Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:I'm Gavin Tye, 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 are you, mate?
Gavin Tye:Good. Mate, I threw you off there because I followed the script. You were like, is that all?
Mitchell Davis:I was waiting for you to come in and say, marketing, get six sides. He's always doing it. But, anyway, not today.
Gavin Tye:It's good. What's going on?
Gavin Tye:Not much, mate. It's getting warmer here. Obviously, it's we had a big storm last night. Mate, instantly the grass went green. Like, it was all brown.
Gavin Tye:And I went out there this morning. It was all green. I can't believe how how quick that changed.
Gavin Tye:So Right.
Mitchell Davis:Must be a lot of water or maybe nitrogen. I think nitrogen, like, pumps up the
Gavin Tye:Does it?
Mitchell Davis:The greenness. Yeah. I think so. If you want, a quick hit of a green lawn, you can give it nitrogen. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Well, welcome to the six side law six sides lawn care podcast, everyone.
Mitchell Davis:Cutting, lawn care. We just
Gavin Tye:we what date we're covering?
Gavin Tye:We've got it all. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Look. We have had a big week since last week, and it's in the title. We're gonna walk through it ASAP. Well, this is our best release of the mobile app yet.
Gavin Tye:Well, last week the podcast last week was under promise and over deliver, and I
Mitchell Davis:Yes.
Gavin Tye:Think we did that with our, next client coming up. So we'll talk about that, what volunteering WA's feedback was. And, and we've also used that with some, you know, with some sales calls and things like that. So, yeah, mate, I think the best release yet by far, by far.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Well, let's get into it.
Gavin Tye:Let's get in mate, why don't we get into it? I don't know if we're
Mitchell Davis:on let's page. Just shift the lid off this thing and stop dancing around it and we'll get into it. What a journey
Gavin Tye:at Six Sides this has been.
Gavin Tye:And it's only Monday, folks. We're recording this on a Monday today. It's gonna be another big week, I think.
Mitchell Davis:So where we landed last week, I told you about how, we had added notifications to the mobile app. I had made some progress on adding recaps and the ability which were previously called wrapped videos. And now you can generate lots of different recaps now from the app, and I had started work on meetings. So I in the five days, it was, I think, between when that when we recorded that episode to when we hit publish on the release, I added ratings. So you can now go onto people's profiles and add a private rating.
Mitchell Davis:So it's only visible to you. You and this
Gavin Tye:context one behind that is so Yeah. I've met people at conferences before and you're like, who is that person? So this allowed me to quickly filter through the attendee list and go, hey, I wanna follow-up with Mitch. He was interesting. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Yep. That's awesome. And the idea behind it being like a so all of these ratings that I'm gonna talk about are one to five stars. And we've done it that way so that you can kind of make that whatever you want that to be.
Mitchell Davis:Like, you can make the meaning of that whatever you want that to be. So as a sponsor representative of which Gavin has done that a lot at events being a sponsor rep, He might be able to use it to go in and go, okay. Cool. I just met Mitch. That's a hot lead or a warm lead or a really cold lead, someone that I might wanna follow-up with six months later, that sort of a thing.
Mitchell Davis:And you can kind of set your own ratings for okay five stars a hot lead etcetera. But then even for people that aren't sponsor reps we haven't feature gated this to just sponsors. We've said okay this is for anybody because myself as a person running a business, I might be interested in following up with someone that I meet there at at an event, even if I'm not a sponsor rep at that event. Right? It's just like all we're doing is just kind of replacing like, oh, jotting yourself down a quick note or something to follow-up with Mitch, like Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That sort of a thing. Yeah. So we've got that in place on people's profiles. You can also do that on sessions, so talks on on the schedule. And again, this is only shared with the event organizer.
Mitchell Davis:So we're kind of thinking that feature would be able to use up oh, you know, I'm going to LariCon Australia later this year. The idea is that Michael, the host of the event might be able to go on stage as part of his address and go, look, I'd really love if you could give me as in him feedback on which talks really resonate with you. So if you really enjoyed this talk about, you know, starting a business or, you know, a a soft skill or things like that to just try and get an idea from people what they actually like Yeah. And I think the best way to do that is on individual talks. We are not sharing it.
Mitchell Davis:At least right now, we're not sharing that information with the speaker because you can imagine it would suck to you know, if you kind of bomb on stage or, you give a talk and maybe it doesn't resonate all that well and you get a bunch of one or two stars, like, that's gonna make you feel like shit. Right? So, I don't think we need to surface that info to them at the moment.
Gavin Tye:So yeah. That's an that's an option that the event organizer can have to go back to those speakers that they can do it. Right? So I think and I guess that the overarching premise of this is if we have used this five star rating over many different metrics, then we can help broadly measure impact. Right.
Gavin Tye:Which is what we want to help businesses do. Right. The better impact that they have, the stronger the community, the more relevant their community becomes, the stronger the growth, the more they can better achieve their purpose. So that's all the intention around this, but yeah. I, I do think that there's relevance in sharing the star rating back to a speaker because they kind of want to improve, but I just wouldn't share it back publicly.
