Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:And I'm Gavin Ty, sales and marketing person.
Mitchell Davis:We're building no. Let's do that again. That's no good. Do you want this to say something different? No.
Mitchell Davis:No? You happy with that? Alright. Let's scrap the let's scrap the person. I don't think that.
Mitchell Davis:All right. Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:Daventai. Oh. I thought you were gonna say Laravel developer. Oh, no. But you need this to you're the founder of, you're the founder of Six Sides, cofounder.
Gavin Tye:You're not a Laravel developer. In this context, you're a
Mitchell Davis:No. But but if we both just say we're cofounders, that doesn't tell anybody anything. Okay. So I think this we can work on it. We'll stick with this one for today.
Gavin Tye:Sure.
Mitchell Davis:So don't cut me off this time.
Gavin Tye:Alright.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:And I'm Gavin Ty, sales and marketing extraordinaire. Don't cut me off, man.
Mitchell Davis:Oh, fuck me. Okay. The script is
Gavin Tye:not working. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:I will give you time after you do your sales and marketing. Okay.
Gavin Tye:Alright. Final thing.
Mitchell Davis:Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:I'm Gavin Ty, background in sales and marketing for b to b SaaS companies.
Mitchell Davis:We're building SixSides.co, and then that's an events platform that helps you build a stronger community through events. And this is our b to b SaaS journey. Gavin, how are going?
Gavin Tye:Good, mate. How are you?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I'm good. I'm here. I'm ready to record. We're into week three now.
Mitchell Davis:Doing well. And it's fun. I'm having a blast with it. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I I like how you mix it up with a hat this week.
Mitchell Davis:I'm trying to yeah. It's having a big bald head on on camera for half an hour. It's it doesn't look so good. So I'm trying to mix it up, different hats. I've got like I think I've got a hats drawer.
Mitchell Davis:I think I've got like eight different hats
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Right.
Mitchell Davis:In the drawer. So you'll you'll get to see them all. And then by the time we get through those, it'll be into winter. Maybe we'll get some beanies or something going. So
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Nice.
Mitchell Davis:What about you? Are you a hat guy or no hats?
Gavin Tye:No. My hat when I wear a hat, it just goes all funny from there on. Right? So I do like it if I get into the habit, but I also, I try not to as well. I don't like hat hair.
Gavin Tye:So
Mitchell Davis:I don't have that problem. So
Gavin Tye:No. No. And and your bald head mucks up with the contrast and the editing. Right? Like, it
Mitchell Davis:That's true. Yeah. When we were doing the, the cover art. Yeah. You look great.
Mitchell Davis:You've got an outline. And I just like I looked like I'd been beheaded from only half me hit. So Yeah. We play to our strengths. Alright.
Mitchell Davis:So I'm gonna ask you, how did Cyclone Al Alfred affect you? Because that's what the people wanna know.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Everyone who's listening. Yeah. So last week, if you're only just listening, I'm in Queensland on the Gold Coast, we had cyclone Alfred, which is the first cyclone since, I think, 1952 come down this far on the coast. And it stuck off the coast for ages.
Gavin Tye:And then luckily, because it kind of got a little bit it weakened, but it ripped the Gold Coast, the beaches apart. Like, there was three meter drops from, the sand down into the water, and, it's gonna take six months to twelve months to fix. So our house was fine. It was pretty good. There was just a lot of rain afterwards.
Gavin Tye:The winds were crazy, and there was a few trees down around the place, but, our house was okay. We got a little couple of leaks in the roof, and my wife who's scared of the dark, she crawled up in there just because I've got a bad knee. And but it was generally okay. Most places around here were okay.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Thanks for asking.
Mitchell Davis:No. That's okay. Look. We put it in the title of the last show, so I'm guessing some people would be interested in in what happened. It was kind of like it kept circling.
Mitchell Davis:Right?
Gavin Tye:It was
Mitchell Davis:kind of just like, come on. Let's just get this thing done. So, yeah, that was interesting for me to watch, you know, from down Sydney Way. For us, it was it was quite windy, and it did rain a little bit, but, yeah, it was nothing like what you were going through. But, yeah, just the whole time, I was like, what's going on?
