Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:I'm Gavin Tye, not a Laravel developer, but sales and marketing.
Mitchell Davis:That's right. 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:Mate, I've been out pressure washing the driveway all morning. It's, fruit bat season here. So Oh my gosh. Turns As out, we're having photos taken for the house because we're getting ready to sell it. And, it must have been a fruit bat highway on our driveway.
Gavin Tye:And, Mel goes
Mitchell Davis:Your driveway's covered though.
Gavin Tye:It's not near the road. Not near the road.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Right.
Gavin Tye:And Mel goes, are you going to clean the bat poo up before the photos? And I just thought it was one or two. And I was like, no, it'll be right. That was the wrong answer. I got in trouble.
Gavin Tye:But I went out and had a look and it was a mess. So I was being out there for the hour and a half this morning cleaning up. So
Mitchell Davis:yeah. Far out, Yeah. So what's going on? You're selling your house?
Gavin Tye:Well, we're getting ready to. We need to if we've put an offer on a house, we need to sell this one. So we're getting ready to be able to pull the trigger, like, within a day. So get that means getting the photos done and then the, marketing stuff ready. So when we find something, we can put it up And, it'll sell really fast.
Gavin Tye:It's just, yeah, we're just getting our ducks in a row.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Right.
Gavin Tye:Yep. How about you, mate? What's going on with you?
Mitchell Davis:I'm good. Last night, I caught up with some mates of mine. Just went down the pub and had a couple drinks, and that was really fun. So that was a nice, like, little midweek excursion. So that was good.
Mitchell Davis:Apart from that, I'm really pleased. Like, this week has been really exciting for us in this business. Like, there's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of really positive things happening as a result of all the work that went into volunteering WA and LariCon AU. So, yeah, really exciting time. Do you wanna walk us through this week in sales?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Well, the plateau of latent potential is really kicking off. Right? So Yep. For those of you who don't know what that is, Google it, or, or email us at journey at six sides and we'll tell you.
Mitchell Davis:Or listen to last week's episode as well. Talked about it.
Gavin Tye:Whatever. There's, there's a few different ways you can answer it. So yeah, this week in sales is all about following up from, and and trying to continue the conversation from, everyone that we met at Volunteer in WA and also at LariCon. And our hypothesis has always been if we can deliver a great event experience, it will make people happy and they'll they'll, and if they're somewhat involved in an event, then they'll want to speak to us about helping them at their event. And that actually has worked really well.
Gavin Tye:We're following up with, I don't know, there's I've filled up our pipeline. There's about $200,000 in pipeline in our that wasn't there two weeks ago, which is really exciting. And people are really eager to catch up with us.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. And they're yeah. They're chasing us now, which is amazing. So Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. We've had we had someone who we've now sent a contract through to. Yep. We're waiting for them to come back.
Gavin Tye:So Oh, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:They've agreed in principle. Right?
Gavin Tye:We've got a verbal agreement. Yep. We've that's one that we've been that was the one a few weeks ago when I asked, how did you think we went on the call? And you went, yeah, it was really good. And I, we didn't win it.
Gavin Tye:And then I thought, hang on. It's not over yet. So, yeah, we've actually won them as a client. Well, we've got the verbal yet now. So that's really great.
Gavin Tye:We're looking forward to that. That gets us into another industry. Yeah. It's starting you can, in my experience, you feel the momentum change or you feel the shift before you see the result. And I feel the shift.
Gavin Tye:So I don't know if you feel the same.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's like all of a sudden there's momentum happening, you know, and it's felt like we were just kind of pushing along. Now we've got other people coming to us. So that's freaking awesome, to be honest.
Mitchell Davis:And, yeah, it's one of the first times I've kind of seen that happen in all of my, like, business experience. So really, really excited Yeah. To see this starting to happen for us. So, hopefully, it will continue to tick along. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So that's been really good. There's been lots of follow-up. We sent out an email to all of the attendees for both volunteering WA and LariCon AU. We've heard some positive things back from there, and and the email that we sent out basically was like a picture of you and I at LariCon AU, and I kind of did like a little cursive, like, marked up, hey. This is Mitch.
Mitchell Davis:This is Gab. Just introducing ourselves and talking about the app and why we did it. And then the basic ask was like, look, you can just hit reply if there's anything that you wanna share with us or if you wanna share us out to anyone else or have any referrals, things like that, we'd love to hear them. And it went pretty well. So I got an awesome email testimonial from Vicky Suzuki from Laricon AU, And she said, amazing app.
Mitchell Davis:Honestly, LaraCon wouldn't be the same without it. It didn't just make the event more engaging. It actually pushed me to meet others, and I'm extremely grateful for that. So that is awesome. So thank you, Vicky.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Thank you, Vicky. Yeah. And it's great. It's actually great to see, we had a plan back in even this was it wasn't December.