Gavin Tye:Right? You don't want you don't want them to go on and, oh, that talk was a one and a half star average across 30 votes. You do I don't I think that's cruel.
Mitchell Davis:But Yeah.
Gavin Tye:To ask the speaker, do they wanna see? I'd wanna know, but I wouldn't want it to be broadcast publicly.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Yep. So I think there's some different things we can do there Yeah. In future releases.
Mitchell Davis:And then the third and final spot for now that you can leave a review is on a meeting. So since the last time we recorded, we've now finished off the meeting functionality. So you can now go into the app. There's a new meeting section. It kind of walks you through what you need to do, but basically you go to an attendee's profile in the app.
Mitchell Davis:There's a book a meeting button that'll bring up a a bottom sheet, which is, you know, notoriously we talked about last week, the bottom sheets.
Gavin Tye:The old bottom sheet.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yeah. That's right. And
Mitchell Davis:then basically, like, you put in an optional reason for booking the meeting and you select from some times that are available, and those are configured by the the event organizer. So, go through, select that, you select up to four times, time slots that you'd you'd be available. Well, we've it's all hooked up with push notifications so that'll then alert the other person. They can then go in, accept the one of the times that you've you've selected. They can propose alternative times or they can flat out just decline the meeting.
Mitchell Davis:And then if they decline, they can put in like a reason for declining if they want to. Right? So we've got all of that in there, and you can set a review on there as well. So one to five stars, and, it's just to help you kind of track for yourself. It will also help for the organizers as well because then they can say, okay, these are the quality, you know, of the meetings.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. That sort of a thing.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So we got those done, which is great. We've got the notifications. I've kind of polished that off. So we earlier in the year, we had Laravel Live Denmark and we built in this concept of these, like, toast messages they're called, which if you've done any web development, you'd see, like, if you just go search toast. I think it was around, like, the jQuery days.
Mitchell Davis:This has been around for a very long time.
Gavin Tye:One of old jQuery days.
Mitchell Davis:Or whatever. Yeah. You're you're you're across the jQuery days.
Gavin Tye:Mate, I'll I'll You're probably working in a factory in this it was the query days back then, and then that days a few iterations pass it. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It's smooth. Yeah. Yeah. Well done, Phil Plaid.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, so, these Toast, pop ups, I have pulled in a new library, which looks a lot better. Originally, I was doing it myself, and then we got some great feedback from Rasmus on the Laravel Live Denmark team about how we thought maybe this could look differently. I kind of we weren't able to do anything with that during August while while Denmark was happening, but have been able to kind of do something with it now. So I'm not using any designs from myself or from Rasmus but it did kind of inspire me to push forward a little and say, okay, what else is out there? So I found one of these Toast libraries which does a really good job and now like looks consistent across all screens.
Mitchell Davis:So whenever you get a notification that comes into the app, it will just pop up right up there at the top of your screen. We've got nice like loading spinners. It's got some colors there for like if it's a success message or if there's been an error, that sort of a thing. It's red and green and looks good. So we've got that in place.
Gavin Tye:So this is
Gavin Tye:a really detailed product release podcast. We're going right into the minutiae, aren't we, Why not?
Gavin Tye:Like, we're here for it. It's just what you signed up for when you started
Gavin Tye:Yep. The I'm just gonna do some work while you're going to it. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Sure. I've only got one more thing, and then I'll talk about
Mitchell Davis:the review time. So we also added private notes. So you can now go these are kept between you and I'm thinking about it. Maybe we can make a decision on it right now, Gav. The private notes probably isn't something that even the organizer should be able to see.
Mitchell Davis:No. Right? They don't need it. It's private notes. It's in the name.
Mitchell Davis:So I think right now the text on those screens does say on that bottom sheet does say this is only visible to you and the organizer, but we are going to do it's very likely we're going to do just a follow-up update to the app because there's just a few things that we'll talk about in a minute. I think I might rip out that bit of text and those just remain private only. So Yep. Yeah. So you can you
Gavin Tye:can add notes. Needs to know because it's not in context. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. Yeah. That's right. So we'll get that changed and you can add notes on each of those three touch points as well. So you can add one on a given talk.
Mitchell Davis:You can add them on a meeting, and you can add them on a an attendee's profile. So yeah. So we got all of those done. And then the the amazing thing was the release the review time. So we put these up on Wednesday.
Mitchell Davis:So I was delayed. I told everybody last week we would have it up on Tuesday. That turned out to be wrong, but there was good reason for it. Really needed to make sure we got everything done and polished, and I feel very good about where the app is now. And so that meant that it was I think it was Wednesday night actually.
Mitchell Davis:So I needed an extra day or two. These things happen. But then by Thursday morning when I got back in the office, Google had already finished the review.
Gavin Tye:Surprise. Surprise. Listening. They're listening to the podcast.
Mitchell Davis:I think so. Yeah. We we scared them or something. Yeah. So thank you, Google, for approving it so quickly.
Mitchell Davis:So that was amazing. And because last time, for context, it took two weeks two weeks before Denmark to get the app approved versus Apple last time approved it in, like, half an hour. This time, Apple took about twenty four hours. Yeah. So both, like, exceeded expectations for, how quickly we could get a release out.