Mitchell Davis:Let's you know, is this thing gonna hit? We weren't sure what was happening. So
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Well, we it made me have a look and investigate, like, what are the categories of cyclones because you're not in them. You don't really pay attention. So we had a hundred kilometer an hour winds, and I had a look at what a category three, four, and five it was category two here. Category five is something like 250 plus kilometer out winds, and I'm like, oh my Jeez.
Gavin Tye:That is just unfathomable of the size of that or how how scary that would be. And, yeah, I I have a newfound respect for people who are in cyclone zones.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. That'd, like, knock your house over. Two fifty.
Gavin Tye:Oh, mate. Yeah. Absolutely. So, mate, how was your week? How's your week last week?
Mitchell Davis:Well, it's been good. We've got a lot of stuff done with six sides, and we'll kind of get into that soon. But all in all, fairly good. Got to catch up with some friends last weekend, some people that I hadn't seen in, like, a year and a half because they they had been overseas. So that was awesome.
Mitchell Davis:And it's funny. I actually relevant to Six Sides, I spoke with two different friends who both might have opportunities for us. It ties into events. So maybe Okay. Off the bike, maybe we could sit down and go through that together.
Mitchell Davis:But, yeah, it was cool.
Gavin Tye:Put them in the HubSpot, mate. Put them in the HubSpot so we don't don't lose track of what's going on.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. That's right. Yep. Absolutely. So, yeah, it was cool.
Mitchell Davis:I got to kind of chat through what we're doing and hear, you know, first impressions from people that I trust. And, yeah, it was great and just really nice to catch up with friends. Apart from that, just fairly busy normal work stuff, doing things for my other business, Atlas Software. And, yeah, I've I'm always looking forward to now that we're in the swing of this with doing these recordings, we do them on Fridays. I really look forward to it.
Mitchell Davis:Each Friday morning, I'm like, oh, yeah. That's right. We get to get on and, you know, talk for an hour, and it's fun. And sticking with our theme of, like, not really doing or doing the minimum amount of editing possible so that this thing doesn't become, like, a pain in the ass to work on. I've got it timed.
Mitchell Davis:And for us to record, you know, we might do an hour, and then I can get the edit done in about half an hour after that. So yeah. And that's way better than when I was doing some other podcasts previously where I would, like, try and chop out every and, you know, overproduce it, and it would take me, like, four hours or something like that to do.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Right.
Mitchell Davis:I'm loving that this is just so much faster, and it feels like we're in the flow with it now. So and little numbers update for you, and then I'll ask you about your week. I think we've got about 10 subscribers now for the podcast. So Yeah. Right.
Mitchell Davis:Things are going well. It's Okay.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Nice.
Mitchell Davis:You know, small small steps. It's early days, but, you know, ten isn't nothing. So if you are listening, thank you. And, if you have any comments or things that you want us to talk about on the show, just reach out. We'll have all the links in the in the show notes.
Mitchell Davis:So that was me, mate. What about you?
Gavin Tye:Mate, question well, question for you. How do you balance your development commitments with Atlas, your your your your your big day business, and then our our our stuff with event kit, sorry. With six sides, event kit was the previous name. How do you balance that between the both?
Mitchell Davis:It's tricky. It's, you know, it's like balancing anything else, any other, you're getting pulled in lots of different directions all the time, not just with work, but with family or whatever. It is helpful to have like deadlines on certain things to know that, okay, cool, I can kind of hold on this for a couple of weeks, but then I'm really gonna have to set aside some time to get in and focus on this thing for two weeks and build out this feature or whatever, like some of the things that we're talking about building in to have available maybe around middle of this year for some leads that we've got at the moment. So thinking through all of that stuff and trying to get like a timeline so that I can balance everything. Like, it's just hard.
Mitchell Davis:That's the nature of having a side business. Yeah. It's hard. It's really hard to balance everything. So I am finding I'm not having as much time to put into Six Sides as I would like, but you know, it's an evolving process.
Mitchell Davis:So I'll be, you know, obviously I'll make sure that we're meeting any of our commitments. Yeah. It's I
Gavin Tye:think there's a balancing act too, right? Like if you have all the time in the world, you can be pedantic and as detail orientated as you need to be. I think when you're balancing the constraints of time and commitments elsewhere, I think there has to be a trade off to go, is 80% good enough, 70% good enough? And then I can come back to it later. Because I think at the end of the day, the final 10 or 20% is really for us, right?
