Hey. This is editor Mitch. I wanna let you know for the first thirteen minutes or so Gavin's audio in this is a little quiet. And then when he turns on a certain program, later in the episode, you'll hear that his audio bumps up a bit. I tried to figure it out in post.
Mitchell Davis:Riverside makes it really hard to play with this sort of stuff. So I'm sorry. Hopefully, you can hear him, and and get through. We've got the full transcript on the website if you wanna suss it out, by the way. Not enough for y'all having a look on the website, I could see.
Mitchell Davis:So, anyway, enjoy the episode. Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, CTO and Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:I'm Gavin Tye, CEO of SixSides
Mitchell Davis:We've we've changed up the the intro a little. We are documenting our journey as we build our SaaS, sixsides.co, which is a community building platform focused on events. This show gives insights into both the business and tech of running a remote startup in 2026. How are you going, mate? Good, mate.
Mitchell Davis:Yourself? I'm good. I'm really good. This is a huge week for us, and, I'm really excited to tell everyone about what we're doing.
Gavin Tye:Mate, I just realized we're into year two and, we've beat 23 to twenty five percent of other startups that failed within the first year.
Mitchell Davis:Really? Is it that many?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It's actually eighteen months. It's thirty two percent. So we're up, we're about that. We're better than others.
Gavin Tye:Not better. We've survived, survived more.
Mitchell Davis:We survived longer.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. 32% of other startups. So look at
Mitchell Davis:us, mate. Yeah. You too. I didn't even know. That's fantastic.
Gavin Tye:The business has gone through a bit of a change at the moment. Hasn't it? So we've gone from just you and I working in the business, trying to make it work to now where we're making that shift to getting people to work in it with us. Right?
Mitchell Davis:That's right. So it's in the title of the show, but we are hiring. It's actually happening. So you are hiring for someone to help with lead gen and marketing and a bit of admin work. Yep.
Mitchell Davis:And I'm hiring for two developers actually at the moment. So we put job ads up. This week, you got, like, 30 applicants or something, twenty, thirty within an hour. I was blown away. I'd never seen that before.
Mitchell Davis:So you actually like, was it that night or the next morning that you paused the job ad?
Gavin Tye:Cause it
Mitchell Davis:was just too many.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. It's too,
Mitchell Davis:it's too much. So I've got enough. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. So I was speaking to another client of mine today and I told him what we were doing and he was, and I was, and I said to him, I would like to add more value to him and make sure he gets more value. So I'm going to hire two and I'll use one in helping with my other clients as well. So we can probably juggle some people across both there.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Just because mate, it's now that we're into this stage, it's like, oh, let's do it properly then. Right? Yeah. So it's been good though.
Mitchell Davis:It's really exciting. Yeah. It's great. It's freaking awesome. Like, this is where I hoped we would kind of get to at some point.
Mitchell Davis:You talked last week or maybe it was the week before about, like, making myself more redundant within all the businesses that I'm involved in because, you know, hopefully over the next few years start to have kids and like I'll have less time to actually be on the tools you know so to speak. And yeah I took that to heart. I've thought about that pretty seriously. So it is exciting even in in another business that I'm involved in. We're doing the same thing at the moment and like hiring a developer there.
Mitchell Davis:And so I know this isn't gonna be like the answer to all our problems or like restrictions on time. This this is still gonna take serious time to manage people that we hire. But, yeah, it's bloody exciting like to be moving down this path and it feels like we're doing this responsibly. Like, I don't feel like we're doing this too early. The like, the bank balance is healthy.
Mitchell Davis:It's like healthier than it's ever been. You know? We've got invoices. You invoiced someone yesterday for something I wasn't even involved in it at all. Like, it's fantastic.
Mitchell Davis:You know? Things are happening now. So, yeah, really exciting time.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I agree. It's it's really yes. As far as you being redundant, like, one thing that I was grateful when I, when we had Harper for the first time is I could take a little bit more time off. I took a whole month off opposed to just two weeks off.
Gavin Tye:But if you can work towards even just being able to come in for an hour a week or two hours a week to be able to manage everyone and just check-in to make sure everything's on track, then you can take an infinite amount of time off if you want. Right. Sure. And the business isn't going to stop. It'll still keep going.
Gavin Tye:And, I want that for you. Right. You and Nicole really at the end of the day. And, and that's across all your businesses. So yeah, that it's, it's, it's really good.
Gavin Tye:Months ago it was even maybe twelve months ago, there's a guy called Dan Martell. He's really predominant on YouTube. He was talking about how to hire remotely. And one thing that really stuck with me, I think I've sent him the video, his video to you, Mitch, but I think we should relook at it again specifically, but he talks about having SOPs for everything, because if you don't have a standard operating procedure, then people will make it up and it won't be aligned with what you want. And then it's our fault.