Mitchell Davis:So we're hopeful that the reason for that is because the app is now out. It's got users that already have it. I think they're a lot less strict on existing apps versus releasing new ones. Yep. And, I think that shows in the review timeline.
Mitchell Davis:So we are hopefully, now we'll be on a much quicker cadence to make releases, which is awesome. So I've got
Gavin Tye:some I've got some questions for you. So how how were you happy with it, with the with the functionality that was that you built in the last couple of weeks?
Mitchell Davis:I'm really happy with it. It's I think it's now you and I spoke on the phone on Friday, and I told you that it now feels like the app is ready. So up until now, it has felt like, okay, we were at sixty, seventy, 90% of where we needed to be. I feel like the app is now at where it needs to be. It's got a bare minimum and then some and then a lot, I think, of what a great conference app should have Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Or an event app. And it now kind of feels there was a bit of a revelation on Friday morning. You and I are both driving. And I call you and it it we kind of uncovered that it feels like this is only day one now Yeah. Because the app is ready.
Mitchell Davis:We have like, I have a lot more work to do with the dashboard, so the web dashboards to try and, like, allow people to set up their own events and have us not be involved in that whole process. All of that work is still to be done, but, like, day one starts now. We have an app that does everything it needs to do and then some I feel like So I'm really happy with it. Yeah. What what about you?
Gavin Tye:Twelve month cycle from when you first started thinking about what was event kid back then to today. Right? Like and it's it just shows the barrier to of like, you've got your lovables and you're all that of the world that you can quickly buy for. You can quickly build an app, but to build something that's meaningful. And it's based off like, like still, still significant.
Gavin Tye:You're a quality developer has taken twelve months worth of work. Like it's, you just have to keep going. And, and of course we're distracted by our other parts or other other other things, but still like it's a mate, I think it's, I think it's amazing. It looks amazing. Mel's in the room now and she saw it last week and she said it looked fucking amazing.
Gavin Tye:Again, that's one of her go to quotes. But I guess where did the complexities come from when you were developing doing this round of features? I'm gonna five seconds with Mitch. This is what this segment's called. Five questions with Mitch.
Gavin Tye:Sorry.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Five questions. I'm at, like, twenty minutes into the episode then.
Gavin Tye:Mate, that's why I've had to break it
Gavin Tye:up. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:No. That's good. The the complex parts of notifications, I had really hoped that when you could when you tap on a notification about, say, a meeting, I could have it automatically take you straight into that meeting so you could quickly take an action on it. Yep. I wasn't able to get that done in time.
Mitchell Davis:It's like it's quite complicated. Yeah. Sounds pretty easy and, like, it should be pretty easy, but for whatever reason just ran into some hurdles. So I just I scrapped that. So you can still open the notification, but it'll just be in that little toast message at the top.
Mitchell Davis:It won't take you into the meeting at this point.
Gavin Tye:Well,
Mitchell Davis:I don't think that's a deal breaker.
Gavin Tye:It's one of the things that I'm learning when we go on this journey is other apps make things look so easy, but the complexity around it, we just see the finished product, but there must be
Gavin Tye:Oh my god. Yes. It is so hard to build, like, a really good app.
Mitchell Davis:Like and no matter how easy they make the the tools and stuff, like, it is we are even a year a year on from where I built the event kit app last year for LariCon AU. Now miles ahead. Like, so much has changed even in that twelve month period. Let alone, you know, ten years ago trying to build an Apple when the App Store first launched, god help you, would have been very hard.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:There's still so much to do. Yeah. So much that you have to think about and does this work nicely on this device? And Android has, you know, 20,000 different devices you can have. Is this app gonna play nicely on all of them?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I have no idea. I can't test every single device.
Gavin Tye:Sure.
Mitchell Davis:It works great on my device. It works great on simulators, but it probably won't work on all of them. And then now iPhone also has this same type of paradigm happening with now they're doing this Liquid Glass stuff on the new version of iOS. Gotta make sure everything works properly on there versus on the old stuff. It's it's hard.
Mitchell Davis:It's really hard to build a mobile app, but it's just continues to get easier all the time, and it's pretty rewarding as well. It's really cool to get a notification on your own app that you built.
Gavin Tye:Because I think it's easy to build an app. It's not easy to build an app people will pay a shit ton of money for. Right? Yeah. Because they're not buying the app.
Gavin Tye:They're buying the the improvement to their business or to whatever they're trying to achieve. I think there's two very, very different things there. What was your favorite feature to work on or favorite part of the new update to work on?
Mitchell Davis:I can't actually tell you my I can't on the recording, I can't tell you my favorite part yet. We got some other because some sneaky stuff that we're working on. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That's gonna blow everyone's mind, hopefully. And we won't talk about it anymore now after this, so don't expect it for, like, another six months. Yeah. Alright? But my favorite thing was something that's gonna change
Gavin Tye:the game. Matt's gonna kick goals. That's for sure.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Something like that.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I I get you. No one else will.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Anyway, so probably my second favorite thing then, probably the reviews. No. The not the
Gavin Tye:reviews. The
Mitchell Davis:the ratings. The ratings. Okay. Because it's just such a quick and easy, like, boop, press a button, and now that's recorded. And then you press it again.