Gavin Tye:It was around January, February. Once we iterated our thoughts to say, Hey, I think that is where our, where our UVP is, where our UVP could be unique value proposition. It's such a rewarding and, thing to have someone reply back and say, hey, you made me connect with people and it feels really great and go, oh, we fucking did it. Like, we turned an idea into a result, into an action, then we we helped someone achieve the feeling that we really set out to back months ago. And it's
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's really fulfilling for me that we could do that.
Mitchell Davis:Totally. Yeah. You I think you had someone reach out to you as well, like in regards to that email that you you sent out. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So, I need to have a look. I had someone reply back as well, yesterday as well overnight.
Gavin Tye:He said, thank you very much as well. I can't, I don't have it up, so I can't remember, but it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. It makes me think about what if we had a stopped? What if people were like, it's just too hard. Lead generation is not working.
Gavin Tye:We're not getting any traction. And we were the day before the Wednesday before volunteering WA, we had no indication that that was going to happen or this was going to happen. And then all of a sudden Thursday, although there were some hiccups, that was, it was just one day. It was a moment in time that before that we had no idea. It's Yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's crazy. Right? It's like gold gold miners. They stop just before they find the gold. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I'm, I'm kind of going through that at the moment with six sides. So I I'm, this is getting, taking my attention and I've got a lot to do and I'm like, oh, should we pay attention to that? And what about, deal buddy? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's a, it's a whole juggling thing that running two businesses is, and no doubt you running three or four.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah.
Gavin Tye:You feel it as well. It's
Mitchell Davis:I do. Yeah. But it is like, this is all the more things that are happening, the more momentum that Six Sides has, then obviously that's a real driver for us to continue to push forward with that if it's starting to feel like it is taking off. So Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:I mean, it's still early days and nothing set in stone, but it's looking pretty positive, which is awesome. So it's it's our job to just continue to capitalize on what's happening there and, like, seize these opportunities. So Yep. We're trying to be very responsive. We got an email from someone who was at Laricon AU Monique.
Mitchell Davis:This Yeah. Week as well. Yep. So shout out to Monique. And, she reached out and then within, like, five minutes, I think you'd replied back to say, hey.
Mitchell Davis:Like, thank you so much. This is, you know, some rough pricing, all this sort of stuff. And then you ended up having a conversation with her as well. So, yeah, we're just, like, we're really trying hard to push as much as we can now while we've got a little drive happening.
Gavin Tye:So you see, you see this with new businesses. Like we had, you had HubSpot, right? And you see, let's use HubSpot and LinkedIn and Facebook is the big behemoths, Amazon, their customer service is shit. Right. They don't need it.
Gavin Tye:That's not their value driver. But it's not their value proposition, but you see, new companies pop up, like as a, like in my world, there's a polo, which is a, like an, elite outreach, email outreach platform. Their value proposition is responsiveness and answering questions as quick as what they could. So that's our secret sauce. I think, I think our culture should be one of responsiveness.
Gavin Tye:So, and it's because there's, there's, there's stated culture and unstated culture. And I think your, your responsiveness, and it may not feel like this because you responding back to customers with sales stuff is not really, hasn't been a key focus of you. But when we were at volunteering WA, the unstated culture of us or our customer service was, yeah, we'll fix it then. And we were fixing it really quick. Right.
Gavin Tye:And so I think in sales, when people have a real, if they reach out to someone, how quick do you just move on and forget that you spoke to them? If they don't come back to you, if they come back to you two days, know, I've moved on from that. Like we can't afford to squander any lead. So within two within five minutes, I said a challenge within five minutes, we should be responding back.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:So and that's yeah. And and she really and she made a comment on that. She goes, wow. Thank you for for responding so fast.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. It's a it's a challenge, but, because we are both of us very busy, but it's a good it's a good challenge. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And if we can do it, it should help us in the right direction, you know?
Gavin Tye:So Our intent is to do that. If we miss, we miss, but we're not gonna miss because we're go, we'll get, we'll get to it later. Like we're missing because we're busy. So, but yeah, like I think this week has been really interesting. I haven't seen a momentum shift like this sudden in a business that I've worked in.
Gavin Tye:So, or been involved in. What we do need to do is make it as smooth as possible, and make sure that we make it as easy and try to shorten that sales cycle as much as we can. And, you know, we spoke about a couple of weeks about getting DocuSign set up. And so when this company come back and said, we're ready and you're like, okay, we'll get it set up. And I was such relief.
Gavin Tye:I've been so busy this week doing stuff that you were like, no. No. I can set it up. It's easy. Like and and just like leaning on each other there, that was great.