Gavin Tye:It's really not for
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And you're hyper detail orientated in certain things. I'm quite relaxed in other things. So yeah, it's interesting to see you work in that, because I do see you put yourself under stress where you go, man, don't worry about it. It's fine. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Because you are you're paid by the keystroke, right? I'm paid by the outcome. It's slightly different different.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Anyway. It's true. Yeah. It's true.
Mitchell Davis:We'll get into specifically a a great example of that, in just a little bit. But, but tell me about your your week. How have you been?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So your my week is for Six Sides is really about establishing, connections in industry, and just letting them know we're there. And I'm really trying to leverage my relationships or my past work of I do a fair bit of mentoring work. So it's always about and I never knew, because I always wanted to give back for the community, but I have built a set of relationships out of there. So this week I've just been having there's an opportunity or a potential confer or there is a conference, around here coming up towards the end of the year and or middle of the year, sorry.
Gavin Tye:And so I just established, reached out to them, and then we had a catch up with them about what their goals were. And we're also, there's a few other people that we've been, I've been meeting with this week just to talk about what we're trying to do with, with the platform. And again, it's resonating, but people just take time. We need to get our ducks in a row there as well. We need to, we've been working on an overview doc, that has come through this week.
Gavin Tye:But I think everything's progressing. It's we've gotta hope we were hoping to hear back about something today that's been delayed to next week, but I feel like we're close. Feel like there's probably two or three opportunities here for this year that we could get, and and it just takes time.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Is that how does that number sit with you?
Mitchell Davis:Two or three events that we will be we're potentially able to get to this year. Would you like, when we first got started with this, would you have expected more or less in the first year? Because we know you're gonna lay the groundwork. Right? And like we talked about last week, these events, it's like twelve months in advance often.
Mitchell Davis:So we kind of knew that going in. But yeah, how are you feeling about that number?
Gavin Tye:Oh, so when I say two or three events this year, that's all we currently know of. So Right. More will come onto our radar. As as soon as you start doing this stuff, things as you can tell, like, what's been happening, I'm a big proponent of if you start putting effort out and the energy out, things will come in from left field that you're not aware of. But if you don't put any effort out, things won't come back in.
Gavin Tye:Happens every single time. So I think effort will breed effort. And although I have visibility across maybe three, maybe four, a couple of these are big, big opportunities, that I think that will breed other opportunities as well. So, God, if we put a flag in the ground and said, hey, for the first year, if we got somewhere between 5,100 ks, and we're just in the ideation phase still, that'd be such a great result. Right?
Gavin Tye:We haven't caught up yet on talked about and planned out how we want the evolution of the platform to go, right? How we want it, are we going to be product led growth? Are we going be sales led growth? We need to do that. And it needs to be able to, having the vision is one thing, but if you can't build it, then it doesn't mean shit.
Gavin Tye:So we need to figure all that stuff out. So
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm excited. Maybe some of that we could do on here on mic, but some of that we'll we'll keep to ourselves.
Mitchell Davis:But
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Absolutely. Well, I guess some more follow-up. No, actually, let's continue on with the slide deck that we put together. Sure. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So this is what I was alluding to before about being very detail oriented or you mentioned. So we've been working on over the last few weeks this presentation, a PDF basically of, hey, this is kind of how we see the industry problem, our solution, the different sides of a community that we're trying to help. We've got a case study in there and then like a call to action. What's the idea for you behind this doc? Where would we use this?
Mitchell Davis:Who is it for?
Gavin Tye:Yeah, so we have to let people know that we have to give them a takeaway as such, right? And I think this is an evolution. This isn't the first document, which I think most people probably try to make the mistake of, Hey, I'm going to make a pretty doc, right? Their evolution for us was is, well, why are we going to build a business? Like, what does a community look like?
Gavin Tye:What are the different sides of a community? What are all the ways that we can help them during, before and after an event? And what are the features and benefits they get? So we did a really detailed couple thousand word document and it's extremely text heavy and it's only interesting to us. Right?
Gavin Tye:So we had shared it with a couple of people. I shared it with a couple of people and like most founders would go, people are gonna say, oh my God, this is amazing. And we got some feedback and it was like, mate, that's two texts every year, I didn't read it. It's like, yeah, of course you didn't. I wouldn't read it.