Gavin Tye:And I even heard this week where they said if the 90% of failure comes from not having the right instruction. Right. When you're hiring someone remotely. I guess it's a bit different for you because you're used to handling developers and you're using something like linear with tickets and stuff. That's not like that in my world.
Gavin Tye:Right. We don't, we don't run like that. So, but I think we can be a lot more prescriptive. I should be a lot more prescriptive. He even said, Dan Martell said there's a SOP for an SOP.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I've had to come up with it. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So I started planning that this week around what I wanted to do, the outputs or where we're going to pay attention to, and it helped me come up with a high level plan. It also helped me identify some gaps in what I've been operating on that I've been doing with in feel and probably haven't got the best outcome that I should get, particularly in deal buddy. So, okay. If I'm like that, there's no way in the world people can emulate what I'm trying to do if I'm not getting the results because of that.
Gavin Tye:I'm actually reading a book at the moment about positioning called, obviously awesome. And I'm going to go put both businesses through that. Yeah. Great. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:So yeah, it's good. There's a mate. I haven't had this much on in this two, these two weeks than I've had in my life going on in a long time.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah.
Gavin Tye:With personal stuff and work stuff.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. There's a lot happening, but it's all it's exciting stuff. So, we we put up the job ads. You told me that you were using Chat Chippy Tea has this browser, Atlas browser, where it can kind of do stuff in your browser for you. I'd never used it before, but you mentioned that you were using it to was that to go back and just send like an automatic reply to some of the people you're interested in?
Mitchell Davis:What were you using it for?
Gavin Tye:It wasn't that good on that on that front going in and sending messages. It was getting stuck on that, but it helped me identify. Cause I think there was something like 49 people who replied. Right. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Some of them were just shit and, but some were pretty good. Like I've shortlisted about five, I think. And so, but it helped me sort through them and actually give me, it made a recommendation on the top 15 to look at. And it got a little bit wrong on the AP score because the AP score, I think, was how much they want the job. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It's like applicant points or something like that. And they get to assign that. So Yep. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So we had a look at it. It just helped me do, it was actually pretty good. And, I've never used Atlas before and it's made me think about running a third screen with just a brow Atlas browser or a Claude browser in the background, just allowing me to do other things in to make me more productive on bigger projects, like what you're you're working on in your world. Yep.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It's really it was interesting. I couldn't find a use case for it, but now I'm finding it. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, I I had heard about it, about the Atlas browser ages ago, and then I I was just like, yeah, I don't know. Why would I need that? But I have you highlighting this of like, yeah, I can get it to analyse these applicants.
Mitchell Davis:This is like a game changer because, yeah, going through and doing this, like hiring for this the other business, I've spent we've done that in fits and starts like over the last six months or something like that. Listed the job out a few times, got a bunch of applicants, and then never really taken it to that next step. And that's for a bunch of different reasons, but this enables us to move so much faster. So I then went and looked at the applicants for this other job that I'm hiring for and had it go through and give me like summaries on people and recommend, okay, who we should contact. And that was like, that was awesome.
Mitchell Davis:So then I've done the same thing because we have listed the job ad for for the developer as well. And there's, I think right now there's like 21 applicants and it only went up yesterday, Arvo. So, pretty good. And again, that's like an overwhelming amount of stuff to to look at. Right?
Mitchell Davis:I could have done it for sure. It's it's doable. But yeah, to to have it go through and look at it.
Gavin Tye:All looks the same after a while. Right? Like they all That's right. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So so, yeah, so this has gone through and it's recommended a bunch of people to follow-up with. I think there's six here that I'll probably go through. So I will have a look at all of these profiles, but yeah, like, why not use it if if it's there to help with this sort of stuff?
Gavin Tye:Do think it's funny. I use the, I use, ChatGPT to build a job ad right from what I need. And then I posted it, then I can tell people replied with ChatGPT. Yeah. And so then I reposted a set of follow-up questions and they replied with chatty PT or, or whatever.
Mitchell Davis:It's everyone's agents just talking to each other.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. And we're managing it. So
Mitchell Davis:It's the same thing. I'm having the exact same thing happening in this other business that I'm talking about where one of the partners of that business is currently exiting. And so we're going through, like, terms of that exit and things like that. And you can tell every single every side of this, email thread is just chat g p t, and we're all trying to use the right words to explain exactly how we, you know, wanna approach different things. But, yeah, none of like, I reckon that's that's gonna become the new norm.