Mitchell Davis:To press the button. Yeah. I I'll have to add that as the next release.
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Gavin Tye:When you then press it again, it
Mitchell Davis:just unsets the rating. Alright. Really simple, like, dummy feature that is gonna unlock a lot of stuff for for our users at these at these conferences. So that one was a good one. Nice and easy.
Mitchell Davis:Didn't give me any dramas. So yeah. So that was good.
Gavin Tye:I wonder if we could give it the conclusion of a conference, prompt them to give a final rating of the conference with a comment, like an end of volunteering WA. What's your overall rating of the conference? Yeah. Was five. Give us a comment.
Gavin Tye:Like, not yeah. I know it's a bit of a app store thing, but yeah. Anyway, food for thought. That's just me adding functionality. It
Mitchell Davis:is. Yeah. So I see the list getting bigger, but
Gavin Tye:What was the most frustrating part of the new updates? This is my question number four.
Mitchell Davis:Oh my god. My the most frustrating part, probably that notifications thing, clicking on a notification and wanting knowing how to take you to that screen, but then having it all just kind of fall apart on me that it doesn't it didn't work the way it was meant to, and it's a bit complicated. Like, if you get a notification while you're at one event, but you've the notification is for maybe a different event. I have to and that could happen. I have to take you out of event a and bring you into event b and do it smoothly.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. And then like you'd expect the back button to if I took you into a meeting because you got a notification about that, then you'd expect the back button would take you back to, like, the homepage for that event. That's wasn't baked in by default. Like, there's just there's just a lot of crap that comes with it. So I've still gotta figure that out.
Mitchell Davis:That was pretty frustrating because I I spent a few hours on trying to get it to work, and then I was just watching the clock tick down like, this isn't ready. This is not enough. And that was I had to undo it all. It was just yeah. Was frustrating.
Gavin Tye:Last question. What's the biggest lesson you've learned over this round of development for people who might be listening?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Able to get a lot done with Cursor. Yeah. A lot done. So, like, I was knocking out these features with a few hours.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. And in the past, yeah, like some of these things might have taken me like a whole week.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And instead I could get you know, I got I got like those those ratings done probably like two or three hours total. Yeah. Maybe less. I don't know. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And, like, it looks pretty good. Works pretty well. No issues. I've, you know, cleaned up a few things. But, yeah, just getting in and using those tools.
Mitchell Davis:And it doesn't matter if you're using Cursor or Claude Code or any of the other ones, whatever. It's all they all do the same stuff. But, yeah, just like the whole time, I'm like, okay. I'm working on this and thinking about how much quicker it's made me. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So, yeah, that. And then if I could have a a close second would be the review time being so fast was
Gavin Tye:like,
Mitchell Davis:oh, that's huge. This is a big unlock for us now that we can hopefully, it will repeat itself that we can release updates very quickly if we need to.
Gavin Tye:I don't think it's something we should take for granted, but it's definitely, you know, because if we do do that and then we're still screwed in giving us the two weeks before the conference is great. Right? Cause it's now that we can tidy up a couple things if we need to. And when I say we, I mean you. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:But
Mitchell Davis:we as a business. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And, yeah, no, it's good. I think it's amazing, mate, to be honest. And it's, I'm looking forward to it. Like since the day we released it or we had it in staging on TestFlight, we used I used it in front of clients and we got one to say, yes, there's a trial. So which we'll talk about that in a second.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. But yeah. The final thing on on development, if that's okay
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Is I've also gotten a bit smarter about the updates that we ship. So at Denmark, I shipped a lot of over the air updates as the conference was running because I was finding bugs or the Denmark team was finding bugs, and I was trying to get a fix up for them so that they could have a good rest of the conference. Right? But the process for going and getting that latest update meant that, like, you had to go back to the home screen basically and scroll down, and then you would see a little there's an update button, and you would tap on it, and then it would reboot your app, and you'd have the latest update. Or, alternatively, you just kill the app completely and then reopen it, and you'll get the latest update as a part of that too.
Mitchell Davis:But what I've learned from, Nicole, my fiance, a lot of people don't kill apps. They just leave them running for weeks, so you would never get that update. So what I did this time around as a part of this release was I now have the app check that much more frequently. So every ten minutes, it'll go and check-in while you've got the app running, it'll go and check-in the background, hey. Is there an update?
Mitchell Davis:If there is, it'll give you one of those toast messages at the top and say, hey, there's a new update. Click here on your screen now to refresh the app.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So I'm doing that, which is great. Works really well. But then the other thing that I've got is it'll also check against the App Store and Play Store. Is there a new native build of the app up there? And if so, then we don't we'll basically stop them from using the app.
Mitchell Davis:They can't dismiss it. All they can do is hit, like, update app, and then that would take them to the App Store or Play Store where they can go update. Sure. So that one is a bit more blocking. So I wouldn't wanna do that during the conference, but if we had to because there was some like, very bad issue that was happening, then we would have that, like, kill switch.
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. So I got that in too. I should have mentioned that in the first part.