Gavin Tye:But so our version of that is, is we need to iterate it and make it look reasonably Well, try to give a professional image of just to really give this overview doc in my mind, sales context or marketing context, is really just to give it, to garner interest, give it indicator of value. So people are like, oh, they've really thought this through. Right? If it looks professional, it looks really good. People are gonna say, these guys are, they look pretty sharp.
Gavin Tye:Right? If it's a sloppy doc, then they're gonna say this guy's sloppy. Right? This dude's business is sloppy. So it's a first impression, really.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Absolutely. And then we how we kind of came up with the content was this, like, multi thousand word doc that Gavin was talking about, largely focused on the features that we have available, different things that we're thinking of. And we then took that, condensed it down, just pulled out the really valuable parts. And that's what ultimately made it into this new presentation doc that we've got.
Mitchell Davis:What would you call this doc?
Gavin Tye:It's an overview. I should just give it an overview. Yeah. I changed it from we did have it as a pitch deck. It's not a pitch deck.
Gavin Tye:It's a six sides overview document. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. So so this overview doc, how we then went about getting something that was nicely designed was we used Upwork, right, which you have used in the past and you've talked a bit with me about before on some other projects. So, yeah, what was that process like to go through and find someone on Upwork? Did you already have someone in mind or you just started from scratch? How did you go about that?
Gavin Tye:So I think it takes, I've used Upwork quite a bit over a period of time and I've had varying degrees of success. So it's all about practice really. I kind of, I put a job post up and then I'll just let people apply to me. Right. And it's, I'm really looking for their past work.
Gavin Tye:There is a risk there because people can put up any PDF and say that's the work they've done before. So, and this guy, he was from Pakistan. He seemed to do a couple of his slides really resonated, there was one AI doc that he created. I thought, oh, yeah, look, we don't need to reinvent the wheel here. The framework of that looks awesome.
Gavin Tye:We already have the content. And he was like, I just wanna get paid per project, not cost per not per hour, which is fine by me. And both of us just don't have One, I don't have the skillset. I could probably make it look pretty good, but nowhere near as good as what a professional would make it look like. And two is we just don't have the time, right?
Gavin Tye:Like you already spent three hours on slide editing at your rate is probably worth 600, 7 hundred dollars worth of effort. Like, this guy was nowhere near that. And, we just don't have the time to do it. And he did an excellent job. I'll be yep.
Gavin Tye:Sure their spelling's a little off. Of course, it's gonna be off. It's a different language. But generally, like, that's the foundation of what we'll use for moving forward. And we'll I'll add to it.
Gavin Tye:There's things I wanna add to it already, but it was an excellent he was fast, and now we we can use it. I've already sent it off to two people, with some others on the way. So Yeah. I'll do later on today. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Well, from my perspective, yes, the design immediately, I was like, okay, this looks fantastic. What was hard for me was then doing the editing on it because like you and I have talked about, I'm quite detail oriented. And in my mind, like, the details really matter. Like, I want this thing to sell us. Right?
Mitchell Davis:And you're right. Not be a sloppy doc that looks like crap or is riddled with spelling mistakes and stuff. And I'm quite anal with all of that stuff, I always have been. So it makes total sense for me to be the one to go through and do like the proofread and the fixing up of, you know, any mistakes or whatever. And then kind of taking my design sense and using, like, 90% of what the designer has put in, but then just tweaking some things.
Gavin Tye:Oh.
Mitchell Davis:And it was tricky. This took, like, three hours to do, and it was way more time than I had allocated. I did this yesterday, and I did not have three hours to put into this thing. But you were just like, mate, we need to get this thing out the door. Let's get it sent off.
Mitchell Davis:And I'm, like, sitting here, like I skipped lunch, actually, because I just like, I did not have time to Yep. Do this, but yet it it had to get done. And and, you know, sometimes there's just that's what what comes up. It's what you have to do.
Gavin Tye:So here's the thing. I could tell that you added in the images from snap from screenshots of the app.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Couldn't tell anything else you did.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Well Right? But only I think only because you're not super detail oriented. If it was sent to someone like me, they'd be like, oh, yeah. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:They really, like, thought this through and, like, the the margins and stuff, everything looks good. Like, anyway.