Mitchell Davis:Like yep. Yeah. Because it's just it's an easier pathway. Okay. Just have it.
Mitchell Davis:I I use Super Whisper, which is this, like, voice annotation thing on my computer. And then I can just talk into my microphone, have it transcribe it, and then put that into chat chippy tea, and then it can go spit out a full email or, you know, go through. That's basically, I'm not typing a whole lot anymore because I'm just using cursor. Yeah. I use cursor.
Mitchell Davis:I mean, I still do some typing. Right? But when I'm here in the office, you know, 90% of the time I'm if I'm talking with an agent, it's through just talking. So, yeah, I could just have it go, okay, let's come up with this email. And then there's a bit of copy and paste from ChatGibbyTee into Gmail or whatever.
Mitchell Davis:Like, it's yeah.
Gavin Tye:It's great. Might have a look at is that we watched that video on
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Aaron Francis.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Using Super Whisper?
Mitchell Davis:He was using a different one. I don't know the name of it, but, yeah, same basic thing. So, specifically, the video we watched is Aaron Francis's most recent one at the time of recording, which is about our designers cooked or something like that.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And the video is on what's the thing? Stitch? Is that what it's called? Stitch. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Stitch from Google. So and it's like a UI builder. It looks amazing. So it's a great video. Go check it out.
Mitchell Davis:I'll put it in the show notes. But yeah, he's using some sort of dictation program to do speech to text and then paste that into an agent, and I'm doing the exact same thing. So Right. Yeah. You might end up liking that.
Mitchell Davis:I am. School. That's right. Yeah. This is the next level of it.
Mitchell Davis:And it's not the same as if you click like in chat GPT itself, you can click the like the talk button and then you're entering, okay, it's talking back to you mode. And that I find is still useful when I go on my walks. Like if I wanna chat through something, I'll do that. But yeah, if you just don't wanna have to type, you can just talk and it does an amazing job.
Gavin Tye:So Right.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I'll put a link to Super Whisper in the notes as well. But there's lots of these tools out there. Some people like other ones. But, yeah, give it a go.
Mitchell Davis:It's cool.
Gavin Tye:Well, you won't need to send it to me, mate, because as we're talking about it, I'm setting that up. Yeah. Can look around. Yep. Very good.
Mitchell Davis:Mate, let's get into, some other big news for us. Project Rendezvous continues to progress. Yeah. So why don't you give us the most up to date info?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Well, it went through to the committee for review, and it got approved. So now we're moving into the contract phase. So now he started we've gotta go through and work out deliverables and things like that. And I did say to him, we're we're happy to work under that MOU.
Gavin Tye:And he said, that's great. That's so much easier. We do
Mitchell Davis:payment milestones. Full formal contract or something like that.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. We'll our terms and stuff like that. But other than that, we're w hopefully you sign off by next week. We still gotta we still have to catch up with them and talk about milestones because it's been a bit of a delay in responding.
Mitchell Davis:It has. Yeah. We haven't had an actual call with them in what, two months now or something. Right?
Gavin Tye:Ages. But it is to their timeline, to their credit. They said we wanna have this wrapped up by the March and we are at the March. So it's well within their timeline. But again, we can't we couldn't pull the trigger on anything until we got a word.
Gavin Tye:But things have changed now anyway, and we've got more clients coming on board so we can make this decision anyway. Yeah, it's really it's it's close. We're really close now. And, and we're we're in anticipation, but we could sustain it with these other the developers as well if we didn't win it. But we'll be putting all our resources to to make sure we hit those milestones to make sure we go above and beyond, I think.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I'm really excited on the sales side to see, okay, with more resources, how many more customers can we get?
Mitchell Davis:Because I've got a pretty good understanding of what we can do with the dev side. Right? But, yeah, what does it look like to all of a sudden have like what is this person's title that you're you'd be hiring for six sites?
Gavin Tye:I don't know. I don't think it'll be it'll be lead generation slash LinkedIn con like content marketer or growth marketer. It'll be yeah. Lead gen slash growth marketer. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay. It won't be an EA. I don't think so. I don't wanna confuse that.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Cause that's a slightly different use case. Right.
Mitchell Davis:That's executive assistant.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So that's the main thing there. And that's what I want to figure out.