Gavin Tye:So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I could see you had like a lot more going on than what I did this week. And so, yeah, it was just like, alright. I'm just gonna smash this out. So bit of chatty pitying to just structure this contract that we already had in place.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I forgot when they Right. Yeah. That's right. You're like, oh, we gotta get this in.
Mitchell Davis:I'm like, no. No. No. No. We already have an agreement, and we've had, like, two other customers pay and sign using this agreement.
Mitchell Davis:But we hadn't done it as a DocuSign before. So I just had to I did a little workshopping and, got that all set up. And then, yeah, we we've sent that off now. So, hopefully, we'll hear back soon from that, potential customer. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So that's really exciting. We also this week had a webinar. Why don't you tell us about how that went?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It was good. We had 45 people register for it or something like that. Probably five showed up. Like, it's but because it was a LinkedIn live, what typically happens is because, yes, we do it live, but they also can come back at any time.
Gavin Tye:It gets delivered into their inbox or on our profile. And so they can watch it any time. So, it's, it's a bit challenging doing LinkedIn lives. It doesn't really give the result that you would like.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:But we did it nonetheless, and I think we'll get some content out of it. Definitely. Yeah. It helped. It always helps structure my thinking around stuff.
Gavin Tye:Like I get it. I'm a little bit all over the shop in the head, but trying to get this in a way that's presentable and, and, and speakable and. Speakable is not the right word, but you know what I mean? It's, it was actually, it was a good exercise to go through. And now as long as we can re leverage that content over and over it'll be, yeah.
Gavin Tye:Handy.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So I think what we'll do is I'll rip the video off of LinkedIn or StreamYard. I'll get it somehow. We'll put that up on our website. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:And then start to build up like some resources there. Yep. So we can link that as a webinar, but then we can also take the transcript, turn it into a few different blog posts, link those to the webinar, like, just start to fill in the marketing website a bit more. Yeah. Because we're doing a good job, I think, with the podcast having that on there.
Mitchell Davis:You and I both have kind of faded a bit on doing the blog posts. You know? There's so many other things to get to, so it'll be good to kind of kick that tire a little bit more. Yeah. And, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Are you are you thinking of doing how often are you thinking of doing the webinars?
Gavin Tye:Probably once every couple of months. It's too it feels like it's not a hard thing to do every month, but when you think you set it for a month and then you start the process, you're essentially doing one and setting them and and it takes a while. I don't think you can spam It I don't think you should spam people on LinkedIn about those webinars. If you do it once every two months or once every three months gives you time to when you fill up new connections, can go back out to them and it doesn't feel like yeah. Maybe once every three months for now.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Right. And it's like building a talk, Right? Like, that's basically what you're doing.
Gavin Tye:It's a forty five minute talk.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. And you yeah. You went for a while. Thirty five, forty minutes, somewhere around there. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, it was good. I was a bit nervous about getting on. So you and I, we were kind of workshopping some stuff beforehand to, like, keep me calm. Once we got into it, I feel like I did okay with supporting you, but I I had said to you, like, hey. I wanna talk less than 10% of the time and you do the other 90, and I think that's about where we landed.
Mitchell Davis:So Yep.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that, you we also sat down last week, and we've committed to something that you were like, I have not done this at all. This is well outside of my comfort zone. So why don't you tell us about that?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. So, this week, we, we spoke with, the AIME conference. Do you know what it stands for, mate?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Asia Pacific, premier business events platform conference. So
Mitchell Davis:I don't know how they get AIME out of that. Those are not the same letters. But
Gavin Tye:So so incentives and meetings events.
Mitchell Davis:Oh, so you just straight up made it up. No.
Gavin Tye:I was looking
Mitchell Davis:for Where did that come from?
Gavin Tye:It comes from, it comes from, Google, but Asia Pacific incentives and meeting event event.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. Yep. Right. So, anyway, this is a conference that is about running events. Right?
Mitchell Davis:So, what we have we haven't signed it yet, but we've, like, committed that we are gonna go there. It's in Melbourne in February next year. And the idea is that we're gonna go there as a sponsor. We'll have a booth. We'll exhibit there.
Mitchell Davis:Your goal is to try and get as many people to to meet with as many people as we can, and my part will be I'll kind of man a screen and run some demos and things like that when we're there.
Gavin Tye:Your job is to woo the shit out of them. Like, not just to go, oh, that's awesome. Like, wanna get out. You want them to go, holy fuck. What are you guys doing?