Gavin Tye:Margins? Come on.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Come on. I'm serious. We wanna look good like this. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That's what it takes.
Gavin Tye:I get it. So I'm of a let me you you put your screen, your filter over what how you look at a doc, right? How it's gonna sell us and stuff like that. I'm I think about it is what does the emotion of the doc portray? Because people aren't gonna buy us to people aren't gonna say, great doc.
Gavin Tye:We'll buy. That's just never gonna happen. Right? It's just never gonna happen.
Mitchell Davis:You're breaking my heart here.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. But the emotion of it is like, this is sharp. This looks pretty good. This is not polarizing. Oh, that's not oh, look at the spellings often or the cap.
Gavin Tye:Like, just along with that cap, all that stuff is okay, and the emotion of it backs the it it's consistent with how we're trying to portray ourselves. To me, that's enough. Right? Because it's to continue the conversation. Right?
Gavin Tye:It's like, oh, these guys have thought it through. It's that nth degree. Hey. You wanna do the combination of how you see it and how I see it? It can only be one plus one equals four.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. But there has in my mind, for stress levels and availability, I think sometimes we have to go, well, what's the trade off here? Because we have to get things out faster. We could sit on it for a week, but for what?
Mitchell Davis:Well, yeah. Yeah. I wanted to. Right? I I messaged you in our Slack, and I was like, hey.
Mitchell Davis:Can I just finish this off tomorrow? I was out of time. So already as it was, I had to, like, push some other things out of the way that I was meant to get to. Yep. And you were just like, no.
Mitchell Davis:No. We gotta get this thing out. And I was like, okay. So I just powered through. And Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, look, I'm really happy with where it's ended up. It took a bit more time in the editing than I was hoping for. But, yes, I probably could have not gone to that insane level. Yeah. That's alright.
Mitchell Davis:Some stress, but whatever.
Gavin Tye:It's learning. Because I think the learning of that is to say how detailed like, hey. You're gonna work on it and go, well, how detailed do we want it? Right? Well Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Hey. I we wanna get it out to this company, like by the end of the day. Yes, sure. Like, okay, well, what do we want to do then to make sure it's okay? So it's to go because we never I don't think we communicated on what the expectation was or, hey, I'm beginning to know that you're you're way more detail orientated than me than me, but then I also have a different framing of things too.
Gavin Tye:Right? And but if we we just have we just need to align expectation. I think it's just all about communication and it's yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Absolutely. So on the point of taking the work that this Upwork designer had done, correct me if I'm wrong, did they do it in PowerPoint? That's how they yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. He he said he designed a PowerPoint, but then he gave it to us in Canva so we can turn it into a like, we can use it more without skill set or Yeah. Or different versions of it. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So then, why I bring it up was because what gave me a lot of trouble was the formatting differences between, PowerPoint and then into Canva. It meant that, like, for there's a bunch of, like, little blocks, like, colored blocks or whatever inside of this PowerPoint. And I couldn't edit them without, like, totally recreating them because it was just like I think it Canva kind of thought those were, like, images. And so it was giving me these, like, apply a filter, and I'm like, no.
Mitchell Davis:I wanna change the color or I wanna change, like, the border radius of this thing. So I had to recreate a lot of that to get it to the level that I wanted. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, that's one one downside of working out of PowerPoint.
Mitchell Davis:But Yeah. Okay. By and large, I'm like, I'm really happy with how it's turned out. You've already sent it off to a couple people. Right?
Mitchell Davis:We've got a few more to send it to. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I'm just gonna while we're talking, I'll check and see if we got any replies back about it. I don't think we would've. But that's a good point. Right? So make sure next time if someone does it, if because I asked them to design in Canva goes, do it in PowerPoint, then I'll just I should have gone, no.
Gavin Tye:No. No. Let's do it in Canva predominantly, like, primarily so we don't have that issue.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Okay. Cool.
Mitchell Davis:We'll
Gavin Tye:see. No replies back so far, mate. So I'll let you know the first time we get as soon as we get
Mitchell Davis:one. Yep. Sounds good.
Gavin Tye:Alright. So another update from last week. We talked about redundancy. Right? We talked about how I've got my screen smashed, which is still sitting in front of me, and it still makes me angry every time I see it, but it is what it is.