Gavin Tye:But Yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's good. Yeah. Awesome. So I had a meeting with Volunteering WA on Friday and just went through, through it with Holly and she got the update already. So she was notified through that.
Gavin Tye:She'd said, So oh, she's already gone through it and had a look at it. She was really, really happy with it. And, I was hoping to and like we were gonna, under promise and over deliver, but she'd already seen it. She'd already seen the event recap. She thought it was great.
Gavin Tye:Yep. You know, we're still gonna do a couple of things there. She about changing the skins on the just a bit more variety. She thinks that's a good idea. But, you know, she was she was really stoked.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Did she get the memo from the last recording about getting a hat or something from them?
Gavin Tye:No. I don't I don't think so. I didn't ask her.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I didn't ask her.
Gavin Tye:Yep. But yeah. Look. It was, yeah, she was really happy. You think about in her shoes, right?
Gavin Tye:She looked at what event kit looked like back in maybe March. I think we spoke to her. It wasn't even six sides then, or could have been six sides, but we showed her what.
Mitchell Davis:It was six sides by then. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:But to where it was then, she put a lot of faith in us and we've, I think we've well, well, well gone above them, like over, over delivered on that. So what we did over promise on that. I think we lived up to what we, our intention was there. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I think so too. There was stuff that we told them about six months ago that is like, the meetings that's only just gone in now. Yeah. You know?
Mitchell Davis:So some of it was not over delivering, but just delivering. Customization level that we've got for the the recaps and some of these other things, I think I'm very pleased with where we've got it to. And, yeah, I'm I too am just very appreciative that volunteering WA took, you know, a chance on us. Mhmm. So, hopefully, they're very happy with it.
Mitchell Davis:And, yeah, it's really exciting. It's an exciting time. Like, we're two weeks away at this point. Yeah. Under two weeks from volunteering WA.
Mitchell Davis:So Yep. It's it's coming. It's very exciting.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So in saying that, yeah, we're starting to switch into preparing for volunteering WA. Mate, I've ordered, I have a gift here for you, which is a live broadcast stand for you when you do your, interviews. Thank you.
Mitchell Davis:Very nice.
Gavin Tye:We've got our, banner, pull up banner last week. It looks amazing. Like the yep. Yeah. I think that was a great, combination of design between you and I and deal buddy with that as well.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yep. So everything's going, going pretty good there. I'm starting to prepare to try to meet people while I'm there. So I'm asking Holly to introduce me to anyone that she's, she would recommend volunteering.
Gavin Tye:Victoria is going to be there. So I've asked her to
Mitchell Davis:good lead.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. They're introduced. They're interested to see how it goes. And then there's someone there's a few people there, so I'm starting to be prepared. I'll be using that meeting booking.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Meeting booking there as I'll be going to town on it, to be honest. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Yep. That's awesome. Yeah. I I can't wait to see how those go.
Mitchell Davis:And I'll be while you're there, I'll be on in support mode. Right? I'll just be here kind of monitoring and seeing how everything's going.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Hopefully you're gonna be pretty jet lagged. Right? Because it'll be it's three three hours behind, is it?
Gavin Tye:It's two hours behind.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Oh, two. Okay. That's not too bad. But yeah.
Gavin Tye:But, mate, I don't I think I'd get fly back in on Friday night at 11:40 or something. Like, really? It's always a big trip going over there and coming back. It's quicker coming back. Have you ever gone there?
Mitchell Davis:No. Never.
Gavin Tye:Not yet.
Gavin Tye:It's an hour quicker flying home in real time than it is going over there just because of the jet stream.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Right. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It'll, okay. Right. So you're coming back the Friday night. That's interesting.
Mitchell Davis:You wouldn't, I suppose because you got family at home, you wanna wake up
Gavin Tye:with them. Mel said, oh, we can I if I wanted to stay there over the weekend, but I I wanna come home to the family, mate? I I prefer go to the family. Yeah. Gotcha.
Mitchell Davis:And I suppose even if you've got an early flight on Saturday morning, it's still like you're getting in at like Twelve. Ten, eleven, twelve. Yeah. Whatever that would be.
Gavin Tye:And then because it's all like Harper's doing, nippers, I wanna be there for that because I know she's scared. So I wanna, yeah, wanna make sure that we're, there for that.
Mitchell Davis:Good one, mate. Good stuff.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Cool. Well, we've got a few other things. You had some meetings this week, and we spoke with some other opportunities. Maybe we can before I kind of hand it over to you, why don't we talk about our revenue expectations?
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:So we set a goal.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:You want me to set the scene?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Set the scene.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. So on episode 26, live from Copenhagen, this was while Laravel Live Denmark was happening. I had been listening to build your sass from the the guys at Transistor, and they had they were like at this point in time of this episode that I was listening to, it was fairly early days, they were talking about some of their how much revenue they were making and what some of their goals were and kinda got me thinking like you and I right from the start of this business had kind of had a goal in mind of like, maybe we could get it to like 100 k a year at some point, something like that, hopefully within the first year or two. And then I kind of was wanting to inspire us and well, it is us. I'm going back and forth a little in my head, but, you know, you being the salesperson, the one who's actually doing the lead gen, I'm like, right.
