Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, CTO and Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:I'm Gavin Tye, CEO and sales marketing. Welcome to our I B2B SaaS jumped the gun, didn't I?
Mitchell Davis:Absolutely. Yep. But it's alright. Let's just roll with it. It's perfect.
Mitchell Davis:Mate, how are going?
Gavin Tye:Very well. Very well. What are what are we building here? What are we doing, Mitch? I cut you off.
Mitchell Davis:Me. If you wanna if you wanna mess with my intro, you tell the story.
Gavin Tye:Mate, apparently, you have a script on that side of the fence that I'm not privy to see because I'm a visitor. So It's true. You'll have to you'll have to finish
Mitchell Davis:that off. Deserve to to myself. So 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 going, mate?
Mitchell Davis:I'm a bit
Gavin Tye:hurt, to be honest, mate. Yeah. I'm a bit hurt because you share so much of what we're doing here in the business yet you haven't shared the fantastic Christmas present and what that has made you, since I gave it to you.
Mitchell Davis:It's made me a billionaire. Right?
Gavin Tye:No way. Mitchell Davis. Sorry, Mitch Davis.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. You'll never be able to know which one. Look. I'm not gonna lie to you. I don't remember the exact details right now because I don't have it in front of me, but you made me some large sum of money air.
Mitchell Davis:Here we go. You've got one you're holding up. You made me a billionaire in Zimbabwean Yeah.
Gavin Tye:By the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, I've made you and I are both billionaires already. Like, this business has already turned us into billionaires. How good is One of the rare unicorns, first billionaire business of just two co founders. And we just built a team by ourselves. It's it's it's been a long, journey and I really wanna thank everyone.
Gavin Tye:We did it bootstrapped the whole way. We took no funding. It's it's really been a miracle. Has.
Mitchell Davis:A turnaround, from last week as well. Like, this has all happened in the course of seven days.
Gavin Tye:No. No. You you got it actually back at AIM, so it's been a little bit nice of you to remember.
Mitchell Davis:Mate, I'm no. I'm mate, come on. I'm telling a story here, for the listeners.
Gavin Tye:It's good to see that it hasn't changed you.
Mitchell Davis:No. No. Not at all. As you wouldn't notice it. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So, mate, it's very good. So thank you. I appreciated the gift. I promise. But I just didn't have it in front of me and I hadn't brought it
Gavin Tye:up yet.
Mitchell Davis:So
Gavin Tye:Yep. I heard a I heard a, I wrote on a podcast a few months ago where someone bought that like a billion dollar note and there's actually trillion dollar notes there. And I thought, oh, that's a bit unrealistic. I'll go with That's where you Yeah. Draw the I'll go with the billion dollar one.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's a bit more, bit more digestible. So yeah. It's a
Mitchell Davis:goal we could aim for.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That's fantastic. Well, thank you. So we've got a few the goal of today is to be mostly technical, which is a bit tongue in cheek reference to, an awesome show by Aaron and Ian, which you can go check out. But I'll kick us off with just a few little personal things here. So I had Nicole and I had our eleventh anniversary of when we started dating.
Mitchell Davis:And I gotta figure out, like, what do we do? Because we're getting married in a couple months. What do we do with the whole do we reset the clock or do we just keep going now? We've been together eleven years. I think probably keep going.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Especially it's weird, I guess, for people like her and I that got married, like, late, you know, compared to our parents, you know, it's only a couple of years. But yeah, I think we'll probably stick. I'm calling it. We've been together eleven years.
Mitchell Davis:We own those years. So I'll stick together
Gavin Tye:eleven married two. That yeah. That's true.
Mitchell Davis:Hopefully more than that. But yeah.
Gavin Tye:No. No. Just as a point in time.
Mitchell Davis:Come on, mate. Come on.
Gavin Tye:Not a not a
Mitchell Davis:conclusion. Yeah. That's funny. Anyway, so, we went out to, the to Sydney, We spent the night at The Rocks, which was awesome. And we went to a restaurant there.
Mitchell Davis:It was like, yeah. The restaurant was okay. But the the highlight was we went we did an escape room, which was fun, and we smashed it. Like, we haven't done one in a couple years, but this one was like a three out of five difficulty because Nicole was a bit unsure. Like, do we still have it?
Mitchell Davis:Are we still smart enough to do these? And, yeah, we ended up smashing it. So that was fun. But then the the highlight was, like, I had told you we planned to go because we're doing all this exercise. We planned to go walk across the Harbour Bridge, and then not like on top of it, but just walk along the, like, the platform.
Mitchell Davis:And, when we got to the hotel, which is like pretty close to being directly under the bridge and looking up at how high up, even just the walk up to the like Ground Floor of the bridge would be. Yeah. They're like, nah, okay, no way not happening.
Gavin Tye:It is way bigger than you think. It's the orders of magnitude bit larger than what you would expect the Harbour Bridge to be. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that I'd instantly I like, I ruled that out because I knew we were gonna have a drink. Like we ended up getting a bottle of wine at dinner and I had most of it because Nicole doesn't drink anywhere near as much as I do.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, I was just like, okay. This is not happening. So we instead, we we pivoted our what was our 10 kilometer goal to walk to be, like, a two and a half kilometer walk to go get ice cream Secular Quay and then back to the hotel after drinking. We still achieved our goals, mate.
Gavin Tye:Did you go to that Copenhagen ice cream?
Mitchell Davis:We did. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:It was good. Was It really good. I enjoyed mine. Nicole got something, hazelnut something, and she did not enjoy hers. And I'm like, she calls herself a foodie, but I swear I enjoy food a lot more than she does.