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. So yes. It's a No pressure. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:No pressure. No. I don't I certainly don't feel any pressure Yeah. To woo the shit out of, the people that could potentially, rocket ship us. So no.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, so look. That's I spoke with you about that after we had this conversation with this sponsor person at AIM. I mentioned to you that, like, this makes me very nervous. It's not something that I'm comfortable with at all, but if you think it will be worth the, like, the cost that it's gonna take for us and that we'll be able to pull this off, then let's go do it. So, gotta get out of the comfort zone a bit.
Mitchell Davis:And so We'll see. That's what we will be doing.
Gavin Tye:You'll see. You'll see at the end. You'll go, we need to do more of these a year. You'll see it. As long as it's Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And as long as it's the right fit of a conference, and I think it is, I think you'll go, okay. Now I understand. The good the good one is worth a year's worth of lead generation.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I'm sure that I will. Like, I trust the process and it makes sense. It's just, it makes me nervous. Like, I I was telling you, I went to a wedding expo earlier this year and as just a normal attendee.
Mitchell Davis:Right? And the amount of vendors that were there, like, coming up to you and trying to pull you over to talk to them, and it was overwhelming. It felt really bad. And so to try and put myself in the shoes of being the vendor and trying to get people to come over to me, I'm like, god, this is just not what I wanna be doing at all.
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:So but it's a very different space. Right? The people that are going there are going there to learn about what's you know, what technology is available and to strike deals and all this sort of stuff. So Yep. It's a different environment.
Mitchell Davis:But, anyway, yeah, it was it was nice to be able to level with you and just be like, mate, this makes me super uncomfortable. And you're like, okay. And I said, I can do it, and so we're we're gonna do it. So
Gavin Tye:Yeah. We'll figure it out. Like, everyone's nervous. That nerve feeling never goes away. Like, I get it.
Gavin Tye:Like it's a, it's a lot of pressure. Like I've done conferences. Right. And I did one last year for sales market fit. And it was only one session at the first day or morning tea people come out and then no one for the rest of the two days, because it was too hot.
Gavin Tye:And I'm like, you fucking kidding me? But I got one client out of it, which it was like a five X ROI. I've been at other conferences, like for the first day or two, like no one comes up and I'm like, we have just spent $40 on this conference. This better be better. And then, and then it just changes, but you've gotta, you've gotta make your own luck.
Gavin Tye:There's a guy, Simon Beard, who has co owns culture Kings or he owned culture Kings. Have you heard of culture Kings, the shop? Yeah. Of course you probably shop there. Yeah, that's right.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Big customer.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. He was saying he actually started at a market, like at the markets down at Carrara Markets. And he was looking around and he was like, no one, everyone's just doing the same thing here because I've got to make my own luck. And he, and he was out like really loud and getting people into his booth. I'm not that type of person, but you've just got to make your own luck.
Gavin Tye:And, yeah, it's, it's it's at a price point. So I thought it'd be more expensive price point, but yeah. I I if I go Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:We think it'll be affordable. We can share we could share on pricing. It's all like public.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like $3. And then we're we're doubling that for travel.
Gavin Tye:Right? And travel Yeah. That's right. With some other stuff like we'll get a three by three stretch thing that whatever Yeah. Like a wall.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Three by two, whatever it is so we can put it up so we can reuse it again. And, I've got some ideas. If it goes really well, I've got a I just had an idea. We won't talk about on camera about we would aim to maybe have in the next couple of years because we're not ready for it yet.
Gavin Tye:But, yeah. Gotcha. But
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So we think, yeah, probably somewhere six or seven grand because we and it's like three days. Right? Three, four Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Think so.
Mitchell Davis:Days. Yeah. Something like that. So it's a fair bit of then like hotel costs and stuff.
Gavin Tye:But Ninth, tenth, eleventh, three days.
Mitchell Davis:Three days. Yeah. Cool. So yeah. So that's really exciting.
Mitchell Davis:That'll be in February next year. So, you know, obviously, we'll keep you posted as we're getting ready for that. But, yeah, that's my job is to wow the shit out of them once we
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Once we get there. So there'll be some fun new tech that kind of comes out of this next, couple of months. So
Gavin Tye:Not just Yeah. Not just wow, but fucking wow. Like yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Anyway, we do our best. So, yeah. So it's, it's like, I'm looking forward to it. They're always fun. You're always meeting new people.
Gavin Tye:We don't know anyone in the industry. So, yeah. Getting in there and, and, yeah. So I, for my other business deal buddy, I committed to, another conference as well down in, down at the, in Sydney in November, like, which is the Australian business show. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Did that, that was, that was a lot more expensive, but they gave me a talk, let me talk on stage for, for, for sales, for helping people with sales across business.
Mitchell Davis:So is this next November?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. November.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Oh, mate. That's exciting.
