it is the right thing. And since we started doing this, since I that proposal, just even with all these meetings, everyone said yes to that.
Gavin Tye:And it's like, okay. Hang on a sec. There's something here. And it's a be a very difficult strategy to defend against, if if I was a competitor, if we get this right.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. The all the indications that I've seen are really strong that we've got something good here.
Mitchell Davis:So it's fantastic. Like, so much easier it seems than some of the other things that I've tried in the past. So, yeah, I'm I'm stoked. And we're we're getting very close. I will talk more about this in this episode, but we are getting very close to having an actual new version of the app that you can demo and show all of these, like, new things that we've been kind of planning now for six months.
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:So, man, bring that on when we finally got that ready and you can start showing that and we can kill off the all the old infrastructure and everything that we've got, I bring on that as well. So
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yep. And I and I have a I've been working on something in my other businesses like this AI b to b coach, sales coach called Deal Buddy. So a next step for me this week and next week is to run six sides through that process to get up and running because it needs to be configured to a business. And then I'm gonna use it as a salesperson, not as a founder, but to approach companies.
Gavin Tye:Because by then, we would almost be at a point to start demoing it, and we will have the the strategy defined, and then I'll start implementing that. So that that'll be a big step change in in in capability as well.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yep. Hey. Bring it on. That's really exciting.
Mitchell Davis:So looking forward to seeing that because I've seen with Deal Buddy specifically, I've seen, like, early things that your develop early, like, UI and implementation that your developers were working on. So really keen to actually see it in action. Yep. And and So I'll have a link to that in the show notes if you're curious. Check it out.
Mitchell Davis:Deal buddy with an I at the end.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. And and anda.com.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yes. It's not yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Not a .jealous.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. No. So that brings us to, you know, getting this interest. But at the end of the day, you've gotta deliver it. You've gotta build it.
Gavin Tye:Right? So and you're you're starting to feel a pinch.
Mitchell Davis:I am feeling the burn. So, yes, I have been working really, really hard to get this over the line because we have a self imposed deadline of today, later today basically to have the first version of the app up and available in TestFlight, which is Apple's kind of built in testing program where you can get early access to apps basically. So we had planned with two of our early customers to give them access on this date, which is the July 7, to give them access to this early version of the app. And we're on track for that. It's not as far along as in terms of being, like, fully developed as I would have liked, but I've been working my butt off to try and get this thing done, like, the last few weekends aside from some social events and stuff with family and things, like, just spending every waking minute that I can to just try and get this done.
Mitchell Davis:Plus also during the week as well. So anytime that's not allocated to clients or where I'm in meetings, things like that. Yeah. Spending as much time as I can to try and get the the app ready for this deadline. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:And it's just a really big task. We already had a working app for LaraCon Australia last year. Right? So I have been able to lift quite a bit of the code base for the new six sides application out and use that, but there's a lot of, like, aspects that have changed about the system. If you listen to the last couple of months, you'll hear of this podcast, you'll hear me talking about all the infrastructure changes that we've made.
Mitchell Davis:All of that stuff has impacts on all the existing code. Right? So it's not just the copy and paste over and maybe change some colors and stuff. It's there's been some pretty significant changes, and so I'm not as far along with it as what I was hoping for. We are still going to deliver today.
Mitchell Davis:Well, I mean, we'll at least have it up on test flight. It does have to go through a little bit of review by Apple, but hopefully, will be available to these customers today. They'll still be able to go in, see their event, see the theming that we've got set up for them. They can see a full schedule, see speakers, see profiles, see a gallery. There's a bunch of things that are all done.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. But it's just not exactly where I thought it was. So when you and I were speaking this morning on our kind of regular Monday calls that we'll have together, I was like feeling a bit bummed out that, okay, it's not exactly where I wanted it to be, but also feeling burnt out.
Gavin Tye:Sure.
Mitchell Davis:That, man, I've really been grinding away at this for, like, a good month now, and it's starting to get to be a bit much.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Okay. Can we talk her through that a little more?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. 100%.
Gavin Tye:So I guess well, one, you're going through a learning phase because when we first started talking, you you did say, hey. I've kind this is uncharted territory for you. Although you have many, many years developing experience, building something that is that we want to scale and then this capacity around different geographies, this is all new for you. Like, a lot of it's new for Not not new for you, but a lot of it's
Mitchell Davis:new All the all the infrastructure, putting servers, databases, whatever overseas, specifically all this usage of Cloudflare, all of that's new to me. Yeah. So it has been a huge task to learn all of that.
Gavin Tye:Yep. And so well, when I first and foremost, I think you're doing an amazing job.
Mitchell Davis:Thank you.
Gavin Tye:I don't know how development works, but I'm getting an insight into that. I've always suspected that it's a way bigger job than your than your maybe ready to admit. I don't know if that's the right word because I know that you've said, oh, it should be pretty straightforward. And I'm like, I don't know development, but I know it is way harder than what you're letting on. And you don't know until you you start getting into it.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:And Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And it's like, well, I'm fucking in it now. I can't get out of it. I've gotta keep going forward. Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. And look, some of that is also trying to like, if I say, oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, like, this might take a day to do.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Some of that is it's always a a bet. There's no, like, oh, if someone comes to you and they want this task done, it's gonna take you exactly thirty seven minutes. Like, that's not life doesn't work like that. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yep. So Yep. It's really hard to know how long something is gonna take. Yep. But through my experience, I have gotten pretty good at estimating, okay, this is how long it's gonna take.