Mitchell Davis:Because, like, everywhere we go, she gets something, and she's like, oh, like, this is not great. And I'm, like, happy just ordering the basic stuff. Like, you know, I know exactly what I'm gonna get in all circumstances. I'm generally pretty happy with food.
Gavin Tye:So Yeah. I went out there with Harper once, like, a couple of years ago, and we went out to the point near where the cruise ships come in. And all these influencers had their stands set up, and they're all doing TikTok dances in the background. Did you see all that as well?
Mitchell Davis:I didn't see anybody TikTok dancing, but there's a lot of people taking photos and shooting videos, like tourists as well because it's right near the, Sydney Opera House. And so, yeah, people, like, love that area because it's so iconic. So, yeah, I bet we were in, like, a 100 different backgrounds of a 100 different shots or or videos as we're walking. And we would have looked like such a, like, oxymoron of us both in our fitness gear walking and waiting in line at the ice cream, like, stand and then sitting down having ice cream, you know, by the by the cruise ship
Gavin Tye:area and stuff. Necking a bottle of wine there as well in a paper bag.
Mitchell Davis:No, definitely not. It was funny though. I made a good choice because the hotel, when we checked in, they said, oh, and you know, do you prefer red wine or white wine? And I was like, white wine. They said, okay.
Mitchell Davis:We'll we'll send a bottle up for you. And then we're like, yeah, okay. Amazing. Great. And then we go have dinner, have the bottle of wine, come back.
Mitchell Davis:And I was thinking the whole time I was like, maybe I could have like another bottle because you know, you just got it kind of runs away from you a bit and you get obviously when you're drunk, you don't make your good decisions. But I didn't. I was like, nope. Good idea. One is enough.
Mitchell Davis:Like, come on. You're pretty tanked right now. Yep. And I didn't fuck it up, and then end up, like, vomiting that night, which would have been so easy to do if I had another bottle of wine and make stupid ass decisions, but I didn't. So I'm a changed man from who I was, like, a year ago where I absolutely would have done that and then regretted it every second of it.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, the not drinking stuff has has worked. So Very awesome. So I'll be back to back to the grind, of not drinking with a few exclusions coming up. This weekend will be one. We're celebrating my dad's sixtieth, so I'll have a drink with him.
Mitchell Davis:And then I think after that, I'll be be back on the lambs. So Yep. Anyway, that's good. And then, fitness goal, I am now at ninety 0.3, which is excellent. So I'm calling that six kilos that I've now lost, which is great.
Mitchell Davis:I have started going to the gym, not as much as I wanted to to do strength, but I'm getting there. I'll be going at least three times this week and then my goal is to get that up to five times. But it's just sometimes there are some days that it's just bloody hard and because I'm choosing to not get up and go earlier. Yep. Like early, like you do.
Mitchell Davis:I don't want to do that and mess around with my sleeping pattern and stuff. So some days it just seems like it's impossible. But anyway, three times this week. That's the plan. How's your fitness stuff going, mate?
Gavin Tye:It's pretty good, mate. We're as when this comes out tomorrow, which will be Tuesday, we are halfway through the 75 hard challenge. So
Mitchell Davis:Yes.
Gavin Tye:It's been really it was would have been really easy yesterday not to do anything, like, but I got up early. I was down in Sydney for the weekend, for an event. It was really easy not to do it, but I got up early on Saturday, walked for an hour and a half. I got to see them. I made a had an interesting lesson is, you don't really get to see a neighborhood until you walk through it.
Gavin Tye:Cause I've driven through my mate's neighborhood for ages and, never really looked at the houses and I was like, wow, this is phenomenal. This, this neighborhood. And then yesterday we did an hour walk with my mate Dean, and then I stopped when I landed and went to Hamilton or the cruise ship terminal out here in Brisbane and did another thirty minute walk. Then this Yeah. And I took it easy.
Gavin Tye:I'm a bit, I'm honestly a bit sore, a bit fatigued from doing this over the last month. So, today I went for a jog. My recovery was big on my whoop and, I went for a run today, run the fastest I've run-in ages. So, I did five minutes of walking and twenty five or twenty seven minutes of running.
Mitchell Davis:Get out of here.
Gavin Tye:That's really big. Yeah. It's good. I'm just trying not to get hurt. Right.
Gavin Tye:My gut's sore feet at the moment. So I've got to sort that stuff out. And I heard a podcast yesterday and I thought it was really, it was really good, about sore feet. So I'm just gonna explore that a little bit. But interesting things happening is now that I'm reading as well, I'm reading 10 pages a day and I'm also listening to a lot of audio books on different things.
Gavin Tye:I'm trying to be more productive as well and stop wasting time. And so, yeah, I'm doing some stuff around the house. I'm trying to put in some plans here to, be more, contribute more, opposed to Yeah. Being an So no, it's going okay. I was down to 101, which was, in your terms of how you're measuring weight, seven kilos, but in my terms, probably four.
Mitchell Davis:What do you what does that mean?
Gavin Tye:Because you round up and down to make it four numbers. No.
Mitchell Davis:No. Bullshit. Alright. Let's set the record straight. Let's say I weighed in at ninety six point five.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Benefit of the doubt when I first started. I don't know exactly what that was, but that's the number now. So we will hold to that. Therefore, I'm at six point two kilos lost.
Mitchell Davis:Thank you very much.
Gavin Tye:Okay. So I was at a 100 and yeah. A 101 or something that day. So I'm down, you know, almost four and a half, probably close to the five.
Mitchell Davis:So yep. Oh, that's fantastic. You know? Good on you. And I would not take away from you with that number, with this wishy washy behavior.
Mitchell Davis:Well done, mate. I'm very I'm proud of you. Alright. How's that feel?