Gavin Tye:Good on you. Yeah. It's good. So I've got, you know, Dean, my mate who's six'four school principal. I asked him, I was thinking about doing it this year, but we had to go to Larra not Larraconnett, we're volunteering WA and it was expensive.
Gavin Tye:And, so this year they come back and I said, yeah, look, if you do last year's pricing, I'll do it. And I called Dean, I said, mate, I've booked, you need to take school holidays, holidays from school. And all I need him to do is do what I'm going to do for us. He will bring people into me. So, and, because he he won't know what we're talking about, but he can stop people.
Gavin Tye:He doesn't care. Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:He's got that energy about him.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. He does.
Mitchell Davis:Cool, mate. That's that's awesome. Yeah. Okay. Sweet.
Mitchell Davis:Well, next thing, I reached out to someone that I idolize in the bootstrapping scene, which is Justin Jackson of Transistor. So I've talked a lot over, you know, the life of this podcast about being inspired by Build Your SaaS, the transistor.fm, their story as they were building it out. And I'd kind of loosely been in contact with Justin who's the, like, marketing cofounder and, like, only just, like, little interactions on social media and things like that. But I was listening to one of his shows recently, and he brought up that he'd written this blog article forever ago about writing a 100 emails, like when you're starting a new project and you wanna try and get the word out there to write a 100 emails. See if you can find a 100 people that you know in your network that might be interested to hear about what you're doing, might wanna become potential customers, or might know potential customers that they could refer you onto.
Mitchell Davis:So I told you about this a couple weeks ago, and you were like, oh, yeah. Cool. Okay. Go ahead. Like, just send it out.
Mitchell Davis:And I said, no. No. No. I wanna wait until we run, both of these, like, big conferences that we've just run so that we've got data there and I can point to that this isn't something that happened a year ago. This is happening right now.
Mitchell Davis:And so I did. I sent it today. I wrote up this email, and I probably went a little too in-depth, but I wanted to explain to Justin, like, the I have kind of followed some of his story like him and John, his technical cofounder. That was a big inspiration for me to reach out to you to become my cofounder on this. So that's pretty cool.
Mitchell Davis:And then, I also mentioned like I I use that same image that I took of that I put in that email that we sent out to all of the attendees recently with with you and I in it. I explained what's going on. And, then at the end, I mentioned, like, PS, we have a podcast too. It's hosted on Transistor. Here's a leak to, like, a fun one.
Mitchell Davis:And, also, if it if they'd I I did a stretch goal. I was like and I'd love to be on the panel as well if you think I would be a good fit. So we'll we'll see if anything comes from that. But I heard back from him basically straight away. He must also be on the five minute response time thing.
Mitchell Davis:He was like, sweet. And I love the, podcast website that you put together, by the way. So he recognizes that we put some work into that. So we'll see if anything comes out of that. It was a short, sweet reply, but, yeah, who knows if if anything will come from there.
Mitchell Davis:I recorded a little Loom video as well, just kind of walking through the the app and showing some of the stuff from LaraCon AU. So I'm gonna do this same thing. I've got a couple other people. I don't know a 100 people that would be a good fit for this, but I think I've got maybe another four or five people that I'm gonna send an email out to, and maybe do a Loom video as well. And, yeah, just try and get us what's the expression?
Mitchell Davis:Increase our luck surface area. Yeah. Yeah. Try and get in front of some people that I think might be able to help us out.
Gavin Tye:Look at you with cold outreach, man.
Mitchell Davis:Whoo. Yeah. That's right. But it feels good because it's not I know, like, Justin is not a potential customer of us. Like, I'm not going to him.
Mitchell Davis:Hey. Here's the pitch for you. It's like, hey. You know a lot of people, and you've been a part of this story. So Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:I'd love if you if there's any way you can help us out. You know? So yeah. So it doesn't feel as, like, dirty, you know, whatever for me, personally. So Gotta
Gavin Tye:rationalize it how you need to rationalize it, mate.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Fair enough. Yep. But yeah. So that was a fun one, and I look forward to doing a few more of those, over the next week or so, I reckon.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Okay. Good one. Nice one.
Mitchell Davis:Well, I talked about what I did last night. What did you get up to?
Gavin Tye:Last night, we ran the second founders collective meetup. It was a talk between, with someone called Mark Sauby. Now Mark Sauby was the founder of a platform of a business called Blue Sky Alternative Investments, and it was a fund manager.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. So not the social media.
Gavin Tye:No. No. So he got actively, he got his stock got, his business got attacked by activist short selling. Now I don't exactly know the ins and outs of what happened, but basically what they do is they attack the business's reputation and they bet on the stock will drop and actually crashed his business. It, he didn't see it coming and it absolutely wiped him out.