Gavin Tye:So I did, I took your advice. I've got a Mac Mini, and I'm building out a second station. So
Mitchell Davis:Nice.
Gavin Tye:I can have that. And, the challenge is as well is because the Mac Mini doesn't have webcam, I've gotta buy web a webcam and all that kind of stuff. So that's allowed me to up go up in quality of webcam. So when we start recording this, I'm doing more recordings, and I have I can go up in ability to do that too. So there is a there's a bit of a win out of that.
Gavin Tye:But, again, I'll be without a laptop for a while. So now I have three I have three, redundancy levels now. I've got an older laptop plus this one, plus the Mac mini that'll come next week. So, yeah, thanks for that. I haven't looked at the other the backup stuff yet, but I'll wait to Backblaze, I think you called it.
Gavin Tye:That's right. So yeah. Yeah. So mate. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:So that's good. I feel a lot more comfortable now. And I feel like the business is once I sync some stuff and update and and have redundancy with with with content, then I'm I'm, the business is
Mitchell Davis:In a lot
Gavin Tye:more space. Far, yeah, far better position.
Mitchell Davis:That's great. Yeah. Well, good good call. I'm glad it was helpful, with the Mac Mini. With your like, there's this thing of and and I'm gonna get it wrong.
Mitchell Davis:So I'm sorry if you're like a data nerd, a backup nerd, but there's like you should have there's this saying of, like, you should have your backup strategy should be like you should have some stuff in the like, you've got your data here locally on your computer now, right? Then you should have a backup like off-site so that if anything happens to your house, like you just had a cyclone, That computer got thrown out the window, you'd wanna have something somewhere else. And I guess in your case, it's like in the cloud. Right? So Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Almost everything you've you've got which is probably in the cloud. But, you know, some people will have stuff in there in another office, you know, or something like that.
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:And then it should be on like something like it should be on two or three different types of media. So like hard drives, and then some companies, a lot of big companies will have data on like tape, magnetic tape and stuff.
Gavin Tye:Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Again, I'm sorry if I'm I'm not
Gavin Tye:I've heard that before, and it's a level of time. Right? So you can go back one day before, a week before, six months before. Yeah. Whatever it is.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:All that sort of stuff. Yeah. So you probably don't need to do that level
Gavin Tye:think I'm gonna get a magnetic tape drive anytime soon.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. But I do
Gavin Tye:have a hard drive. Yeah. I have a hard drive here. So, yeah, I will do that as well. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Cool. Mate, okay. So I guess the the real the the the main topic of today is something that we spoke about last week, and it was, building a customer advocacy group. Like, I've been thinking about that this week and, a lot. And I really I think what we think we might do here is when we're identifying a topic of interest, like a customer advocacy group about how it can help us with product development and things like that, is to let's drill down into this a little more.
Gavin Tye:Like, if we highlight on something or someone does go, hey. That was interesting. Can you deep dive into that with our 10 subscribers? Hopefully, 11 by next week. We can drill down into that.
Gavin Tye:And when we release this stuff on YouTube, we will create a playlist and release the documentation that we have created or or whatever else just to help people undergo this exercise. So, mate, I've been thinking about customer advocacy. So I was thinking, I've done some research this week and, yeah, we'd love to chat about that and and think about it from your side of the fence as a dev, and then I'll think about it from my side of the fence as a dev because dev, as a salesperson. Because we although it's the same thing, we might have different requirements from something like that. So what are your thoughts on that?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Let's do it. I'm keen. I I asked you the other day or I forget when it was. Like, hey.
Mitchell Davis:Do you want me to look into this at all? Do you want me to do anything? And you're like, nope. I've got it. So, yeah, I this is all gonna be new to me, and I can try and be the voice of the audience.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, let's do it.
Gavin Tye:So one of the things that I when I've been selling, working at B2B SaaS companies, before, one thing that I've always, that has never quite struck me or haven't quite understood is the development team seems to just create a list of features and then just goes and build the features. And then we've got to go to the market and say, hey, we built this feature. And you go, well, where did that come from? Who said that that was useful in the market? And I think well, know my observation of that was is not all features or not all all functionality that was developed hit the mark.