Gavin Tye:This wouldn't be a podcast if I wasn't hanging shit on you, mate. Come on.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Cool. Alright. Final little fitness update. I have tried to introduce some running into my walking.
Mitchell Davis:It is a struggle. I did like 300 meters the other day. It was probably only for a minute or something like that, and it did start to hurt a bit. So you and I talked a little bit about that and you gave me some advice of okay, just to, you know, run for a minute every kilometre that I walk or something like that. And you suggested as well do it on flat ground because this was downhill and apparently that was a mistake.
Gavin Tye:I just don't think that that's necessarily a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, so I took your advice, like the advice I gave you the other day is, so I run three minutes on two minutes off for now, just so I'm trying to get like sacred habits.
Gavin Tye:So today I ran two blocks of that. So I ran, I didn't stop. So I ran for 12, thirteen minutes. Ran two blocks and then another three minutes and then I walked and then I ran again and then, and then tried to extend that a little more on the backside, but I'll do that for the rest of them, like another couple of weeks till I get used to it. And then I'll close that block in.
Gavin Tye:So I'll do three blocks plus a three, and I'll just gradually grow that over time. And before you'd be surprised at how easy it is to fill in those blocks over time, then all of a sudden I'll be running five Ks and then it's not a big stretch. If you can get to five, you can get to seven. Right. And then you're, you're almost at 10.
Gavin Tye:So, but just do it over the long term. It's when problems come when you try to do it over, I'm trying to do this in three weeks and then you end up pushing yourself and it's not enjoyable. Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That's right. Yep. No. I gotta avoid that. Anyway, so that's the fitness update.
Mitchell Davis:So in the promise of this episode being mostly technical, let's dive in to that. So big changes for us on the app infrastructure discussion. I don't know how to end that sentence, but we are our dashboard is now a React app. So for your benefit, Gavin Yeah.
Gavin Tye:What does that mean, mate?
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Yes. So I have used Vue, v u e, for, like, the last ten years or something like that. And that is a UI framework, I guess you could say. It's a front end framework of like, okay, it's got buttons and you click on things and it does things and da da da.
Mitchell Davis:It's like your standard it's one of the very many ways to build a website nowadays. Right? And I've been very happy with that. I'm super comfortable and familiar with it. There's a competitor to Vue called React and React has by far won the battle.
Mitchell Davis:So React is another framework which is used by a lot of people, millions of people. Right? And I'd always like I have written React code before. Our mobile app is written in React, but I'd always preferred to then if I'm gonna work on stuff for the desktop for your computer, I would prefer to write it in Vue. And just while we were at AIM, actually, between meetings, I had my laptop with me and I hopped into cursor and I was like, rewrite our Vue app in React.
Mitchell Davis:And it went away and did it. And that's what you talked about I think last episode of like it suggested, okay, if this wasn't being done by AI, how long would this take? And it was like, this could be a week or two's worth of work to do, which I think is right. And, yeah, it did probably 80% of it in about half an hour of just sitting there while we were waiting on our next meeting. And the reason I've even entertained this and have ultimately gone with it is because these AI models, because React is so much more popular than Vue, they're built on React.
Mitchell Davis:Right? These LLMs. So all of the the, like, cursor and all the other agents and stuff, they're good at React. They know what they're doing with it. And there's heaps of, like, component libraries and things.
Mitchell Davis:So we get so much more stuff out of the box by using React. So yeah. So it's now it's like a little bit uncomfortable for me. Obviously, I understand React, but it's not my strongest suit. And so now it's it's quite interesting, to be we're a React only app now and not using Vue, which has always been my, like, safe safe ground.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Okay. So, so that's part one of our huge infrastructure changes.
Gavin Tye:And so so sorry, just before you jump off that. So what for me, what does that when you're writing in Vue and everyone's writing in React, what's the and now you've aligned with everyone else, does that just mean the Hiring's gonna be easier
Mitchell Davis:in the future because way more people know React than I know Few. Few is starting to feel a bit outdated, I think, out in the world. So we don't wanna be running an old obsolete code base. Right? Sure.
Mitchell Davis:But also we get access to more tools out of the box, like I said. So we ought to be able to move a bit quicker or adopt some like fun new things that are out there already now our a big driver behind this also was like we're integrating an AI assistant into our dashboard and I could have written a bunch of Vue components myself for that, but there already exist a bunch for React that we could just like drop in and start They are for the developers out there, we're using Shad CN on our dashboard and there's like different registries or something like that for all these different types of components. And I found one shadcn.io, I think it is, has like an AI, set of components and they look pretty good. So, we're gonna start incorporating those. We wouldn't have been able to do that with Vue.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, a few different factors behind it. Apart from that, I don't think anything else changes for anyone else, our users or you, Gavin. Like, I think it's more it will just be mainly around hiring and, like, the speed of implementation gains that we'll get out of using the most popular stack that's out there.
Gavin Tye:Sure. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Sorry. Well, one other thing is now that, our mobile app and our web app both share the same framework, probably we'll be able to leverage some like, get some synergy there between the two so we can have some code reuse, have code generated on one app that can instantly be put into the other, etcetera. So Gotcha. Yeah. That sort of thing.
Mitchell Davis:It's just I think ultimately this is the best move for us in the long term, and it'll just be a bit of a learning curve for me to become more of an expert with React, so more experience at least. So Gotcha. Yeah. Any other questions on that part?
Gavin Tye:No. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Cool. So then onto the next thing, which is, we have made the move now to PlanetScale for hosting our database. So, I can give you an overview of what we used to run and, that it was costing us a lot of money to do this too, but it was covered by AWS credits. So it wasn't really. So we used to be running our database on Amazon's RDS service.