Mitchell Davis:Let's set a goal that's actually, like, meaningful. And if we could get to 300 k a year, which is the goal that I kind of pushed on to you late in that recording, I think it was, I thought that would be amazing. Right? And then we look at where we're at now, and we are nowhere near that. So that feels completely unrealistic at this point.
Mitchell Davis:And, again, kind of looking at the release that came out last week as day one, we're only really starting now. Right? Obviously, you have been putting in a lot of work into the lead gen area and but there's still just so much to do. So we got on the we got on a call on Friday morning, like I said, and we kind of had this revelation of, okay, it's day one and da da da, feeling really good about the app. But then I brought up about this 300 k goal and we both the words we used were like, it's unrealistic.
Mitchell Davis:Like, it's not gonna happen anytime soon. So we haven't now set like a new goal that we're going after, and I think that's probably that helps us, like, guard our feelings probably a little bit. Yeah. Because if we don't hit a goal, that's really disappointing. But it is we have kind of shifted our expectations of, okay, the 300 k thing, we're not gonna talk about that anymore because it's unrealistic and we're kind of just gonna see, okay, where can we get to over the course of 2026.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Right? And then once we've got some more data, then maybe we can start forming some goals.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I've been in this situate and I'm as you were talking then, I've gone I've just do this in my own personal life too. Like, I set these goals in my life that are unrealistic or I do something and then it ends up hurting me for a longer time. And then it just stops me from forming good habits.
Gavin Tye:Right? Like when I did the trial run a couple of weeks ago, and I was talking about this with Mel on the weekend, me forming habits around fitness at the moment when I got so much on is really, it's a fragile thing. Cause as soon as I get distracted, those habits stop. Right. And I did the trail run and I was out of action for two weeks.
Gavin Tye:My back's only becoming good now, but now I've lost the habit of running. Like it's already gone. Right. So, and even in the past I've set these things, I can't do an Ironman. I had no basis for setting a, like, it's a big goal, but I haven't got, I never had the foundations in place.
Gavin Tye:Right. And when I worked at this company called Redeye, the founder every year, he would go, I've got this goal. And I was like, there is no behavior of the market to indicate we could, we could do that. And I think the 300 ks goal, it's a, it's a fucking great, it's a great north starter aim for. Right.
Gavin Tye:And we're in love with that value proposition and this is our baby and we're, we're thinking it's most founders do this. And I, when, when you take the emotion out, my observation is most founders think the business is probably two or three years ahead of where it actually is. Cause in their mind, that's where it is. But in reality, it's not. Right.
Gavin Tye:So I have been thinking about that 300 ks goal a lot, even on Friday, like I'm doing this inductive program and I'm talking about exactly the same thing about deal buddy is how do I start growing that as a business and getting it to the next goal? And then, and then we've been reverse engineering a little bit and then which I was like, oh, this is exactly what we're going to do for six sides as well. Right. And so what got me thinking around that, like, we were to, I think the question is if we were to hit 300,000 in revenue, what, what structures would need to be in place for us to do that?
Mitchell Davis:Work backwards.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Like, well, one is, because I've got SEO here. Like, I think we would need to be, we'd have to have a combination of inbound leads. We would have to have a combination of an app and of an inbound strategy, which would be marketing and SEO and all this kind of stuff. And we would have to have an outbound strategy going.
Gavin Tye:But it would have to be in a framework that we can manage in a consistent basis. Cause we did start doing blog posts on the website a few weeks ago, but we never continued. Like, that's just a hazard. Right? Yep.
Gavin Tye:So I do think about, I do think about, well, what would need to be in place? It's not to hit three 100,000. We'll be the first market of 3,000,000, but what structures do we need to have in place? And that will, that will be able to at least drive consistency to that. Right.
Gavin Tye:So we would need to have like a product led strategy a little bit there, like a freemium tier or something. And then, and then step them up the value ladder. It's exactly the same strategy I'm employing with Deal Buddy, which is, and they all, I think we need that. We don't have that structure. And I think that's what we should work on next.
Gavin Tye:Hey, let's implement this strategy. Then this strategy, I think the referral strategy will work. It's just that we need some conferences to do it. Right? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Or we need some events or communities to do it. So Yep. Yeah. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Well, what do do? Anyway, that's kind
Mitchell Davis:of where we're at with goals at the moment is we're kind of we're unsetting it, and then we're gonna revisit this like next year, late next year and just see where we're at to get that foundation.
Gavin Tye:Right? So Yep. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:What are you thinking with SEO? You've got that as a topic here.
Gavin Tye:Well, one of the so I'll talk about the conversation I had on last Friday, like with the product person around Deal Buddy, because I think that that will play into what we're doing here a little bit. Right? So currently my onboarding costs for deal buddy, there's a two day workshop, to, to onboard a client, then there's a SAS fees. And then I'm going to actually implement, a support structure on the backside for three, two or three months or four months to help people embed. Right?