Mitchell Davis:Because ultimately, if I weigh if if I get that estimate really wrong, that's really bad for my business. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Sure. You're also my observation is you're a perfectionist. You it has to be per like, it has to be perfect. I'm not saying it shouldn't be perfect, but you I think it feels like you're building you're trying to build out a lot of the functionality while you're going so you don't have to come back and do it again at a later stage.
Gavin Tye:And maybe maybe we're maybe you're you're going too deep on the first pass, if you know what I mean. Like, I did because last week, we we talked and you showed me this cool emoji thing. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:But I do think that if we think about your mental state or anyone's mental state, bro, yours, mine, because I was down a couple of weeks ago, that there's only a certain amount of capacity we have to use before we start draining and we we get into the red, which is where you're you're approaching the red now. It's like, okay. How do I do I how do I stay on and, like, stay on task and not get distracted by the cool the cool things? And and you know what I mean?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It's funny you bring that up. So I talked about this with Nicole, my fiancee, and I was like I told her that I I did sorry. Set the stage for this emoji thing. I was thinking it might be cool to have a way for people to while they're sitting there in the crowd at a talk to quickly, like, have a shared sense of how's the crowd feeling about this.
Mitchell Davis:Right? And so I was thinking, okay, wouldn't wouldn't it be cool to give people like a few options of emojis that they could just kind of like spam? If you've ever seen like a Twitter.
Gavin Tye:Google Meet's do it. Like, he he's yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Oh, Google Meet is yeah. Cool. So it's like it's a thing. Right? If you're watching a live video or you're on a call or whatever, you get the option to, like, spam an emoji or something like that and it appears on the screen and whatever.
Mitchell Davis:So something like that, I thought, okay. That'll be pretty cool. And then I put together just a screenshot. I didn't make it work yet at that point. I put together a screenshot, and I sent it over to you of, hey.
Mitchell Davis:This is an idea that I've got. And you're like, oh, okay. Like, alright. And then I decided knowing full well that, okay, I'm putting time and energy into this instead of other stuff. I decided to just build it out.
Mitchell Davis:So I then got it working. Right? And then, like, two hours later and it it seriously was about two hours, and that's it. And it's now a feature of our app. Got it working.
Mitchell Davis:Right? And then I was I sent you a video of it, you're like, oh, cool. Okay. Right. That's cool.
Mitchell Davis:I was talking about it with Nicole that night, and she was like, okay. But you have all this other stuff to work on? And I was like, yes. But I need the reason I decided to build it out was because I'm bored or, like, burnt out on building all of the stuff that I already built, you know, eight months ago or whatever it was. And it's nice to have, like, a fun little carrot, you know, oh, this is something that I can just go build.
Mitchell Davis:It's fun. It's new. It's novel. Learn some new technology with it and then, go back to working on the other stuff. So that is what I have done.
Mitchell Davis:And and to be clear, that's the only, like, fun new thing that I've added, and it was dead set two hours to build. I know you're not, like, picking me apart here. I'm just trying to Yeah. Give the the right, like, context of, okay. Yes.
Mitchell Davis:I I did go and build this other thing, but it wasn't like it took me four days to do.
Gavin Tye:Okay. So okay. So I think there's a one I think there's an opportunity cost. Right? Like, the of doing something that does take some headspace, but it is what it is.
Gavin Tye:But if you're getting burnt out from doing development work and then you go and do other development work, you're still doing the same mental capacity. It's just change maybe it's like having a break from doing work. Maybe your mental capacity might be better off or your mental state. Mine too, because I gotta get out of the house. It might be better off going to the gym or going for a walk or completely decompressing from it and then coming back.
Gavin Tye:Because I Yeah. I worry that I just don't want you to burn out. You gotta be in this for the long haul. Right? And yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Look. I I know that the burnout that I'm feeling is temporary. I've dealt with this before.
Gavin Tye:I've talked yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I had a huge amount of burnout right in the lead up to that talk at LariCon, and I didn't have the opportunity to just like, I can't say, oh, sorry, Michael. I'm just not gonna give the talk.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Wasn't possible. Right? So this happens. I'm instantly, though, put back in that same place of, yeah. Wow.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. This is what it's like when you're overworked. So with all this being said, I'm going on a holiday a week from today when we do the recording. Right? So I'm going to Bali, which is just a short flight couple hours north of here, which is awesome.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Going with Nicole and some friends, which should be great. And, I'll be gone for ten days. So I am thinking I will probably have to do some work to continue to meet. Like, we have actual real customer deadlines, not just self imposed ones coming up in August.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. So things still need to get done, and I was hoping to be further along. I think the consequence of not being there yet is that I probably will have to do some work, but I certainly won't be spending the entire time working. Yep.
Gavin Tye:So not I'm sorry.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. And and to be clear, I'm okay with that, but I think it will really help to have, like, some other stuff to focus on because it is kind of it's getting to be a lot at the moment.
Gavin Tye:Okay. So last week, we had last week, we had, Chris do some work. One of your other employees do some work in business, and that seemed like we got a shit ton done on that side of the back end. Right? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Is there any capacity for us to to use him again in the stuff that you're working on now? Like, has he got the ability to do
Mitchell Davis:that? Potentially. Yeah. He's not as strong suited, and he would be the first to say this, so I'm not throwing him under the bus. He's not as strong suited for front end, which the the mobile app is all front end.