Mitchell Davis:We're a MySQL database, and I had it set up because I thought this was so smart. We had this global database, like, control plane layer. And that's like that's where you keep all the high level stuff. Like, okay, these are all of the users that we have in our database. Anyone that's ever used the app, that's where they live.
Mitchell Davis:Also things like teams. So organisations that are running events, they live up in there and then also like the highest level stuff about the events themselves. So, okay, the name of the event, which team it belongs to, where it's being held, etcetera. But then we had regional databases and these are where we would store information about like who's giving a talk at that event or what the list of sessions are and any questions that get asked and files that get uploaded, etcetera. Those live inside of these regional databases and long time listeners of the show would know we ran an event in August in Denmark, Laravel Live Denmark.
Mitchell Davis:And to support that we spun up infrastructure at one of these regions in Frankfurt, EU Central 1 on AWS. And we kept that running this whole time. Arguably, we could have got rid of that ages ago, but, I kept it running because it wasn't really costing us anything because we we had these $10,000 of AWS credits. And we're only about halfway through that, mind you. And that's now like a year ago or so that we got those.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. So, and you can't like they they expire, you know, next year they'll expire. So, was like, we might as well use them. And then it was a problem I didn't have to think about for now. Right?
Mitchell Davis:But what it did mean was our cost to scale into other regions were very high. Right? And so as a part of project Rendezvous, which, we'll have just a small update for you at the towards the end of the episode, there's a high likelihood we will need to scale up fairly quickly into other regions around the world so that the app and the dashboard are nice and performant for people. And that was gonna become untenable with the the way that infrastructure was running. So what I decided to do over the last two weeks or so is consolidate our databases so that instead of having this control plane global database which is replicated everywhere and then these like regional silo databases, Instead, just squish both of those two together.
Mitchell Davis:And so now we're storing all of the, like, the sessions and the speakers and the whatever. All of that exists in that same global database. What that does is it means that now, for now, we don't have any way to facilitate, like, data that should only remain in Australia, will only remain in Australia. We don't have any way to do that right now. But we're also not looking at at targeting customers that are that would need to run under that model right now.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. So Okay. With a model like that, we'll come a heftier price tag. Right? And then we could afford to spin up regional copies of this whole infrastructure.
Mitchell Davis:Right? So we'd be able to do that in the future, but we certainly don't need to do it now with only, you know, we've run like 15 events or something like that so far. So I was absolutely trying to overengineer this initially. Right. But it wasn't costing us anything.
Mitchell Davis:So I don't feel too bad about it. Anyway, now we have one database, per region, but what we've then done is made this move to PlanetScale. So I've known about PlanetScale for a few years. They're a database provider and, they've got this interesting like branching model where you could have like separate copies of your data. It's quite interesting the way they do it.
Mitchell Davis:It's been a real learning curve, and I had a lot of problems with it initially, but, we are now set up on them. So we're not running any databases on Amazon itself. We're running our databases now on PlanetScale, and it's gone really well. So I did that cut over to that I think yesterday afternoon, and then I've gone in and had a look. The app is just as performant as ever.
Mitchell Davis:And I've got plans to have it be even more performant using their replicas. We can I was showing you before this call, we can add now other regions around the world for like $20 a month for the database? Right? And then, we will have to spin up other infrastructure in other regions. But now our costs have gone from being like $500 a month per region to being less than $100 a month to add a new region.
Mitchell Davis:It's much, much better. Right? So and I feel really good that, like, PlanetScale is used by lots and lots of big companies. Slack's on there. Etsy's on there.
Mitchell Davis:There's like, there were a bunch of as I was walking you through this the other day. So I feel like we're in pretty good hands there. So yeah. So that's been fun to learn about that and to make that move. I wanted to do this prior to running the event, the Project Hammer event, which did happen on Saturday as we record, and we'll talk about that in a minute.
Mitchell Davis:But you were like, no. We can't do this right now. Yeah. And you took me back to a conversation that we had a while ago of like, okay. Within a week leading up to an event, like, let's not make any crazy changes.
Mitchell Davis:And I just wanted you correctly identified it that, like, I just needed this done. I needed this thing off my plate. It's the only thing I wanted to work on. And you're like, I know, but you can't we can't do this right now. So I did
Gavin Tye:identified way up until the lessons learned from Denmark. Right? It was like, hey, look at the touch infrastructure. Like, because there's always these, we've had a couple of red herrings pop up like recently and we, only found out too late.
Mitchell Davis:So,
Gavin Tye:and we didn't want to do that. And luckily we didn't. Right. Cause it turned out that it worked well on the weekend. So in that scenario.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Yeah. So and I had a bunch of problems with actually importing all of our existing data, so I don't think I would have been able to have it done in time. Actually, I had to reach out to their support as it was, to ask them for help because the import feature was not working. And then they came back and they and I wrote like this long.
Mitchell Davis:I was pretty pissed off. Like, I'm we are so excited to be using PlanetScout. Like, I wanted to do this for years. It's finally time. I'm trying to use your import tool.
Mitchell Davis:I'm following your docs. I'm doing everything you've said, and it is not fucking working. And then, like, on this support ticket form, like, you couldn't even add an attachment or anything. I was like, if your form would let me add attachments, I could show you, like, what's go I was just like I was a bit dumping on this support thing. Anyway, and then this, it sends me an email so I could reply to the email, and there I included the screenshots.
Mitchell Davis:And then this guy came back to me the next day, and he's like, hey. Okay. You know, I'm so sorry. I could see this is what's going on. This is what you need to do.
Mitchell Davis:He asked us to spin up a a metal instance, they call it, which is like $600 US a month to do. And I was like, okay. Sure. As long as we can then after we do this import and get it live, we can then spin it back down to being like $50 a month, which is what we're on right now. And I went and checked their docs and sure enough, you could do that.