Gavin Tye:So it's think of software end of service. Alex Urquhart put out a really good, newsletter on that last week about it's not just software as a service. It's end of service. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:So basically I know that is too cross cost prohibitive to many new founders and I want to be able to help them. So what I want to do is step that back down in functionality, to give them a free, a freemium tier and a certain amount of credits for free. Right. But Ash, which is the, person giving me the advice was saying, Hey, you own sales market fit the Brett, like the, the, the name. And the, she said, I think that's, if you talk about where deals, go to die, like where demos die in a, in the sales process and you help them there, like all the problems that they have in their world.
Gavin Tye:And then you templatize that whether you do it as a webinar and then you put that as a, Hey, that's the problem. That's a solution call to action. And then you give them the free version of that and then you build them up. Then once they get in on the free version, then you bring them up the value ladder into the funnel, into paying that. And so I'm like, okay, I think that when we're doing blog posts, we're just, we're doing it about, I think the messaging was about us a little bit.
Gavin Tye:Like if we go and help associations build their community, strengthen their community, then we position six sides and then get them to engage. But we make it SEO over time in a way that we can easily follow, like doing one or two a week or with this webinar, we're doing, doing that a week, a month. Yeah. And adding to that, I think that is a, that's a medium term strategy, right? That's SEO is gonna take a while to kick in or yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I think that's part of it there. Then we can direct people to, you know, when they search us and go and have a look, they can, we can direct them to that stuff. As well. I feel the sales strategy once we talk to them is reasonably strong that we don't have the proof of helping a community build, helping an association build community over a long period of time.
Gavin Tye:I think we'll get there. We've got four
Mitchell Davis:It's just the cold start problem. Right? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:That's right. We have the
Mitchell Davis:intent We get to have a recurring event yet at all. Right? You know, you're gonna have more founders collective meet up soon and we can try and use those. Yep. We will use those.
Mitchell Davis:But, yeah, like, we'll only be having our first annual recurring event like next year, you know, hopefully, if we're able to to retain these clients. So Yep.
Gavin Tye:Yep. We'll see even volunteering WA holds that conference once every two years. Yeah. So they don't even do it. Even the one that we're speaking to that I sent the proposal for on Fridays, once every two years.
Gavin Tye:But they do do other smaller events. So that's why we've got to make it appealing for other other events. So there's four opportunities I'm currently working through at the moment that one, they will either all lead into recurring revenue or, I would think that they have the potential to lead into recurring revenue. Yeah. Right?
Gavin Tye:And so six sides is particularly, I think that's a real not six sides, sorry. Founders Collective is really interesting because we're halfway through our second where our second event is run on the November 20. And I think as of this morning, let me just tell you how many people we can
Mitchell Davis:live stat update.
Gavin Tye:56 people registered already, and we're still just over a month away.
Mitchell Davis:That's crazy.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. We're we're shooting for one fifty at the event. Yeah. 150.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's crazy. You think about, like,
Mitchell Davis:volunteering WA, I believe, is around 200 people.
Gavin Tye:Two sixty.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Two sixty, is it? Yeah. And and, like, Laravel Life Denmark, they're around the 200 mark. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And you might reach that in your second meetup.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know.
Gavin Tye:So, but I think that's where over time we will track that. And I still think we have some development to do there, obviously, between what you'll tackle the next, which is just the not the fun stuff, I don't think, which, by all means. Yeah. But it
Mitchell Davis:It was a realization on Friday of like, there's a lot more to do and it's not the fun, sexy stuff to build. It's the boring stuff that the product needs.
Gavin Tye:People
Gavin Tye:yeah. People don't, I don't think in all honesty, there's not a lot of people with vision. So if we can't show them what we're doing, they won't see it themselves. Right. So there are visionaries, but there's not a lot of the majority of the world is not visionary.
Gavin Tye:So we are, we want to show them how we'll help them grow events. This is why the six site, the founders collective case study is really important because we will show the progression and, and then me as the client will go, hey, I would love to see the growth in in people attending and things like that. Yeah. To go from there. But I think it's in a really good place and hopefully we get this funding, which we're, we should find out in the next couple of months.
Gavin Tye:And then we can start doing, conferences. I'm going to look at, see what volunteering conferences are there are around or associations they are around just to try to get in front of them. If we get a couple of these flagship clients, which I'm praying that we're gonna get one big one, it's gonna be that that'll be really important. And that's how we get this growth.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. We talked about the funding in episodes twenty and twenty two. Yeah. So if you're curious, you can go check those out.
Gavin Tye:It's left the too long didn't read or too long didn't listen high note to that is we put in for funding for Queensland government of about 97,000 for marketing and commercialization. So Yeah. Yep. We would And
Mitchell Davis:it should hopefully we should hopefully be hearing more about that in the next month, or, you know, at least by end of the year.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I'll have a look at the timelines, after we get off the, off the podcast to have
Gavin Tye:a look.
Gavin Tye:Cause I think it's, I think it's November. They were, they were gonna come back. So they're never on time. So,
Gavin Tye:yeah. We'll keep you posted either way. Good or bad. That's all right. We'll share it all.
Gavin Tye:But, okay.
Gavin Tye:Well, we did so in saying that on Wednesday, we did show the functionality to a company. She was so impressed with it. And then so I wrote her a proposal. And then we also showed it to this other organization called Worldshare, and they're going to do a, they're a great they're a they're a, what would you call them? A Christian they're a Christian church or a Christian organization.