Mitchell Davis:So, he does not feel strong in terms of design and, like, making decisions on where things should live on a page and stuff like that. He's amazing with dealing with data and the back end side of things. Mhmm. But, yeah, the front end is in his strength. So it's a little tricky.
Mitchell Davis:He has plan he has certainly worked on plenty of mobile apps that we've done. He's worked on the LaraCon Australia app as well. He did some work on that last year. Like so he knows how to do this stuff, but giving him two weeks to or, you know, however many days, whatever, to go work on the app. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:It feels like, okay. I will probably have to be pretty heavily involved. Sure.
Gavin Tye:So what what what about utilizing him again for doing what he was doing more with the dashboards and stuff? Eventually, you're gonna get to that point you need to pay attention to. So I understand peaks and troughs. You know, we're not gonna get out of that. But to try to smooth out in a few you know, it's not gonna help next week or, like, it one, I don't ideally, don't do any work while you're away, but I understand that you may have to do a couple of hours.
Gavin Tye:And you probably wanna get out of the sun because let's face it. It's not
Mitchell Davis:your best friend. Yeah. I won't be spending a lot of time at the beach.
Gavin Tye:Surprise. Nicole, I have to go do some work.
Mitchell Davis:You just really wanna get out of sun. She knows. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:But at least trying to smooth out some of that work, like, that you're gonna have to get to. I'm I'm completely open for it.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It the so the tricky thing with that is that with the phase that we're in now, it's really hard to design the back end APIs in isolation. So you kind of need to know, okay, what does the app need?
Gavin Tye:Right. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:So that you can then provide it from the back end. Right? Yeah. Okay. Gotcha.
Mitchell Davis:So because I thought about that as as I forget if it was last episode or the week before where we were talking about getting set up with Chris. I think it might have been last week. And we got to that he did six days of work on Six Sides for us and, it got to like day the end of day three I think and I was like, it's at a point now where the back end is working as expected. Everything is functional. There are little tweaks that need to be made to our APIs so that we are serving the right types of data and things like that, but you wouldn't know those changes that are needed until you're writing the mobile app to then know.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Man, it'd be really great to know, you know, this person's last name here or something like that. So it's tricky. You really have to at at the phase that we're in now when it's such an early product you really need to be across both sides and that's just Okay. I can try, I can talk with Chris about it and just see okay is there some way that we could help but my honest thinking is this will have to be me Sure. Who builds this out for now.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Chris has made a ton of progress with the dashboard. Maybe we can cover that because we do now have a dashboard. So a web dashboard that our customers can log in, configure their events, and do things like that. It's it's certainly early days on that as well, but that's something that Chris took from start to finish or start to slightly further than the start. Again, we're not we're not finished, but you can now log in.
Mitchell Davis:You can view events. You can view teams. You can look at a list of attendees and speakers and talks and so on. Like, we're we're getting a lot further along with that, and that's using WorkOS as well, so we've still continued down that pathway for anyone that's been following along. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:So that's been really good. We're enjoying it all. It's that's being distributed out to to Frankfurt where we're hosting some data there for this Denmark event and also here in Sydney. In AWS, it's all the servers or the Lambda functions are running on AWS, and then they're served by Cloudflare workers. So we kinda got this hybrid cloud approach, and it's going really well.
Mitchell Davis:I'm honestly stoked with our infrastructure and how quick everything is, to run, but also to deploy. It's amazing. I'm really liking where that's got to, and and Chris got us a new dashboard basically using one of the Laravel 12 starter kits. So, yeah, it's really exciting on that front.
Gavin Tye:So how do we what do we do about well, one well, first and foremost, great that you've said, hey. I'm starting to feel it because we don't we don't see each other. Right? So in person Yeah. How do we protect against it?
Gavin Tye:What's the what's the way that it re that works for you to relieve it?
Mitchell Davis:Well, there's only so many things I can say on the podcast.
Gavin Tye:Go for it.
Mitchell Davis:No. I think the best way is to not have a huge amount of work that needs to get done, before a given deadline ever again, right, which isn't gonna happen. The reason this is happening now is because okay we have to go from zero to one. We have to go from not having a working new Six Hides app to a working Six Hides app and that this unless we don't know. Unless something really significant changes in the future, this should be the biggest block of continuous work that needs to happen in the life of this business.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Because you're going from effectively nothing to a complete app. So this was expected, and you and I have talked before about the amount of time that we're putting into the business now and things like that. And I told you, like, mate, my the time where I earn my keep is now getting us from this zero to one, and then yours can be you could be working 10% the number of hours that I'm working on this right now, and that's what I would expect. That's totally fine with me because my time to then go, okay.
Mitchell Davis:And I can relax a bit and I can work at a reasonable pace that doesn't bring burnout will come once we run our first event through this. Right? I'll then continue working on the app, of course, and we'll we'll add new stuff and there'll be new features, there'll be bugs, there'll be software development still to do, but it won't be at this crazy pace that it has to be right now. So I was fully expecting this, and I'm glad that I'm going on this holiday because it will be a chance to get out of the office and Yep. Go do you know, go have fun, but I will still have to do a little bit of work while I'm over there, and that's okay.