Mitchell Davis:So I was like, okay, we'll pay the $2 or whatever it's gonna cost us to have this up for an hour and then I'll do the switch. And it worked perfectly. So they just need to update their docs, I think. But, that was super frustrating. But, yeah, it's finally done.
Mitchell Davis:So I'm feeling really good about that. We're going to I am going to spin up, a replica in Frankfurt where we still have all the existing infrastructure for, Denmark, confirm that it works, and then shut it all down because we don't need it anymore. So I just wanna know that, okay, this path will work in the future. We're not gonna run into some big issue with the way I've set this up, and then I'll shut it all down. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So, I'm feeling really good about that. Like, this has been a huge set of changes that's kind of been a couple of months in the works. I've been thinking about this since before Christmas, and finally it's done. Okay. So any questions on database stuff?
Gavin Tye:No. Not really. So but we can't use our Amazon credit towards this stuff. Right? Because that's not an an AWS.
Gavin Tye:No.
Mitchell Davis:Not for PlanetScale, but they're now the only infrastructure that's outside of our AWS account. So, oh, not true. We have three different providers. We got Cloudflare for which we pay like $10 a month or something like that. Very cheap.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Now PlanetScale, which is this $50 or so a month plus in a little bit per region and AWS. So we still have costs on AWS. Yep. But you're right.
Mitchell Davis:Like, the planet scale costs are now separate from, like, we will incur those costs. It won't be any credit based.
Gavin Tye:So the question with, the data sovereignty of having data sit in a country, like we can't even though we have just an instance set up in planet scale Sydney, that doesn't adhere to data sovereignty laws?
Mitchell Davis:It would until we need to get another region going for something. We wanna get something in The US or back in Europe or whatever. Then now instantly that data is being replicated out to other countries.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay. But what about if in the host country, it's only the writable data that sits in that, like the attendees and stuff? No, it does. It goes across all regions.
Mitchell Davis:We have one database that's shared everywhere now.
Gavin Tye:Right. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. This is like we can go back to having a model like that. It's just a lot more expensive. So therefore we'd need to Yeah. Charge accordingly.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. So I think that comes up Yeah. And when it does, we'll be able to address that fairly quickly. Yeah. I'm pretty sure.
Mitchell Davis:But, for now, no, we've got one database and let's just keep it simple, stupid.
Gavin Tye:I don't think that's a big thing with conferences or events. Right. Because it's not, Yeah. It's, I don't think it'd be a big, a big deal. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:And like, there's so many SaaS services out there that I use and have used for forever that don't offer like an Australian data center, you know, like, especially businesses in Australia would have to be used to the fact that you can't always get data sovereignty because not everybody runs all this stuff in Australia.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It does depends on the association. Would imagine that you go for the organization. Right?
Mitchell Davis:So Yes. Yeah. Or the government. You know? If we were trying to go after the government, sure.
Mitchell Davis:They're gonna want that. But the government has deep pockets. Right? So, yeah, it's we'll have to be if this comes up and it's a deal breaker for someone, then so be it. But, you know, if the deal's high enough, then we could absolutely spin out something that just works for just within the borders.
Mitchell Davis:You know? Gotcha.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. Cool. So that's database and then final thing on the infrastructure, a big part of what's driving all of this is that it helps us get towards being able to rapidly spin up new environments for things like previews and development. So we sat down last week, looked at how we could have you create a ticket in Linear, which is our, like, project management tool for all the development stuff, which we haven't really used all that much for Six Sides. I use it extensively for Atlas and, some of your other the other things I'm involved in, but there hasn't really been much need for it yet with Six Sides.
Mitchell Davis:So we're changing that now so that I'll start creating tickets in there and tracking them, but you have the ability to do it as well. And so you have already, you went in and created a what was that feature? The first feature that we started adding, chat, do remember?
Gavin Tye:Was it chat?
Mitchell Davis:Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. There was there was one other one.
Gavin Tye:The other first feature was, the ability to select photos. That's what it was.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So, basically giving Gavin the ability to go in, create a ticket, and you used ChatGPT to come up with like the right type of language that needed to be in this ticket. And then it went and you can connect it up to your cursor cloud agents, which I'd never used before. And it can then spin up your app, make the changes, and then submit a pull request for you on GitHub, which we use. And so that's really exciting for us because that unlocks like a lot of potential for you being able to get in and make whatever changes you might want.
Mitchell Davis:And of course, it's still my job to go review them and architect it properly and stuff, but you could at least if and we'll get there. If you are able to actually then go see those changes for yourself on the website or in the app, that would be very powerful. Cause then you could go, hey Mitch, I just created this thing. Can you go have a look at that? And this it's like gives us a way better way of coming up with like ideas, right, and being able to talk about them if you can actually see it there on the screen and it won't involve anything from me until it's time to actually approve that work.
Mitchell Davis:Right? So a big part of what I'm doing here is is kind of getting our infrastructure in a state where we can support multiple copies of the of the code base. Right. And different databases so that you're not going in and messing with our production database. Right.
Mitchell Davis:And neither am I to that effect, like everything should be protected the whole way through. So, yeah. So I'm working over the next couple weeks in and amongst other projects that we're doing, but I'm working on basically replacing Laravel Vapor, which is what I've been using for five years now or something like that to provision Blaravel apps and run them on a serverless infrastructure on AWS, which means we can scale up and down really quickly as, as like a big surge of traffic comes in, which is exactly what happens at some of these events. We'll still be using Lambda, but I won't be provisioning it through Laravel Vapor anymore because it feels like they're kind of they're not working on Vapor anymore. They're focused the Laravel team is focused on other projects.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. And it's really hard to automate deployments and stuff like that with Vapor, spinning up new projects, new preview environments, etcetera. So I'll be looking at replacing Vapor. Won't lead to any cost savings for us, but it'll mean we've got control and the ability to spin things up and down when we need it. So, yeah, I'm doing all of this using Terraform, which is new to me as well, but really enjoying it.