Gavin Tye:They're going yeah. They're going to, Cambodia in a couple of weeks, and we've offered them to use six sides as a, as a communication tool and, and media gathering tool and a communication tool for the basis of that. And he was like, yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. So I've got a meeting with him in an hour after we wrap up or this afternoon
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Just to understand his process so I can actually map out to show what outcomes and get him more excited and build a business case for him Yeah. Is over time. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was awesome sitting down with him and, yeah, just connecting. There was we got some history.
Mitchell Davis:Where he's based is also where I went to uni.
Gavin Tye:Yep. And so, it was cool getting to talk
Mitchell Davis:a little bit about, some of those overlaps. That was nice. And yeah. And hearing about what they're doing. So Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Shout out to WorldShare. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yep. And then we still have the conference, sorry, the webinar coming up, which I think is on the November 19. We, we need we'll pay attention to that this week now that you've got the release out. We'll look at the structure of what we need to do to do some posting on it and, and start specifically inviting people that we've connected with in relation to six sides over these last couple months. And then try to get, you know, four or five, maybe 10 people there if we're lucky to to the webinar.
Gavin Tye:So, yeah, that that's exciting. Yep.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Should be good. Hopefully, we can get that. I would love if we could get more. We sure message a lot of people on LinkedIn.
Gavin Tye:Mitch, I'm under promising and over delivering on that.
Mitchell Davis:That's right. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Smart. That's the move. That's the name of the game, mate. So Yep. Well done.
Mitchell Davis:Very good. Alright. Anything else before we go?
Gavin Tye:No. No. I think that's it. I just think now is it's still like I've always said, we've gotta run simultaneous strategies here, like of what to what to do here. And I think, yeah, having the structure down of, like if we were to hit 300 ks, because that's a lag indicator, that's the result.
Gavin Tye:What do we need to have in place for us to be able to do that? And I don't think we have, we just need that structure. Right. And, and our time we're bound by time, obviously. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Like we have our own things going on. And I think to a degree we're both kind of have to be responsible for getting the name out there. Right. And, but I can drive it through most of it. Right?
Gavin Tye:Create the content. It's still it's still gonna require some effort. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. So we will talk this week. We'll find some time to talk through me posting on LinkedIn because it is I'm genuine. I I want to.
Mitchell Davis:I now, like, after putting after we have put in all this work into six sides, I really, really want it to succeed. Right? And so if I can help us with the increase, the luck surface area by posting about it more and I can make that a key part of my Yeah. Yeah. Role.
Mitchell Davis:Like, that's that's fine.
Gavin Tye:We'll get Mel to my wife. She's here. We'll get her to put a give her a title for six sides, and we'll get her to post through her link LinkedIn too. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. That would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very happy with that.
Mitchell Davis:She just stuck her finger.
Gavin Tye:Nicole, I don't believe has LinkedIn at all. She is a barista and, she's not reaching out to other people to ask them how she can make their coffee. Oh,
Gavin Tye:that's the last thing before we wrap up because I know we're close to wrapping up. I did mention the other day about giving our partners an update of what we do. Because you speak to Nicole all the time about Six Eyes. I speak to Mel all the time about Six Eyes. But they don't hear from each other, like from only one-sided.
Gavin Tye:So I think, great.
Mitchell Davis:You wanna do like another dinner thing or
Gavin Tye:another I
Gavin Tye:think yes,
Gavin Tye:maybe. Chaotic?
Gavin Tye:I think we can do another dinner, but I don't think we're gonna do an update on the platform while the kids are around. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Okay.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I don't think
Mitchell Davis:Well, well, if you got some ideas, let me know Yeah. How we might be able to make that work. Because, mean, Nicole is here. She often will come here to this office on Wednesdays
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:As we've been doing, like, wedding prep and stuff. So if maybe we could make that work.
Gavin Tye:Maybe we could do it maybe we do it what do you think we do it in December towards Christmas and we do the year end review for them?
Mitchell Davis:Sure. Yeah. We can have, a nice presentation and Yeah. Yeah. That'll be fun.
Gavin Tye:Wear a shirt and tie. Yep. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Alright. Yeah. We could do that. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Cool. We'll see how we go. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Awesome. Well, thank you for listening, dear listeners, and following along and liking and sharing and
Gavin Tye:Do not message at [email protected].
Mitchell Davis:No. Just don't even bother. That's alright. It's gone. I can actually turn it off.
Mitchell Davis:That would be funny.
Gavin Tye:That would be the real. I better not do that.
Gavin Tye:Just put it automatically automatic reply on it and
Gavin Tye:set it on my We're not interested. Yeah. Thank you. Go away. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. We could do that. Alright, mate. Where can people find you online?
Gavin Tye:My LinkedIn is easiest place. Gum and Ty at LinkedIn. T y. Yep. You, mate?
Gavin Tye:What about you?
Mitchell Davis:Mitch Dev, as always, it's it's predictable. It's reliable. Yep. It's exactly what it says on the tin.
Gavin Tye:We hope you have a good week, and we'll catch you all
Mitchell Davis:next episode.
Gavin Tye:Alright.