Gavin Tye:So for more what I understand, he would have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and that debit completely devastated him. But he come in and did a talk about how he built himself back up and he did it through this, this thing called the seven ocean swim. So the first swim is a 34 kilometer swim or, or would there's no particular order, but it's the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland. And it's really cold. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Jesus. That's a long way to swim. Three, four Ks. Oh my God.
Gavin Tye:And they do it at night. Right? And then they, then he did the cook straight between New Zealand's North And South Island, which was 22 Ks. Now the big one there is a great whites in that in the middle of the, in the island. And then he did Molokai Channel known as the Kauai Channel between Molokai and Oahu in 42 Ks.
Gavin Tye:Then he did the English Channel, which was 33 Ks. And then did the Catalina Channel, which is another 32 Ks. And then he did the Suguru Straight in Japan between two, the Honshu and Hokkaido Islands, which was 19.2 k's. And he did the Strata Gibraltar, which is 14.4 k's. So, yeah, like, so not many people have done it in the world.
Gavin Tye:So I'm just looking at here. So, there's not that many people who did it, recently. So Mark Sabi was the twenty ninth person to complete it on the 06/29/2024. So, yeah. So many people stop.
Gavin Tye:I don't get it. So, yeah, so he did that and, basically, he'd just come and talk through his life about what he learned and put, built himself back up from, that, that attack and the devastation and how he's vowed not to be prayed, don't be prayed, not to be prayed again. So, yeah, it was a, it was double meanings between building a startup, of being for founders and all that kind of stuff. It was really, it was really, it was a great night. You know, there was sixty, seventy people there.
Gavin Tye:It was interesting. It was really good. So, it was good.
Mitchell Davis:That's awesome. And you had Mel there, your wife?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Mel come down and she helped out, which is great. It was great to spend time with her. Doesn't get to see what I do. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:You think she just sees me at a desk here and she, she knows that I'm, I'm doing stuff, but she, she, it's not her world. So she come down and, she was really good at getting people to register. She was like, I'm going to get in trouble if I don't get you for if you don't register. So she was bit she was able to, get people to do that. But, yeah, it was really good.
Gavin Tye:And, you know, the the indirect reason for doing it is hopefully people will get exposure to six sides or exposure to deal buddy. You wanna, wanna talk about about being a client. Right? So I've been chasing this guy for a while and he come last night and, he was like, oh, we should use this for our conference. I was like, yeah, we should.
Gavin Tye:So that kind of worked.
Mitchell Davis:Little does he know. Yeah. You've been chasing him for
Gavin Tye:a year. I've been scheming for a year. Right. And the indirect thing, and he's actually started his conference to have influence with the government in the indirect way that we're doing it. Like, he's just trying, he's just doing things on a different level as well.
Gavin Tye:And, it's like when you've people play chess and people play checkers, like we're trying to yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Was telling me his story. I was like, mate, that's smart. And, and I'm like, yep. You've you've that's smart as well. Right?
Gavin Tye:So
Mitchell Davis:Little do you know? Yeah. That's awesome.
Gavin Tye:I'm gonna go and see him up. He lives on the Sunny Coast. I'm gonna get him on the podcast, for, for the leap. Yep. Which is we released a podcast for Mark Salby's like to go with the talk last night.
Gavin Tye:So if anyone's wants to listen to it. Yep. Yeah. The leap by founders collective, it has a more in-depth talk there as well. So there's a massive, yeah.
Gavin Tye:Okay. There's a massive class action going on with that still and that business. So we had to be a bit sensitive about what we spoke about. So, yeah, it was, it was good. It was fun.
Gavin Tye:It was fun.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's awesome. We so you and I were talking about the challenges of trying to get people into the app and engage using, the tag you read and some of the other features that we have over the course of a single meetup could be quite difficult. You know? The meetups are only gonna go for two hours or so and that it might be hard for people to get the value out of it if we can't get them into the app and, like, engaging with other people in that way.
Mitchell Davis:Because the numbers were like, you had think there's 49 people in the app for the event last night. Nine of them did tag you're in. So, you know, so it's 20%. Right? It would be great to see everyone getting in there and doing it.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Now some of the things like we've talked about, almost everybody that I could see had a profile photo. So if we had so they've already gone to the effort of adding a profile photo, which is great. Yeah. If we can make that easier to go, hey, do you wanna, enroll in Tag, you're it, and use your profile photo because you're probably the only person in your own profile photo.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yep. So we could
Gavin Tye:do that. It does become an issue because someone said, says I need a single photo. And I was like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:You you you need to do it. There was confusion there and getting people to do it. I think that they may have tried and they were doing it together and it wasn't registering. So I do think
Mitchell Davis:that
Gavin Tye:that there there are some little not where we can so we can improve the UX of it. Because even Mel goes, this is not easy to get into. And I was like, yeah. Mel's so brutal. I'm like, fucking calm down.