Mitchell Davis:So to avoid it, I I don't think honestly, there's no way to have avoided this. I've worked on this business as much as I can over the last six months. Yep. It's only been a crazy amount of development time over the last maybe two months of that, but that's life. Like, I got other commitments and things.
Mitchell Davis:So,
Gavin Tye:yeah. Have we got a product road map? We don't have a documented one, do we?
Mitchell Davis:I don't think so.
Gavin Tye:No. Okay. Well, maybe we should do something like that, like, least understanding what the like, what we need to do, what you need to do, and what we need to do. And then we can put in, I was talking to Rolly about it. Sometimes they when they get ideas, they put it in there, then they figure out the priority of doing things.
Gavin Tye:Like, today, talked about photo filtering and stuff like that. Like, put filters on photos. Yep. Maybe when we're like, it's so in like, when we're trying to get to a endpoint, which is a not a MVP, but a decent app. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:We can just document some of that stuff to circle back later. Right? Yeah. I don't know. And Yeah.
Gavin Tye:For sure.
Mitchell Davis:Like, Linear, I mentioned last week, Linear is like a project management tool for development software development, and we use it on all well, almost all our client projects here at Atlas and works amazingly for this type of stuff. You can just add things to the backlog and put things in future cycles and stuff. So totally we could do that. I can't tell you how much I look forward to being able to just bite off a feature that's been, you know, in the queue for a couple of months and then I can turn around to you and it you know, and it's something that we both think will be valuable. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:And then I can surprise you, you know, before you hop on a sales call or whatever and I say, mate, I've just added this thing that by the way, it's in your app, you know, like, and you just open your phone up and it's there and I've rolled it out and it took me four hours to add this amazing new thing. Like, I can't wait to get there. I was describing to you on our call this morning about the dashboard in its current state. It's kind of like we've just built the canvas and now we can start to paint on top of it, and I feel like I'm doing that at the moment with the app. We've to have all these foundational things of which we're probably 60% of the way there.
Mitchell Davis:I gotta finish the rest of it and then we can start to paint and add all the fun stuff and new features and be innovative and etcetera. So Yep. Okay. It's a process.
Gavin Tye:And the the complexity comes I think the there's there's slight complexity that happens here as well is we do we do one feature or one piece of functionality, then we've gotta look at the tweaks for all the other sides, and it goes from one to five or six. Right? And so that that's all. And I know doing that over and over again, how frustrating that could be. So I I get it.
Gavin Tye:But but I think yeah. I think another thing is as well is future planning is, let's say some of these clients come off that I'm chasing that will be monthly well, hoping to be monthly SaaS SaaS monthly subscription fees, planning out some help for you in a way that adds value in a in a way that's more sustainable, I think can't be a bad thing because it accelerates. But then you've got other things you got in other businesses to look at.
Mitchell Davis:So
Gavin Tye:one thing I have picked up, though, is I thought a developer was a developer. I knew there was back end and front end, but it's like a chef. There's many different types of chefs out there. Like and I most of us who are nontechnical go, dev's a dev. It's it's absolutely not a develop like, it's not the same thing.
Gavin Tye:So
Mitchell Davis:And there's, like, diff yeah. There's whole different flavors of technologies even for front end and back end. There's, like, a million different programming languages. There's, I've talked about it before. There's, like, 20 different ways to build a mobile app.
Mitchell Davis:There's, like, hundreds of ways to build a a back end API. It's there's a lot. And I it doesn't overwhelm me at all. I really enjoy it. I like learning new stuff, but at the same time, I'm not I don't have my head head in the clouds, and I wanna learn absolutely everything.
Mitchell Davis:It's like, I I know, you know, probably 10 different technologies or languages or different things like what I feel very well, and really confident in, and I know that they do a great job, and I built that up over time. Like Laravel being one, Expert being another, and it's working like, that has continued to serve me really well. I'm not that interested in learning everything else that's out there. But it's also, like, it's not just front end or back end developers. There's also, like, the infrastructure people and DevOps.
Mitchell Davis:So, running all of your servers and making sure you can deploy stuff, and, like, there's so much. The the rabbit hole goes so deep.
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, it's interesting you've you've picked up on that.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. And it's yes. It it's true. And I've been thinking I was just thinking about that then about stress levels. We're all gonna go through peaks and troughs, and that's okay.
Gavin Tye:I don't think being stressed for twelve months on two years at a time is probably I don't wanna do that. But I also think that, well, one, the more stressed you feel and the more that comes with responsibility and deadlines and all that kind of stuff, and, we're doing something that no one else is doing. So, of course, it's gonna come with a sense of pressure. But I wonder if if there's a timeline to say, hey. I'm feeling stressed.
Gavin Tye:And you go, okay. Today is the July 7. If we're if you're still feeling that in three months time, then we have a or two months time, then that's when we have to look at changing processes because that is not so because I don't do you know what I mean? I wonder if that is something to be conscious of.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yeah. For sure. I would like us to put more things in the calendar down the line of, okay. Hey.
Mitchell Davis:Let's check-in with how was that problem. You know? This podcast is a good way for us to kind of keep track of this because it forces us to get in a room and talk, you know, each week about this stuff. We could pretty easily put in, yeah, a month from now, two, three months, whatever, put something in the calendar from today's date and go, how are you feeling about this? You know?