Gavin Tye:What does that growth market apart look like? And how can we use the lead generation in a way to it's getting harder to use lead generation, to do lead generation online. So we have to ramp up our volume to get the results. There's no other way around it. So I don't know how what that looks like, which I'll gotta figure out and I'll execute, which I haven't had the headspace to do it.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. But we do have the ability to really quickly just stand up an event really fast for someone and, get, you know, we did it with the safety conference. They were like, yeah, absolutely ready to go. And we, whatever we charged them, it was really quick. And that opens up the conversation later.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I got an email back from, the people who have the women in aviation event coming up yesterday and I offered them an introductory price. I said, yes, can we connect after Easter? We want to move forward with this. I forgot to tell you that yesterday.
Gavin Tye:Amazing. Yeah. It's not, it's nowhere near anything, what we've charged. It's really just really crumbs. Right.
Gavin Tye:But we know we can set it up really fast, but it gets our foot in the door.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. No. I'd take that any day. So that's great.
Gavin Tye:So the value proposition for us and our positioning is really, I think it's really simple for six sides. Yeah. Now because we're spreading the resources across six sides for now and Deal Buddy, I've identified that my value proposition and my positioning at Deal Buddy is not right. I need to work on it. I need to work on it fast.
Gavin Tye:And I feel like we'll go back to more around the, earlier stage founder route so we can help more people at time at once. We do need to develop some tools to help them develop tools. But again, able to think about hiring these people have, it's just changed what I'm thinking about and it's gone, oh fuck, I've had that problem there the whole time. I just haven't been able to, I've just haven't thought of it. So yeah, it's, it's really good.
Gavin Tye:It's really good. It's good. I'm I'm looking forward. Yeah. Absolutely.
Gavin Tye:That probably brings us into the Deal Buddy discussion. Right? Sure.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So you've been Deal Buddy's been a project of yours now basically for as long as Six Sides has. Right? I think you launched both of them.
Gavin Tye:It before. It was before yeah. Because because that's why I reckon I started in August or September, maybe July before. Okay. That's one
Mitchell Davis:of the reasons
Gavin Tye:why I was hesitant to say yes to Six Sides because it was already underway.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. So then, for those who don't know, and I'll put a link in the show notes for Deal Buddy as well. So Deal Buddy is like well, how would you define it?
Mitchell Davis:Because I don't wanna label it wrong.
Gavin Tye:How would you define it? Because
Mitchell Davis:Sure. Okay. Alright. I'll tell you. So it is Wrong.
Mitchell Davis:No. It is a, it's like sales coaching AI tool. So specifically, maybe I could give, like, use cases and then you can tell me how to put this in like a product category, but specifically, like it helps with working with leads through the them becoming like a customer journey. Right? So a sales journey.
Mitchell Davis:It's helping them through there. And specifically, it incorporates all of the stuff that you have done and published under Sales Market Fit, your philosophies on sales, and then, basically, like, you're putting information about the lead, and specifically, I know you use it for proper butchering, I don't. Yeah. No. I don't well, I'm I'm explaining the use case.
Mitchell Davis:Right? And then you can come in with the with the one line pitch of how
Gavin Tye:this works. Right? Sure.
Mitchell Davis:So you use it. I know this for six sides plus, you know, other, clients that you have to go, hey. Okay. We just had this meeting with this person. Let's send an email summary, etcetera.
Mitchell Davis:And it knows all this stuff. It's got all this context. So it's like a highly specific version of chat GPT, which covers sales, right, using your philosophy. So maybe that's maybe I got towards the end of it. So how do you define it?
Gavin Tye:Well, that's what I'm going through the positioning exercise at the moment to redefine it. But, essentially, what it what it does is it monitors the interactions between a salesperson or a founder and their client. Right? So we aware of the principle, every action has a reaction. Right?
Gavin Tye:And so the way we act in a sales meeting or a meeting with a client has an impact on that client. It's either gonna move them closer to the sale or further away or won't have an impact at all. But unfortunately, most people go, Hey, this is what I do. I'm going to send you a proposal. And I hope that they buy, but it doesn't actually help a client move closer to having enough demand or need in that opportunity to buy it.
Gavin Tye:So what six sides or what deal buddy does is monitors the interest and the amount of demand in the buyer and provides guidance to move them through to the right so they will eventually wanna buy. And we used it extensively with project rendezvous because we wanted to position it. And it's actually project Ronde View is the first case study of it being helped this particular process and it helping with by adding value, really articulating the problem and really going above and beyond and helping them see that there is a real outcome that they can get from it, which I, which is a, which there's two ways. It's exciting project run of you for me. Okay.
Gavin Tye:And so that's what deal buddy has done. Actually helps it it's been, it's been the culmination of six years of work of me trying to figure out this strategy that is completely different to what other people would think about with selling is to make things easier. It's kind of like a sales Sherpa. You take the heavy lifting off the client so they can get to a buying choice really easy. And if you don't do that, you're asking too much work on the buyer to do.