Mitchell Davis:Terraform's like this way to automatically create infrastructure based on code instead of like clicking on a website and selecting this option and hitting deploy or whatever. It's all automated. So that's cool. And then, yeah, once I've got Vapor out of the way, then we can start doing these preview environments. So you'll be able to talk to Cursor, talk to Linear.
Mitchell Davis:That'll go run for half an hour, and then it'll send you a message and go, okay, done. Here's the link. Then you can click on it and see it live. Then the the last part of this will be yeah. And then once that code is either approved or or rejected, it'll then shut all that down.
Mitchell Davis:So we're saving those costs. And the very final piece when we get there will be the ability to do that with the mobile app as well. So we'll have a copy of like our staging app and you when you open it, it'll go, okay. Hey, which version of the app do you wanna run? And so if you've got the if you've got linear to go and create all of this stuff to the mobile app, you'll then be able to go click in and look at it on your own phone as well.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:So that's all coming in the next few months. It's gonna take some time. I don't wanna lose all progress on like the dashboard and things like that just for the pursuit of this. We gotta keep moving forward, but, it's certainly really fun. Like, this is a fun Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Thing to get set up.
Gavin Tye:It does go back to what we were saying around. We need to commit to getting to a stage of development and then we can put a pin in it and go to another one. Cause it's so easy at the moment to half start stuff like to start stuff and not finish it. I think that's the real discipline, right. Is to finish it off, to make sure it's valuable.
Gavin Tye:And then move on to something else otherwise. Yeah, I saw a good, yeah. I saw a good illustration the other day about, did I, did I save it? I'll look for it. It was about when you multitask and when you stay on task, how much more you can get done opposed to just jumping from one to the next.
Gavin Tye:So I said, I'm sure I found it. Cause I wanted to,
Mitchell Davis:All the context switching. Right? That's a killer.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So I am proud of how I've done this though. Like, I've stayed very focused on, okay, one one of these things at a time. Move us to one database. Okay. Great.
Mitchell Davis:Now move us to PlanetScout. Great. Now let's replace Vapor. Great. And then slowly starting to figure out all these pieces.
Mitchell Davis:And I'm doing a lot of that prioritization work when I go on these walks because I've just started using over the last week, I've started using the Chattypitty voice mode. So I'm spending an hour, like, hashing out a project, and then I'll come in the next day using the chat based interface and go, okay, summarise this whole thing for me and then give me what are the next steps I need to take today and then that's what I go and implement. And it's been working. So Yep. I know that over the next few days I'll be getting rid of larable vapour.
Mitchell Davis:That's the plan. So yeah. So
Gavin Tye:it sounds like the walking is being really productive for you in many ways, right, for you to think about?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. The voice model is a bit dumb. It's like it tries to, I don't know. It just does a lot of stuff that I'm like, okay, great.
Mitchell Davis:I feel like I'm talking to a five year old here. But, then being able to come back in, it's like night and day when you compare the text based stuff versus the voice stuff. It can then reread everything that got talked about over an hour and give it to you in a couple paragraphs. Like, it does it does work. So, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Look. That's infrastructure week. So hopefully for you technical people out there, you've you've enjoyed that. And sorry that hopefully, you got something interesting out of there as Mate,
Gavin Tye:I was scrolling through my emails while you
Mitchell Davis:were going in.
Gavin Tye:See. Yeah. You're probably on Twitter
Mitchell Davis:or something. I don't know. But,
Gavin Tye:like, the the
Mitchell Davis:especially, like, the cost saving aspect, the ability to auto scale into other regions, not auto scale, but for us to move fairly cheaply into other regions, that's compelling. And then the this live preview stuff. It's amazing. Yeah. Like, this would not have been doable two years ago, you know, like, this has come along pretty quick.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, once we get that next like, I'll keep trying to just add, a couple small updates and things like that in as we record in future shows just to to keep people posted. Right? But, yeah, very exciting stuff. It's all fun times for me.
Gavin Tye:It's a begs the question is if project rendezvous, which we're expecting to hear back this week around the result. Yep. If we were to if we were successful there is how do we support you to get people to come in and help you? Which I think that's a really, is one of the next things we need to solve is because there's a lot of different things that you you're developing these amazing strategies and you're going building these great frameworks, but having someone to come in behind you and fill in those gaps that we can't get to, to really round that out, I think is really important. Like let you do your big picture stuff and amazing, fantastic things, but getting people to come in after and go, hey, we still got some stuff to do on the app.
Gavin Tye:Put this chat functionality in or do this other stuff that we know there's just one or two niggly things on each thing to support you on doing that. So you can continue on making these massive strides in functionality and differentiation.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Well, the the thing is, like, there's now that once this infrastructure work is done, I intend for that to sit there and just run for a year or two. Like, I really we will have to come in and go, okay, great. Let's add something in US East 1 or whatever. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:But that'll take five minutes. If I've done my job here
Gavin Tye:Yes.
Mitchell Davis:That'll only take five minutes. So it's Yes. I think, like, we're still far too early to be hiring. I know we've talked about it on the show like 10 episodes back or so, something like that. Episode 42.
Mitchell Davis:But we're still a long way away from that. If project rendezvous does come off, then we'll be closer. But, I think I still have a lot more time that I can put towards this myself to fill in those gaps. Yeah. I don't know that we'll have to hire yet for that.