Mitchell Davis:Just doing more regular check ins with purpose. Yep. But I think it would be we would particularly for stress levels, we would know, well before, like, two or three months, are you still at that point? Because I'd be depressed. You know?
Mitchell Davis:Yep. It would be bad. And similar for you if it was you going through the stress or the burnout or whatever. Like, you would I think we would know for that. Yep.
Gavin Tye:I think if it's temporary and we know what's temporary. I can see when this would be relieved. Yeah. When we get to this this date, I I can see that's only existing because of a time a time period. But if it's there, like, I think there's a different stress of, say, we didn't get on anymore and it was we were in conflict about the direction of the business or Yeah.
Gavin Tye:We had a bad employee or something that wasn't bound by a time frame and it wasn't going away. I think that is something that's probably a good skin to look over something. Yeah. If if anyone is listening, has any frameworks or can point us in the direction of anything to do with this, we'd really appreciate it if you could re either reach out to us on LinkedIn or Blue Sky for Mitch or send us an email at journey at six sides. Because I don't think we're reinventing the wheel here.
Gavin Tye:I think it's probably a well Yeah. It's actually a common.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, overall, I'm still extremely positive about all of this. It's just okay. It's a bit of hard work to get through at the moment. So
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Gotcha.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. We will get there. Okay. So, anyway, on the Slack connect stuff now to kind of just go back just for one minute, it went really well with the team at Laravel Live Denmark. So that's who we had in mind last week when we were about to send them an invite.
Mitchell Davis:Went really well even before we got it. So we sent it, like, a few hours before we were to get on a call with them, and I wrote to them, like, as soon as they accepted the invite into the channel, I wrote to them, like, I'll explain why we wanna do this on the call. We're just having a shared space so we can, you know, get out of email, basically. And they were like, don't even worry about it. We love it.
Mitchell Davis:We use Slack all the time. This is fantastic. Like, they were all in instantly. So that was really nice to see. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:With a certain crowd at least, a certain type of customer, this is probably gonna be right up their alley. We haven't yet done this even sent an invite for one of our other customers in a totally different nondevelopment sector. I agree with what you said last week. Well, they're probably using Teams or something else. Right?
Mitchell Davis:So it probably won't be a good option for them. But, anyway, we could try. The next time we have a call with them, it might be a good option to bring up. Because who knows? Maybe they are using Slack.
Mitchell Davis:So
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I'm just having to look if there's a platform to, connect our Teams platform to bring in Slack.
Mitchell Davis:And Otherwise, like, we might have to get set up with Teams or something like that because it it effectively is like like for yeah. See, I'm with you. I I also don't use Team, but maybe it's something that we have to do if this is a channel that we wanna pursue is offering support or creating a closer bond with these customers. Like, who knows? It might be something that we need to look at.
Mitchell Davis:But, anyway, it's certainly it's it's just like one tiny little fraction of our approach, so it's not the end of the world. But to try and give some follow-up, anyone that listened last week, it went really well. So if I mean, yeah, if you're out there and you're running your own business and it happens to kinda be like this and you've got customers, like, maybe it's something that you could consider setting up. Because as long as you're on the paid plan and so is your other, like, partner, then this is a free thing. It's not like you pay extra to connect, between two Slacks, so worth looking at.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So there's a platform I can see called Myo, m I o I o, and it, connects Google and Microsoft Teams and Slack and Google and all that kind of stuff. Zoom. Yeah. So it looks like it might yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. We'll we'll see. Maybe we'll look at that over the next month or so in preparation to reach out to that other customer about. Sure. Anyway, cool.
Mitchell Davis:So we've got a couple more things on the list. So six weeks of SEO titles. This is the last one. Yep. The last one for now.
Mitchell Davis:We'll see. So when we kicked all of this off, I believe it was episode 13. So you've actually had one, two, three, four, five six. This will be the seventh episode, I'm pretty sure, that has a SEO type title. So I gave you a freebie here.
Mitchell Davis:It has gone pretty well. Like, the the podcast numbers have grown, which is fantastic. We almost doubled. I didn't release I held true. I didn't release the episode, in June.
Mitchell Davis:I waited until July, because we release our episodes on Tuesdays, and that's it. You won't get me to change that. It is going well. Look. Again, if you're out there, maybe this is the big feedback episode.
Mitchell Davis:If you're out there, let us know if you found us because of one of the titles in one of the recent episodes or maybe you're more willing to share it with friends if you've been a listener since right at the start. Like, we would love some feedback. So if you're listening to this and you have the capability to send us an email, do that because then Gavin and I will both get that instantly. That would be really good. So we would do another SEO title on this one, and then you, next week, are recording with, do you wanna reveal who you're recording with?
Gavin Tye:Yes. I'm gonna record with Roman Galakoff. He's the founder of Record Advisory. He's a an accountancy firm for startups, and, he's gonna talk about, you know, the options with bootstrapping over funding, some give like, first principles, accounting principles. Sorry.
Gavin Tye:And just give just give some general advice about what we should be considering at this stage of our business. Right? Tracking tracking customer acquisition costs, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, Roman's a good friend of mine. We've been mates for a long time.
Gavin Tye:He's a really, really funny man.
Mitchell Davis:Hope he brings it next week. You know, you put him on a pedestal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:He's he's got an interesting backstory too. So Yeah. Hopefully, he will share that. He might not want to. So Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I would just bring it on him.