Gavin Tye:And sometimes that, and often that will lead to a no decision or a look, I'll talk to me next month. I don't have the time. Right. So we're trying to make it like that. So, that's kind of where
Mitchell Davis:it is. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, thank you for that.
Mitchell Davis:So that covers what Deal Buddy is, but then the relevance here is that, Deal Buddy at the moment, like so I'd known about Deal Buddy and we've been talking about it since, you know, November 2024. Right? And you had kind of had this idea once it was clear that you and I worked pretty well together that we would basically start working together on Deal Buddy as well. Right? And kind of have a biz a shared business together and we kind of work on six sides and we also work on Deal Buddy.
Mitchell Davis:And so you've talked multiple times on the show about okay starting to bring me into deal buddy and figuring out okay how could that work and what does this look like? And so as we're progressing with the hiring now, it's like, okay, we've got a real opportunity to bring someone in as a developer to help with transitioning Deal Buddy off of the tech stack that it's on now, which leverages Bubble and NAN and Pinecone. Pinecone. That's right. Like, we went through you showed me and invited me into all the different parts that make up the application, and there's a lot of stuff in there that I've never touched before, never even seen.
Mitchell Davis:And and you're coming across like some rate limiting issues. So we had to get in there and update something to use a different AI model, a different LLM. And, yeah, it was like, oh my god. This is complex, which is fine. Like, it it is a complex application.
Mitchell Davis:Right? But it's it's just a very different stack than what I've ever used. And so the idea that you have had, for the past couple months now and now we're starting to put this in place is, okay, let's transition that out of using that tech stack and instead over to using a tech stack that I'm familiar with so that I can get in and make progress on the on the project. We can do hiring and that will we'll get some synergy there with Six Sides and and Deal Buddy. And so, yeah, we're starting to look at that.
Gavin Tye:So the reality is is the attention to run two of these businesses is gonna be too much to find leads for Deal Buddy and, Six Sides, right, for for myself. And you've got so many other things going on too. Yeah. But it, there is real value there. So what I want to do is, make six sides the primary client of Deal Buddy and build Deal Buddy out to, to build a world class business, sales business in six sides.
Gavin Tye:Right? And I think that will be a real differentiator. And there's some really interesting things that we've spoken about, which we won't speak about here today. That could really be a game changer, particularly for people coming to us right, over time. But the the thing is is we identified this.
Gavin Tye:I I think we would have spoken about RecruitKit back in the day where you just spent all your time developing and not selling. And yesterday you were like, it's the inverse. You you don't have the ability to develop. And I was like, no, I'm I'm proper fucked. And I was like, I would I wanna we work well together.
Gavin Tye:I want our success to be interlinked with each other. And I just think it makes sense for us to you to become on as a founder, co founder fifty fifty. So you're invested in us building this out for six sides to be great. And then who knows what might happen for in the future with that. So I can already see it looking the same.
Gavin Tye:And then there's already ways that this would interlink into our website and all this kind of stuff. And that is really interesting to get to, but we've got to untangle this mess from bloody deal buddy, from Bubble.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yeah. So Yeah. That's right. So that will be an evolving journey to get that done, but I am we sat down and we spoke with Peter at the inductive program and walked through with him about what we're doing and he talked at length a bit about a lot of people transitioning away from, like, using Bubble for their initial MVP, get it off the ground, and then moving into a more mature tech stack.
Mitchell Davis:And, yeah, it's it's good to know we're not the first ones. We won't be the last ones to go through this. And, like, we were even at one point we were thinking about, like, should we be hiring someone that is familiar at least with Bubble, and some of these other, tech that you're using currently and then also have them know about Laravel as well. And we kind of we came to the realization of like, well, look. No.
Mitchell Davis:We don't I wouldn't expect to put any further work into Bubble. The only thing that we need is the ability to export all that data out. Right? And then we're basically rebuilding from scratch the Laravel side. And it like, Laravel now as I think we've talked about has like an AI SDK which can integrate with all the different providers.
Mitchell Davis:Like, we can do a lot of the stuff already that you're Yeah. Doing at the moment under under Bubble. So yeah. So I think as far as getting the data out when the time comes, we'll probably look at hiring just, on a contract
Gavin Tye:basis. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Exactly. To just go, okay, can you take all this stuff and get it over here for us and pay an expert, you know, to to spend a week on that or something like that. Yep. But, yeah, it doesn't make any sense to hire for stuff that we're not gonna use.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. So really exciting. And you and I, there was a very a nice exchange that we had, which I wanted to call out. I think it was on Slack.