Gavin Tye:Like, we understand that. Like, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:We're working on it. Yep. So I think like a really cool thing that we could do is if you upload if you take a photo to tag your ear, right, while you're trying to enroll, and we can detect that there are multiple faces in it, we show you the photo that you just took and go tap which one you
Gavin Tye:are. Right? Like Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:We could do stuff like that. We already we could do that. So, that would help a lot with that sort of stuff. Yeah. And it might also be cool you think about, like, from an event organizer's perspective, if they wanna get all of their speakers enrolled in the game, then they could take it, you know, and they're sitting there together at the dinner before, you know, the night before the conference kicks off or something like that, take a photo together, and then the event organizer can go tap on each of the faces in that photo and go, hey.
Mitchell Davis:This is Mitch. Hey. This is Gavin. You know? Ta da da.
Mitchell Davis:Like, bang, bang, bang. Just get it done.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So already, like, we have the technology that we could do that. So, that might be a natural evolution that we look at, you know, next year.
Gavin Tye:I don't know much about the check-in feature that you built for Laricon, but we'll have a look at that. Like, getting people to get their phone out and using that, using it then and there. And then while they're, and then getting them to take a photo in if they're already enrolled. Right. Or doing something like to take a photo might be worthwhile or, or take a photo, please go take a photo with the sponsors banners or something like that.
Gavin Tye:Who knows? I don't know, but we gotta get them out of their phone and, and doing that. Right. So, yeah. So we don't need that many.
Gavin Tye:We just need a couple. Right. We just need them registered. Right. Because then if we got Finn, Dinmore was really nice and he come down and help out with the photos.
Gavin Tye:If they're already registered, then they can they'll get associated to the photos as well. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I don't I think you're right. We don't need that many people, but probably more than 20%.
Mitchell Davis:There's probably a sweet spot of about if we have 40% or so of the audience or of the attendees are in the game and they're taking photos, then all the other people that are in the app are gonna see that and think, oh, why has Mitch got a circle around his face? You know? And it'll start to become that, like, viral component, think. We don't
Gavin Tye:necessarily need them to enroll and tag your writ. Like, it's just take photos so it associates to their profile that they can create a recap, which is if they don't wanna do that.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So we're not always gonna be able to, you know, to have everybody go in and use it, but it's cool. It's more data for us to kind of understand how these different types of events as we run them and not just you running them, but like any other meetup, you know, to see what maybe they could expect as like a reasonable outcome.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Did you do did you take some of the learnings of, like how Michael introduced the app and Yeah. We did. I did
Gavin Tye:talk at the beginning and got everyone up to mingle and that worked. They but what they did is I got up and started speaking. The room got really loud and it was like, okay. So that was good. They did that.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. But it didn't. It didn't. They didn't take photos, but, and I did think some were trying, but one guy said, Hey, look, I'm taking a photo, but it's not it's saying I need a single person in the photo. So,
Mitchell Davis:they were trying to do the enrollment instead of add to the gallery. Yeah. Okay. So some of it's just like, it's gonna be human error. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So Anyway It was it was good. One of the most interesting things that come out of it was, particularly in Mark's talk, is he seemed to have popped his head up above like, tall poppy syndrome in Australia, like, is is a real thing. Right? If you pop your head up too high, but make yourself a target, people seemingly don't like it.
Gavin Tye:Right. And they go for it. They go for it and go for you. It did come up yesterday. Someone else was saying like, the, the real key to building a successful business is just keep your head down.
Gavin Tye:Don't let anyone know you're doing it, stay off the radar. And you can actually build a really strong business without getting yourself into trouble. Right. Oh, really? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:It was really interesting. There's a guy up in Noosa that no, he goes, there's a guy up in Noosa that no one's ever heard about. His business just got valued at $1,500,000,000 and no one knows who he is. Right. A FinTech business.
Gavin Tye:And I'm like, yeah, right. And it got me thinking about what's the level of marketing and attention we want to bring to ourselves with our success. Do we want to not do that? Because that big opportunity that we're chasing that we're meeting next week, if we were to win that, I want to go and tell the world that we want it to build our reputation. Is that being tall poppy or is that just being smart marketing?
Gavin Tye:I don't know the answer to that question. Yeah. Yeah. Because I saw Roman and in his business, he he emailed a journalist and they featured him at create financial. And I'm like, I'd love to do that for us.
Gavin Tye:But then again, is that drawing a target on our back?