Mitchell Davis:See how we go.
Gavin Tye:But yeah. Look. And to be honest with the, you know, this SEO, Mitch, I don't know why we would go back.
Mitchell Davis:Well, I yeah. You don't because this was your idea. Right? But I like the more loosey goosiness of it of just, okay.
Gavin Tye:Hey. I think you're just a bad loser, Mitch. Like, okay. We're in TV. No.
Mitchell Davis:Maybe. So, anyway, where I was going with the with next week is you will then I think you're gonna get eight episodes that you will have complete creative control over the titles for. So maybe from episode 21, I might take it back for a little. And let's see if the numbers drop off or if they continue. We're we're gonna run the experiment.
Mitchell Davis:I'm not doing any cover art for this period, so that way we're not skewing the results there with trying to change two variables at once.
Gavin Tye:Oh, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:But maybe I'll pick that back up in five, ten episodes from now. Might start playing with that. So, yeah. Anyway, we're having fun. It is working.
Mitchell Davis:And let us know if you found us through one of these SEO titles or what you think of the titles. If you think they're stupid, then let us know.
Gavin Tye:Fair enough. Fair enough.
Mitchell Davis:Cool. Alright. That's that one. So let's talk about the blog. So you are our head of sales and marketing, and you came to me last week, I think it was, and you asked me about getting set up with the blog.
Mitchell Davis:So do you wanna walk us through how all that went?
Gavin Tye:Mate, that was a shitty process, I'll be honest with you. You you were like, yeah. No worries. Download this command. Download whatever it was.
Gavin Tye:I don't even know what you told me to do. You told me to download Heard.
Mitchell Davis:You bluff it from your memory.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I'm gonna go look at it because it was horrendous. For what is second nature to you and gets it's not second nature for other people who aren't familiar. Yeah. GitHub desktop and then heard.
Gavin Tye:Mhmm. It was overwhelming to say the least. And then you were like, just just go into there, that command, and hit this, and then you can write in there. And I was like, this is not this is not something that could work. It was too hard.
Gavin Tye:It was overwhelming, and blogs are supposed to be easy, and it was not. But we found a good solution. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yes. So where we yes. There was a lot of setup. Where we got it to was that you needed to make a new markdown file for those in the know where writing the marketing website is written with Next. Js, and it's got this ability to do blog articles via markdown files.
Mitchell Davis:So we got it to a point where I thought it should be easy enough after having done all the setup where you needed to create a new markdown file and then start typing in that, and you had to run a command, yes, to run NextJS. Right? And that pretty quickly, you were like, dude, I'm so overwhelmed. This is way too much. This is gonna be too hard.
Mitchell Davis:And I get it. Like, I totally get it. It sucks. I've had to work on sites that, you know, other people have written and you're dealing with, like, really complex files and all this sort of stuff that's just like, oh my god. Just give me, like, an easy way to make this work.
Mitchell Davis:So I get it. So we went looking for a solution, and I found one, and it is called tina.io. Tina.io. It's actually as far as I could tell, it's an Australian team, which is pretty cool. So it's this CMS platform that lets you write blog articles or pages or whatever.
Mitchell Davis:It's one of these, like, headless editor platforms where it plugs into your website. So I then had to spend, and I did it same day, like, right after we had this disaster of a call that the blog articles weren't working. I then went searching, I found Tina, and I was like, hey. Right. This is it.
Mitchell Davis:Let's get it set up. So I did. I got it set up, and it took a couple hours cause some of the stuff was pretty new to me with the way that they wanted you to integrate it. Anyway, we got it working and now you can go in and use a nice visual editor to type in articles and make changes, add photos, whatever. It all works as far as we can tell really well.
Mitchell Davis:So you're still waiting on me to make that actually live. It's we're not using it yet on our production, like www.6sides.co. We're not using it there yet, but I don't think you're in that big of a rush to write blog articles anyway. It's just like, this would be great to have when the time comes. So but I've got it now.
Mitchell Davis:I think you can write them on the staging site. I'm pretty sure that's up and running. That's what what I showed you when we got back on the phone. We got back on a call after a few hours. So I was probably a little tense that day.
Mitchell Davis:But, anyway, we got it there.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's I'm just looking at it now.
Gavin Tye:Completely forgot how to use it, so we'll have to figure out how to
Mitchell Davis:We might have to have another call With that video or something. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Oh, well, I'll actually write the article, then we'll put it up there. So we'll do that first. So Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:But, yeah,
Gavin Tye:thanks for that. Like, it was a lot more intuitive. And
Mitchell Davis:It's night and day. 100. So it it will lead to a way better editing experience for both of us plus anyone else that happens to come in and work on it in the future. So I I agree. This probably needed to happen.
Mitchell Davis:I just wasn't necessarily ready for it to happen yet, but it's done now, and I think we'll be all the better for it.
Gavin Tye:So
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Cool.
Mitchell Davis:Well, we've got a couple more topics left. We'll talk through a little bit more about TestFlight and and maybe on the dashboard to round things out, but you've got here Lean Startups. Did you wanna walk through that?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I've just started listening to the Lean Startup again. So when I first started working in a startup a long time ago in 02/2015, my founder was saying, oh, read all these startup books or listen to these startup books because I listen to Audible. And it just wasn't the right thing for me to do at the time because my job was sales, and I had to be in a sales capacity, think about that stuff. But now that I'm we're going down this path, not only are we working in the business, like you're doing dev and, obviously, I'm doing sales and all that kind of stuff.