Gavin Tye:Are we gonna cry?
Mitchell Davis:It was it was one of the more sweet ones from both of us. But yeah. He said, hey, mate. I really wanna thank you for your help. I'd be lost without you on this.
Mitchell Davis:And I said, that feeling is exactly how I felt with everything you've ever helped me with in business, mate. So right back at you. Like, we really do complement each other's skill sets pretty well here. So yeah. So I'm feeling great about all of that.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Anyway, that probably carves out the the Deal Buddy chapter for now.
Gavin Tye:My Suno, one of my Suno lyrics that you have graciously decided to not use in our song talks about one plus one equals four. Yeah. Right. I put two verses in our songs, but, yeah, it, anyway, I can't.
Mitchell Davis:So for context, we after last week's episode, and I was like, we need to work on the on the title. And I just meant, like, we need to change the words that we say, which we've now done. But you took it upon yourself to use pseudo to generate two songs, which
Gavin Tye:Oh, I've generated more, man. Way more.
Mitchell Davis:Only two made the cut. And, like, the production of them sounds pretty good, but they're not, it's not what I meant when I said we should update the intro. So I'm gonna put one of them on. You tell me which one you want. I'll put one of them on at the end of this episode as a, you know, a little extra.
Gavin Tye:Yep. It's, it's it's, hurtful, but whatever.
Mitchell Davis:I'm sure you spent a lot of time on it.
Gavin Tye:Oh, I did.
Mitchell Davis:Not the AI at all. Yeah. Anyway, okay. So we did as we were talking with Peter at Inductive, we did talk a bit about how our roles, like, who should be doing what. It was actually really I don't know if cathartic is the right word.
Mitchell Davis:Almost therapeutic maybe to sit down and talk through to a third person together of like, hey. Okay. We, over the last two weeks, we we have butted heads a little bit on differences in how we approach planning and like I wanna use linear for this stuff and you wanna use, you know, whatever spreadsheets and stuff. And it was really good to just kind of air it all out. It's not like there's any animosity, but it's just, okay, we have different ways of approaching things.
Mitchell Davis:And Peter kind of explained, hey. This is very normal. Right? So, what did you get out of that conversation with Peter?
Gavin Tye:Just for the record, I've never said spreadsheets. I don't like spreadsheets. Yeah. Look, it was interesting to listen to you speak to him instead of to me so I could just observe and, and then just think about what you were saying. So it was actually, we'll always, one thing I'm not, one thing I'm not worried about is us getting to an impasse or something that we can't get past.
Gavin Tye:Right. So we'll always get to a solution. Sometimes we're not meant to get to a solution for a little while because it's a complex problem. We just need to think it through. So I just think that we're just at the stage of when we're, of growth that this problem's come up.
Gavin Tye:Right? And it's once we get past this, there's another problem. I don't think we're reinventing the wheel here.
Mitchell Davis:I
Gavin Tye:do think we have one thing that I did come take away from is we just need to, play to each other's strengths instead of trying to actually, get the other person to probably work on that weakness. I think that is probably a good tactic to do. Yes. We should always work on our weaknesses, but capitalize on our strengths. And Nate, thing that come up is we know when you are most energized and we know when you start tapering off.
Gavin Tye:So if we can keep you energized, and then try to not have you feel deflated, I think that's better for, for your output levels and, and the productivity of everything. Right.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I I'm good in, like, I do sprints, not marathons as far as working on projects. Right? I Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:I do struggle to do the same thing for like three months. Yeah. I find I want to naturally, oh, that's exciting. Let's go do that. You know?
Mitchell Davis:And I'm kinda I'm the dog chasing the car a bit sometimes. Right? Yeah. I do have discipline to do stuff when it really matters. I know that, yes, I can just suck eggs and just get in and get the job done.
Mitchell Davis:Right? But Yeah. That's not my strength. I would much rather be able to go work on Yeah. On new stuff.
Mitchell Davis:You know? So yeah. So we've identified that and we're gonna account for that with this hiring that we're doing.
Gavin Tye:And and mine vice versa. Like, when we were on the call and started talking at the weeds, like, got a pain in my head. Like, I was like, oh, I don't like being down in there. But my skill like, when I was thinking about it and even just popped into my head there is I'm best at long term change or long term goals. Cause I think about, I just thought about why is that?
Gavin Tye:And when I was younger, I identified that I did not want to live in this life. Like when I was a kid and all that turmoil, and I made a plan over ten years or whatever to change things. And I have identified things that in my personality and things like that, that I wanted to work on. And those things don't happen overnight. So I made a plan of just consistent effort over time.