Mitchell Davis:But look, who knows? I just it's not mandatory because, like, there'll only be so many large things that I'm like, okay. I need to be the one to focus on
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And have someone else fill in the gaps. Probably not.
Gavin Tye:But we like, I understand what you're saying, but we also spoke the other day about the next iteration of six sides and where that's likely to go, which we're not going to speak about that here, but that opens up another area of stuff like of functionality that we need to have while still filling in the gaps of all the stuff we have to do today. So I see this evolving all the time. It may not be someone full time. That's where we've to figure out how to, can we split them across different areas of the businesses that we operate so we can spread costs and then slowly move them in. But yeah, it's yeah.
Gavin Tye:Cause both of us, this is what I think when you've done it in some of your other businesses is, and I haven't yet to do it in my businesses, transition from the business owner slash employee to do the business owner managing people, which I think which I haven't been able to do. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, interesting stuff.
Gavin Tye:Like it's fantastic. Like I've never been able to bridge the gap between sales or client facing through to, development. I just never had the patience or couldn't speak in the language or, or be able to position it away and stay across it to have it scheduled in the roadmap and then have it done and then review. Like I just client facing or outwardly facing is I was never in the office enough to do that. So, and there is a, there is some stuff lost in translation there as well.
Gavin Tye:Like, it'd be interesting to even sit down with a client and talk it through and I go, hang on, let while we're on this hour meeting, let's just knock this out and just see what it does look like. See if it comes up with something.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It's true. Yeah. That would be really cool. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Because they're not, they're not gonna get that with other, like other well established players, you know? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. And it's okay. Yeah. Anyway.
Gavin Tye:Okay. So like I mentioned, we got project rendezvous. We're hoping, to hear back from them this week. I spoke to them briefly on Friday and you said, look, they're due to hear back, but they are a little slow. I would say this week we would hear.
Gavin Tye:Right? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And just to know if we have this deal with this very large project that would be a game changer for this business. So I would, I would expect that that would give us
Gavin Tye:a yes in principle, but then they would have to do their due diligence, which is another thing we need to if they do do that, we have to sit down and plan that out, what that looks like. Because I have lost things on due diligence before, which I'm sure you have too. We just gotta make sure we get ahead of and anticipate all the things they're gonna ask us and then, and then be ready, proactively ready for that. So, yeah. So that that's interesting.
Gavin Tye:You're working on the final draft of a magazine editorial we've been, off offered to put in for the civil contractors federation, which is due today as well?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So I do need to get that done. It's nowhere near it yet.
Mitchell Davis:So Yep. Yeah. It's just been it's been a lot to do. We're very appreciative of the opportunity. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:But there's been no shortage of other things for me to tackle, especially with this infrastructure stuff and especially with the changes that we needed for the project hammer event, which ran this weekend just gone. So Yeah. Yeah. We need a we need to hire a designer. I know we can't we don't have enough work for anyone to do right now anyway.
Mitchell Davis:But yeah. Ugh. Just sometimes I just don't wanna get in and do it. But, you know, I will. We'll get it done.
Gavin Tye:I think it's one of those, I don't know how you're just thinking about it. Maybe it's like, what do we have any external timelines or deadlines that we need to work to? Or is it other things? And then maybe we prioritize those external deadlines first then do other stuff. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:It just comes down to like willpower and discipline. Prioritising. Yeah. I would have got in and done this on Wednesday last week, but I instead I wanted really to work on this infrastructure stuff Like Yeah. So Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. And that's the benefit of being your own boss, but it's also, like, it's a con of it. Right? Like, if this was if I was working for you, you know, and you'd say, fuck no. You need to go work on this magazine thing and get that done, and I would have had it done on Wednesday morning, but we're not.
Mitchell Davis:Right? So yeah. Anyway Yep. It's alright. So get that done.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I do think we should not send it to them by close of business on Monday. I think we should try to get it to them as quick as we can if possible.
Mitchell Davis:I will. I'll be looking at it just after lunch. So Yeah. Alright. So let's talk about the weekend.
Mitchell Davis:So
Gavin Tye:Look, it was a bit of a bit of a, let's call it a shit show, but a massive lessons come out of it and it's been like, it has been, you know, it's a good lesson. Like, there's been a lot of lessons we learned. So first and foremost is our Canberra trip got disrupted. So I tried to book some trips. I made some connections with some people in Canberra to fill out my day, there.
Gavin Tye:And unfortunately on Friday afternoon, twenty minutes after I booked the car and all that kind of stuff, the people that we're gonna meet canceled. And I was like, damn it. Like, I was still gonna go down and then just try to wing it and find some people. And you're like, look, don't do it. Like, it's just a waste of effort.
Gavin Tye:Like, just cancel that. And so I canceled the camper trip and they still wanna meet. They just, it was just didn't work out.
Mitchell Davis:So,
Gavin Tye:so I ended up flying into Sydney on Saturday. And then on Friday, Friday, sorry. And then as we were planning the event on, project hammer, for the event on Saturday, just as on a plane, we got a text and said, hey, plans have changed. We don't need you to come to site anymore, to the conference anymore. We won't do it ourselves.
Gavin Tye:And, so that was a disruption. So we were coming down to Sydney for that, which was unfortunate in the interim, but what ended up happening is they still had a great event. They still, we, we work really closely with the event organizer there, Joe. And she said their feedback from everyone there was really positive. So, it did.
Gavin Tye:The silver lining of that was, is I was always thinking we need to go to events for a while to build rapport and all that kind of stuff. It may look like we don't need to. So, but what we do need to do is develop an event manager success playbook So we can give it to them as a bit of a training manual on how to get the best out of six sides, both with the dashboard and how to set up an event or make sure they get everything they want from the event. Also during the event. So what all the functionality is, how to use a leaderboard, how to send notifications, all this kind of stuff.