Gavin Tye:I think there's a part of it that is working on the business. So listening to to, that book, they were talking about, you know, ship an MVP, make mistakes, and we can't do that. Obviously, we can't do that. Our market would not allow us to do that. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:But how do we not stifle innovation and make sure we're financially responsible and we're not wasting money? I think is really conscious is a really, something to be conscious of. And yeah. And and so what I was thinking, do well, do you listen to audiobooks or anything like that?
Mitchell Davis:I haven't listened to any audiobooks, and I also haven't read any, like, actual books in
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Years. So I'm kinda divorced from the whole book scene. Sure. I listen to a lot of podcasts, though. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:So Okay. There's potential for some overlap there, but no. Sure.
Gavin Tye:So something that my wife and I did when we were thinking about getting married and we were planning on getting married and or what we could see this was a longer term relationship, like we were gonna be together, is that we started listening to couples marriage books, like marriage counseling and relationship books. And so what we would do is we would listen to a chapter each, and then we would review the chapter and see how it applied to us.
Mitchell Davis:Okay.
Gavin Tye:So maybe because I it it won't necessarily make sense because I'm only one half of the business if I go and listen to a book and then go, oh, Mitch, that was great. And you're like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yep. Maybe it could be something that we look at is we just listen to a chap like, we figure out what a book is, like, book to listen to while we do that and then or a podcast, whatever. And then listen to it and then review and talk to each other about what what each of us took away from
Mitchell Davis:Sure. The
Gavin Tye:from that chapter and how it might apply to us. Right? Because we are a team at the end of the day.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I I like it. That sounds fun. As long as, like, the the topic or the subject is good, I'm sure it would be. You wouldn't recommend me to listen to anything garbage.
Mitchell Davis:Right? But Yep. Yeah. I mean, that sounds fun. It sounds like a book club type of vibe, but it's like a a startup club.
Mitchell Davis:It's a our business club. It's good.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Look. And I think because if we don't, like, I can see what'll happen. If we don't, I'll end up listening to this stuff and wanna implement, then you won't know what I'm talking about. Then we might have different points of view or won't understand the context behind it, and they will be misaligned or something.
Gavin Tye:And I just wanna be aligned. Even if you don't wanna you go, hey. I don't wanna do that. You implement it and go, okay. That's fine.
Gavin Tye:At least you know the why behind it or the context. Right? And I try to learn something from every book whether it's good or bad. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Well, I mean, I'm about to be on a plane to Bali and then back. I mean, that's like, what, five, six hours each way, something like that. So I will have some time if and, you know, there'll be downtime while I'm on the holiday. So Sure. If there's something that you want me to listen to, I'd be more than happy to.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay. Alright. We'll we'll talk about that, and and we'll come back. Maybe keep that keep that updated as we go.
Gavin Tye:And Alright. Hopefully, we could get list of books to to, to review over time. Right? So
Mitchell Davis:Book club. Alright. We'll put that in for two weeks from now, see how we went.
Gavin Tye:I'm gonna check the Oprah list, see what she has.
Mitchell Davis:Read the color purple or something. That would be fun. Yeah. Cool. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Sweet. Is that everything then on the it it's The Lean Startup, is it?
Gavin Tye:The Lean Startup. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:That's a podcast?
Gavin Tye:No. It's a book.
Mitchell Davis:It's book. It's a book. Oh, man. Okay. Alright.
Gavin Tye:Oh, man. You're already saying oh, man.
Mitchell Davis:No. Just like I thought that you had said earlier that it was a it was a podcast. But
Gavin Tye:I'm sure there is a podcast on it, but, no, it's a, yeah, it's a link startup by Eric Rise.
Mitchell Davis:Gotcha. Okay. Cool. No worries. Well, I guess final kind of things to round out.
Mitchell Davis:So we do have the dashboard now. It's gone really well. It's a Laravel and Vue JS web app. We're doing some fun stuff where or some interesting stuff that I hadn't done before where we're hosting it on two different regions at the moment, so in Sydney and in Frankfurt on AWS, and we're using a Cloudflare worker to sit in front of that and kind of act like a load balancer. It picks up like, oh, okay.
Mitchell Davis:You're closer to the Sydney region. Therefore, I'm gonna route your request over to the Sydney one. And it's not just like a standard load balancer like you might have used.
Gavin Tye:What's a load balancer, mate?
Mitchell Davis:A load balancer is where, it's a server that receives, web requests. So, like, when you go in the browser, you go to a website or whatever, receives that request and then decides, okay. Where where do I send this to? So it then needs to send it to another server to go and process it. So maybe some other server in Sydney or somewhere in America or whatever, and its job is to try and pick like, okay, which server is best positioned to accept this request.
Mitchell Davis:That's the way that we're handling it, where it's all based on your location, but there are other things that you can do, like, okay, to prevent any one of those. You know, you might have five other servers in different places or whatever to prevent any one of them from getting overloaded. You might say, okay. Just randomly pick out of the five services that you've got, just go pick a random one and then send it there regardless of how far away that is. So there's, like, all these different strategies that you can do.