Gavin Tye:Not massive effort, but just consistent effort over time. Then, and eventually that change comes. It's massive change. That's where I set a pretty far fetched goal. And I don't necessarily know how to get there, but we'll end up, we'll work our way there.
Gavin Tye:Right. And that's where I think our difference was, which is where we're, where we're figuring out how to, how to bring them together. Right? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That's working.
Gavin Tye:That's why we're working.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. It's working. Okay. So look, this week we had a couple of things on. We had the national safety conference that's ran now.
Mitchell Davis:Have you heard much from them?
Gavin Tye:No. I will check-in with them today. Okay. Like they probably conference wrap up and stuff like that. So they may not be, available, but we will do a lessons learned from them, as well and then see how it, how it, yeah, how it went.
Gavin Tye:But they were, they were stoked. I got a message from Ashley and saying, Hey, it was brilliant. So, and again, like, I think one of the things that I've noticed is we we're so excited about some functionality, but maybe it's just about getting people using the app and in the app, and then we can add that. So instead of going, use the schedule questions, use this, use that, use tag. And it's always too overwhelming.
Gavin Tye:So cause I don't think that they used the questions in the schedule and I don't, they didn't play tag. So there wasn't a lot of photos in the gallery.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. They had 93 attendees in the app. So I don't know how many people went, but yeah, it feels like, okay, maybe it was underutilized there, but interesting then if you got feedback already, you know, from their organising team that they were really happy with it, then imagine how happy they would be if if they did leverage all of those other aspects. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So I and I do think there's probably a secondary chance to get people into platform if they do upload their official conference photos and we go back and say, okay, enroll in tag your writ, and then you will be able to see all the photos on your profile. Right? The functionality we're building is not being utilised. No anywhere near what it would be.
Gavin Tye:That's a real differentiator. So we have so much more. And I think that's probably on us. Right? Like,
Mitchell Davis:where Yeah. To some degree. I think like compare a LariCon or a volunteering WA and how heavily that was used there to some of these more recent events. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yes. But also look at LariCon is their lead time and getting familiar with everything has been the longest of everyone. The same as volunteering WA, they had nine months to, to get used to it. This, one they were already set in their ways. They were already set in delivery to throw into No exactly.
Mitchell Davis:Which is why I don't know that it's like you said some of that's on us. Right? But I don't know that that's the case. Like it's these event organisers will make of the app what they will. Right.
Mitchell Davis:It's sorry. What I
Gavin Tye:meant by that is we have the ability to potentially, when they sign up as saying, Hey, you're coming to an event. You have the ability. We could, we have the email marketing side or something. We have the ability to, to show them that that's there or in app prompts or something. Right.
Gavin Tye:Like which we we're not even, we're not even there yet. So
Mitchell Davis:No, that's right. Yeah. There's always more that we can do, but it's just like I don't think we accept any responsibility of like, why wasn't the gallery used or whatever? Like, that's entirely on the event organizers. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So anyway. Yeah. But great that that that that ran fine. I did have a look, little infrastructure update.
Mitchell Davis:I had a look at PlanetScale, and we got to while these events were running, this is our database.
Gavin Tye:Mhmm.
Mitchell Davis:We our memory spiked to a peak of 88% yesterday. Yep. Which worries me a little because that's pretty close to a 100%, and then I don't know exactly what would have happened at that point. So I feel like there's some type of gremlin happening. PlanetScale is our database provider.
Mitchell Davis:We're running MySQL databases, and we're just on their cheapest $50 a month instance. Okay. As a part of that, we automatically get to read replicas. So we should have like a fair amount of redundancy in the system to handle like spikes of traffic. There's effectively three databases that are running that are all able to serve traffic.
Mitchell Davis:But for whatever reason, like the usage on the replicas, very low to the point where it makes me wonder, is something going on and it's they're not actually getting news properly. So I don't think we have any events coming up this week. So I'm not too worried about this, but I think having seen this now, the next time we have an event that's at least over a couple of days, a conference or something like that, I might bump us up to the next tier, which is like $70 a month, but it's double the, power or something like that. Right? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Until I can get in there and figure out what's actually going on. So
Gavin Tye:What was the spike from? Like, because I've got
Mitchell Davis:no idea. I don't know. Like, just usage of the system over the two days. Right? Because it does the spike does seem to last for two days, but yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So and then it's a bit something that is a bit annoying. I can't seem to see if there's any like, hey, send me an alarm. Send me an email if the usage spikes over 50% or something like that. So maybe the reporting, maybe we're on too cheap of a tier or something like that to get access to that because surely that exists. But anyway so I got some more research to do there, but we ran a bunch of other events like Project Hammer and some of the other ones that we've run over the last two weeks, and I think I said last week didn't report, like, CPU and memory were basically flatlined, like, the whole time.