Gavin Tye:So, it's actually turned out pretty, it's been a blessing in disguise and, I initially didn't see it on Friday. And I thought I took it personally that we were asked, that they said that they didn't want us to go there because they didn't need us. And I was like, hang on, we're coming down for it. But it ended up being, I think a blessing in disguise. So we'll do a lessons learned with them this week.
Gavin Tye:And then, you know, I'll start working that event managers, playbook as well. So we can not be bound to go to events every single time. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. I think it's good. Well said. What it did is it opened an opportunity for us to catch up and grab Brecky with Nicole. So originally, we were gonna do lunch in the city, which is where project hammer was being held.
Mitchell Davis:And instead, we got to go somewhere fairly close to us and to where Dean lives. And, yeah, we got to catch up and have breakfast with Nicole at a cafe. So how was that? Mate, Nicole's Nicole's my fiance for anyone that doesn't know.
Gavin Tye:It was good. It was great to see Nicole. Like, I've only seen her online. So, yeah, it was good to hang out. And, yeah, it was, it was fun.
Gavin Tye:We're having there were some stories I think you heard about me that you didn't know.
Mitchell Davis:And I did. Yeah. I got some ammo now. Next time you wanna feel, you know, be a prick at me. Yep.
Gavin Tye:But yeah, Nuckett was fun. It was oh, it's always good to catch up. So, yeah, yeah, it was great. So the, the weekend trip down there ended up being, positive. So I spent a lot of time watching soccer, which was good.
Gavin Tye:I was out at Penrith yesterday. And, yeah. But I think there's some good lessons to be learned out of the weekend for both planning trips to go places and also, being on-site to deliver conferences. We don't necessarily need to do that every single time. So Yep.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Right. Awesome. We now have the dice. Did we tell people? I think we told people that last week.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So the dice I think we did. They did show up. I have definitely have them here.
Mitchell Davis:I think so. Yeah. And so you brought some down for me. You brought what I thought was a lot, and then you told me you've got like five times that back at at home.
Gavin Tye:You got a thousand dice. I reckon you got 200.
Mitchell Davis:So, what we're going to do is firstly, we need to mail a set out to Nick. It's Nick Taylor because he, left us that. He put up a post on LinkedIn about it and responded to what we were asking about. So thanks, Nick. We'll have to I don't know if you've already got his details.
Mitchell Davis:I've got
Gavin Tye:his details.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Perfect. So, Nick, if you're listening, hopefully you are, we'll we'll send you some dice out soon. But we're also thinking of doing a bit of a a more personal touch of sending out some dice to some leads or some people that we've worked with before and just kind of that being a bit of a differentiator because I doubt that, you know, our main competitors out there would be doing that sort of personal touch stuff, especially in the price point, like, category that we're operating in at the moment. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So that's that was a cool idea of yours this morning. So we'll we'll start looking at some of that this week to to try and get some dice out there. Let's leverage these dice we've got. Yeah. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:They look great as well. They've come up really well. So yeah, we could definitely reorder these again. And I
Gavin Tye:think a third, no, I think they're probably a third of the price of what those ones we're gonna order for AIM were. So yeah. Yeah. So we can actually, order some more. I think these are I've got some good ideas with them.
Gavin Tye:Hey. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We'll keep that for future episodes.
Mitchell Davis:So then final thing on the subject of AIM, tomorrow, we will be sitting down to email out to everyone that like, the different leads and conversations that we had with people at AIM so that we don't I'm starting to feel a little worried that, okay, have we already missed out on following up with some of those opportunities? And and you pointed out, no. It's only been two weeks. So this is probably the perfect time to be emailing out, having given people some time to get back in the swing of things. And yeah, so hopefully, there'll be some more meetings and things that come out of that.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. Yep. So Cool. Next week will be episode 53. It'll be our one year of podcasting anniversary.
Gavin Tye:I already think it's our anniversary. It's fifty two weeks is a year.
Mitchell Davis:So It's not the way it works. Yeah. There's some math there. I I reckon if you talk with chat GPT, it would tell you that, no, one year anniversary would be next week. But Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Whatever. Yep. That's contentious. Alright. Anyway, so look forward to that.
Mitchell Davis:We would love if you would leave us a rating or review on, Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this from. If there are any, we will read them out next week at the the top of the show. If there's not, you'll know because we haven't addressed it. Just being transparent. But it would be much appreciated if if you would leave us a rating and a review.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. We haven't had any
Gavin Tye:for a while. So, yeah, if anyone can leave us a review on on Apple or, yeah, as a or, like, on a podcast and they let us know, take a screenshot, send it to us at June at Six Hides. We'll send you some dice.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. There you go. Okay. And these are good dice, mind you. Like, you'll you'll want these dice.
Mitchell Davis:I'm telling you.
Gavin Tye:Yep. I've got three colors to choose from. Yep. We'll send you one of each.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. We'll send you one of each. That's right. So yeah. Perfect.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Well, mate, where can people find you online?
Gavin Tye:LinkedIn is the main place. Gavin Ty, t y e, and also at 6sides.co. You can get in contact with me there.
Mitchell Davis:Amazing. And you can find me on LinkedIn and a lot of other places under the handle Mitch Dev. Just before
Gavin Tye:you go. So if anyone's listening here and they're trying to grow their business or, or trying to find leads and they wanna run more in person events, we'd love to use you as a case study. So reach out to us and we'll, we'll help you set up an event to help people connect better and help you become a pillar of that community. So, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Thanks. Amazing. Yep. Good. Good idea.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Yeah. I hope you all have a good week, and we'll catch you next episode. Bye, mate.