Mitchell Davis:It's round robin and all sorts. So there's a lot of different things you can do with load balances, but we balancers, but we have kind of written our own using Cloudflare Workers, and we're routing traffic from anywhere in the world to one of these two regions on AWS at the moment, and we fully expect to add more regions over time Yep. As we get more customers in other parts of the world. And this was my first time using something called mutual TLS, which is like a way to have a private connection between Cloudflare and AWS. That's what we're using it for.
Mitchell Davis:So if you found the right, like, URL, the right web address for our Sydney dashboard, for example, you wouldn't be able to visit it. You can only visit it through this Cloudflare load balancer, and that's something that I'd never done before. Chris, I don't think had seen that before. He certainly didn't know how to set it up. So that was fun, and it works really well.
Mitchell Davis:So now we've got this secure dashboard. The only way you can get in is through Cloudflare. We're using WorkOS, so you gotta be logged in, and it's really fast. So it's cool. What something that is interesting though is, like, we can't really test the latency of the Europe system.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Okay. Because we're all the way over here, and if it's running really slowly, that's hard for us to see for ourselves. Right? Because it's just of course, it's slow.
Mitchell Davis:It's on the other side of the world. It's gonna take, like, a second or two to get anything back. So what we might have to do is lean on the guys at Laravel Live Denmark to help us do some testing of the system prior Yeah. Right. And make sure that everything is up and running as quickly as, at least Rasmus on that team knows that it was when he was here, at LariCon Australia last year.
Mitchell Davis:So
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:That's like a challenge that I've never had to deal with before because I've always been close to whatever it was that I'm hosting. Right? I can tell if it's slow. So Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:There's there's a challenge there.
Gavin Tye:So where does that sit in relation to if you're storing data here in an overseas, where does that sit in relation to data privacy laws and all that kind of stuff?
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. So as far as the data sovereignty, it is tricky to we we have to try and thread the needle carefully to just store the relevant information in each part of the the world. Right? So with Cloudflare, they kind of have region Earth, they call it, where all their stuff is kind of shared all over the globe. That kinda makes a little trickier to do some of this stuff of only store certain bits of information in a certain country.
Mitchell Davis:It might be a bridge that we have to figure out how to cross if we get some very sensitive customers, like government customers, things like that. Yep. We might have to figure that out a bit more, but right now, like, the vast majority of the data that is being held for any events that we run will be held inside of that region only. And then it's just like, okay, ways for people to get into the app which needs to be stored globally. So a list of users, and that's things like, you know, emails and passwords and names and stuff like that.
Mitchell Davis:That all gets replicated globally because I need you to be able to log in quickly from anywhere in the world. Right? Sure. Sure. So it's that kind of, like, high level stuff that's gonna go everywhere, and I don't really see a good way around it.
Mitchell Davis:You wanna be able to go overseas and still be able to access your app even though your account might belong in the Sydney data center or whatever. It's like, no. You're still our user. You should be able to access it everywhere regardless of what events you're going to.
Gavin Tye:So Okay. So is is there, like, platforms around that if you say, hey. I've gotta adhere to the Australian data sovereignty laws, but I'm also operating it overseas, that it can actually tell you if you are or you aren't compliant, or you just have to
Mitchell Davis:There might be I'm sure there are, like, auditors out there that will help with that stuff, but we are not in a position to afford anyone that calls himself an auditor.
Gavin Tye:No. No. I mean automation. I mean a software that can just let you know. But Maybe.
Mitchell Davis:To be honest, it's never something that I've had to deal with before because I've only deployed stuff to the one region. It's always been in Australia, so that's been taken care of for me. Right? So Yep. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:The last time I put anything overseas was, like, twelve years ago. I had a server in Japan running on Linode because that was the closest one to Sydney at the time. So that was a long time ago. Right? So Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. Yeah. It's not something that I've I've had to deal with nor has Chris through asking him about some of this stuff. So, yeah, I mean, if you've got any thoughts and you happen to be out there listening, let us know. But for now, this is what we're doing.
Mitchell Davis:Seems to be working well. Yeah. And once we run this test flight version of the app, which will hopefully go out today, Once we run that past the guys over in Denmark, we can see if they come back and say, this is really fast or no. It's really slow and then Sure. We've got something wrong.
Mitchell Davis:You know? So Okay. Anyway, we will see. So, mate, why don't we wrap up now? We've been going for an hour.
Mitchell Davis:So where can people find you online?
Gavin Tye:They can find me on LinkedIn. Gavin Ty. That's easy enough to find.
Mitchell Davis:Excellent. It'll be in the show notes. I'm Mitch Dav everywhere. I won't see you next week, but you'll see Gavin with Roman, and I'll be in Bali. So bring that on.
Gavin Tye:Awesome, mate. I look forward to seeing you with your tan.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. You'll be waiting a while. Think it'll be sunburn. I'm sure I'll have sunburn.
Mitchell Davis:I doubt I'll have a tan.
Gavin Tye:So I've I've seen your blue your blue legs, mate, so you definitely need some
Mitchell Davis:Blue legs? They're very wide. I don't know about blue. That's a bit
Gavin Tye:White white blue.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Yeah. Sure. Yep. Alright.
Mitchell Davis:Cool. We will I'll catch you all in two weeks. Gavin will catch you next week. Thanks. See you, mate.
Mitchell Davis:Bye.