Mitchell Davis:It was fine. So this surprised me and slash made me a little nervous. So
Gavin Tye:So project project hammer ran at over 90% attendees in the app too?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Oh, on their most recent one? That was 90%? Wow. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Great. So they're holding true. That's that's twice now. So they must really be encouraging people to get in and use it, which is great.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. It's a different use case. They're using it for a review something. So they have to go it to get the the whatever it was, the paper. So yeah.
Gavin Tye:But anyway, okay. Cool.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. I'll, I'll keep everybody posted on that. So just final few things as we wrap up. So you had a founders collective, networking event?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. We did. We had the, networking drinks on Wednesday night. It was good. We didn't really pay attention.
Gavin Tye:We felt like we've lost a bit of momentum from last year. We did September, November, Christmas. It's now March. Just with a lot of stuff going on, we weren't really keeping in contact with the audience through Substack. So, that's a lesson learned.
Gavin Tye:We'll, Roman and I will have a plan for that. But yeah, that was good. It was, I bet there's some smart people out there. Hey. Like yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. A lot of PhDs doing some really cool stuff. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Really?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. In defense and all this kind of stuff, like with drones, with, scanning. I was just, blown away. I'm nowhere near as smart as some of these people.
Mitchell Davis:Right? That's okay. Yeah. You can be smart in your certain areas
Gavin Tye:In my own way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Knowing all the history of my family.
Gavin Tye:Yep. My immediate family. But, yeah, that was good. It was good.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And then a couple weeks ago, I think you mentioned that you were gonna go to a local school and see if there was anyone that could maybe do, like, work experience or you had something in mind there and then you met with them this week. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I did. And unfortunately, it's just not gonna work out. So my daughter's school, wanted to go and see she was from a K to 12 school. And I and it's a it's a technology school, like in the later years.
Gavin Tye:And I wanted to go and see if we could help them out, like with a SaaS startup, like do work experience over the over a longer period. And they're just not geared for it. One, we're not, we work from home. So that's not, that's not about that's not a it's a nonstarter. But then two, they had a four day work experience in middle of the year.
Gavin Tye:And I was like, no, that's not what we would it's just gonna
Mitchell Davis:For more ongoing, like, okay.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Over a period of time. Yeah. So they are gonna reach out. I don't think they'll reach out, but, you know, we, we, it is what it is.
Gavin Tye:It just, we'll keep it in And I think later we will pick it maybe back up again. But like what you did at uni, like with a, or a TAFE or something like that.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. That's right. Yeah. We definitely don't have
Gavin Tye:the bandwidth for it, so we just park that for now.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I think it's just a distraction for now. Yeah. It would be like in terms of the value we would actually get out of a high school student or even a uni student at this stage, like, we're we're just not ready. So good idea, but just wrong time, I think.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So yeah. Alright. Well, mate, I think unless you had anything else to go through?
Gavin Tye:No. No.
Mitchell Davis:Gets us there. We've done it. So mate, where can people find you online?
Gavin Tye:They can find me, where can I find me online? LinkedIn. Yeah. Sorry. You caught
Mitchell Davis:me off Yeah.
Gavin Tye:You just caught me off guard. I was thinking I'm just switching off into my next task. So yeah. LinkedIn. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:LinkedIn.
Mitchell Davis:The show's not over yet, mate. Mate. Yep. You can find Gavin on LinkedIn. You can find me there as well and, Mitch Dav.
Mitchell Davis:We've got links to everything we talked about today in the show notes. And, as we end the episode, I will leave you with one of the songs that Gavin created in in what's it called? Sooner?
Gavin Tye:Sooner. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Sooner. Yep. So enjoy that. We will catch you all next week, hopefully, with some more updates on the hiring and maybe even the final approval for project Rendezvous if we're lucky.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I wouldn't hold my breath there. It would take a while to review the contract. So But, yes. Hey.
Gavin Tye:Could be.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Could be. Why couldn't it be?
Gavin Tye:Why couldn't it be? Yep. Alright, mate.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Enjoy. Catch you all next week. Bye. From whiteboard sketches to scaling fast, building the future, learning as we pass.
Mitchell Davis:Sales and code, the founder's view. This is our B2B SaaS Journey. Come build it too. Come build it too. Come build it too.
Gavin Tye:Come
Mitchell Davis:build it too.