Mitchell Davis:Like, maybe. I mean, we're so maybe when we are a lot bigger, then, yes, that might draw a target on our back. But, like, right now, the more people that know about us, surely the better. Like
Gavin Tye:Maybe maybe what if we did that and all of the competitors who were like our competitors, the bigger ones were like, I thought we were gonna win that. Then all of a sudden, they're like, who are these guys? So maybe it
Mitchell Davis:But I mean, like, even so if we do win some of these larger opportunities that we're trying to go after, our competitors will hear about it anyway.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Like Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:You know?
Gavin Tye:Might make us more might make us attractive to yeah. Right.
Mitchell Davis:That yeah. That's right. So like, I don't want to hide who we are. I think that makes it really hard to try and find customers if we're like afraid to poke our heads out and go, hey. This is Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Who we are and this is what we do and why we're different and better than our competitors. You should pay attention to us. That's a really hard thing to do if you're also trying to stay really quiet. But I think, like, there's a difference of it's a spectrum of how far out, how tall of a puppy you become.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. What's good what's good and what's bad. Right? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I do agree. Like Yeah. You end up on a panel on channel seven news or you end up doing something or you end up on big brother. I think that's probably not ideal. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. And I
Mitchell Davis:don't think either of us are that interested in that. Well, I mean, maybe you are. I don't know. You might
Gavin Tye:see me on big brother, mate. Yeah. Well,
Mitchell Davis:that kicks off. That's already on now, mate. So I don't know. You're you're being voted out, I guess.
Gavin Tye:Know? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So it's an interesting point, but I think for right now, I my opinion is let's get out there. I mean, if I think maybe not a press release thing might not be on the cards right now.
Mitchell Davis:I think I'd probably wanna be a bit further along. But
Gavin Tye:We need to be in win to do that. Right? And show demonstrate traction. So
Mitchell Davis:Exactly.
Gavin Tye:That big one that we're chasing, if we were to win that, we we I thought we'd wanna do that because we will wanna bring attention to that and all those other games. And I still Brisbane 32, I'm still on my radar. I'm still chasing it, but that would be a big, big feather in the bow. Right? Feather in the cat.
Gavin Tye:Cat. The sayings. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Oh my God.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. The bow and
Mitchell Davis:the feather. Yep. Yeah. Something like that. So, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Does that kind of round that one out?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I think so.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Awesome. Yep. Well, on that note, why don't we round out the podcast? See what I did there.
Gavin Tye:Sure.
Mitchell Davis:Mate, where can people find you?
Gavin Tye:On LinkedIn. Find me on, Gavin Ty, t y e. You can find me there. I'd love to connect. If you have any questions Do
Mitchell Davis:you resent having to spell your surname? Like, because you every time you you go t y e Yep. Is the typical spelling t y?
Gavin Tye:It could be anything, but it's only three letters, so it's not that much of a impulse to do. When I was young, we took my stepdad's name and his last name was Troscott, and that was a big name to say all the time. Like Yeah. Right. And I'm like, I'm so glad to come back to Tyme, which is my dad's name.
Gavin Tye:And Yeah. Yeah. So I just, it's easy to say it. Right? Otherwise, I go, can't find you.
Mitchell Davis:Well, you get
Gavin Tye:for me to say TYE. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Gotcha. I just wondered. Because when I do the transcript, on Transistor, Justin, if you're listening, it does t y by default. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Every time I'm like, okay. I'm gonna go change that.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Right. It also does 6sides.co. It makes it the number six. I'm like, no. No.
Mitchell Davis:No. No. I have to spell it
Gavin Tye:out every got no rules in there? You can't
Mitchell Davis:tell them? You can't. You can't add rules for on their auto transcript. You can on Chatchippy Tee, but I need it to be in Transistor's system. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And then that feeds our website and all this sort of stuff. So yeah. Yep. Anyway. So, I just I was curious about that.
Mitchell Davis:Well, thanks for asking, but you can find me online on LinkedIn at, Mitch Dav, d a v. And Oh, yeah. You're Dav. Why? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Well, it's a good question. Why Dav? Because I got the mitchdav.is, like Mitch Davis, my name.
Gavin Tye:That's nice.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. That's a domain name that you can have. There's nothing on it right now, so it's a bit boring if you go to it. But, yeah, I've got my own name just as a domain name. So I thought that's kind of fun.
Mitchell Davis:So then when I saw that, I was like, okay. Maybe I'll just go by Mitch Dav. So I've got that in most places. Not everywhere, but most. I got it.
Mitchell Davis:So Good to story. So thank you for asking. I appreciate it.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Alright. You're welcome.
Mitchell Davis:Cool. Alright, mate. Well, yeah. It was fun catching up, and we will catch you all next week.
Gavin Tye:Okay. Cool, mate. Be good.
Mitchell Davis:You too. Be good. Oh my god.