Gavin Tye:So why wouldn't we create a strategic like, I've got a name here, like a strategic advisory council here with key people who are responsible for building community or running events to build that community. Why wouldn't we find out what their pain point is, and what they're looking to achieve and their goals and objectives, and then see if we can build with them instead of for them. Right? And I think that goes a long way to forming partnerships. If you form a partnership, you're not trying to sell, you're not seeing as a sales organization, you're form of help of genuinely helping them.
Gavin Tye:And so that's how I see something like an advocacy group or a strategic advisory council or something like that. What I like that. Do you what are your thoughts?
Mitchell Davis:Strategic advisory council. Sounds very posh.
Gavin Tye:We sound like we're got our shit together, to be honest. We know
Mitchell Davis:what we're doing. We got an overview doc. It's not sloppy. And we've got a strategic advisory council. It's this is Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:We're humming along. Absolutely. I think on the point of like devs building out features that maybe nobody wants, you know, in businesses that are larger than ours, you typically have, like, product manager, right, who is kind of directing, okay, this is what we're gonna go after. And I guess the hope is they have done some research, you know, on, okay, what features should be built out for smaller teams like you and I, you know, separately, or even us now, like, yeah, we don't have that. So it is like all of the features that have made it into six sides, you know, for LariCon last year, that was all just stuff that I thought of.
Mitchell Davis:Right? And some of it was informed by Michael at Laricon AU, but largely it was just like, okay. Yeah. This seems cool. Let's let's build that out.
Mitchell Davis:And and most of the things that I decided to build were used, which was great.
Gavin Tye:Mhmm.
Mitchell Davis:But for sure, if we can hear directly from more event organizers or other people as well, other sides of the ecosystem, The other types of people that we're going after, like attendees or from speakers or sponsors. If we can get more voices, absolutely, surely we will build a better product.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So I think you hit on the nail here inadvertently is hope. You said hope, right? Have a product manager. I think we wouldn't be going into this business not thinking that this is going to scale and we're going to have at some stage twenty, thirty people, right?
Gavin Tye:I think that's a whole another conversation is how do we build a business that has no more than, that we could run it with no more than 10 to 20 people, right? So we can maintain close contact and relationships with everyone. But that's another story for another day. But there are things that we're going to make mistakes, right? We're going to try things that's going to fall flat.
Gavin Tye:I think there's things that you can, that it's far more acceptable to do that. Like, hey, we're going to try this different type of approach to the market. It's only going to take a couple of hours. It's a lot less of a risk because we're little mini iterating. But then I think there's a bigger risk, whereas, well, one is you hope people have done their research, or two is I hope this feature is going to land, but it's going to take me a month to build it.
Gavin Tye:And then you do it, build it, and it doesn't land. And you're like, oh shit. And then that's where I think if we have an advocacy group and strategic advisory council, sorry, we find out what their goals are. Like, we've uncovered some really interesting problems that I don't know how to fix yet, which we won't share. Right?
Gavin Tye:But if we have an idea and we go, Hey, this is what we're thinking. We're thinking we might be able to do this. And they're like, Yeah, okay. Or, No, that won't work. We don't go down this path of something that is going to fall flat, right?
Gavin Tye:Because we don't, we've just mentioned, we don't have the time, you specifically don't have the time to waste time. So, and I, in my mind, if we can build close partnerships and people get invested and emotionally invested in us being successful, seeing people in industry, that can't be bad. It can only lead to doors being opening. And that's when we go from three or four opportunities that we're looking at now to 30 opportunities because people go, hey, you've got to speak to Mitch and Gav.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. And and and it's word-of-mouth is by far the best lead generation tool. We've already it's already been proved here now. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. And we don't have a budget to put towards advertising yet. And, yeah. So this is this is our play for now. Absolutely.
Gavin Tye:I I I don't think we should put money in advertising until we figure out the product market fit or the the fit and how to actually turn $1 into three. Right? If we can figure out how to turn $1 into three or five or 10, then that's when we go, well, let's just dump marketing dollars in the front end.
Mitchell Davis:Right? Yeah. We're a long way from that for sure.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. 100%. At least three weeks.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Episode what would that be? Episode seven then. We'll Yep. We're spending all the money on advertising.
Gavin Tye:Of the podcast. You got the money. Alright.
Mitchell Davis:So how do you get started with What's the what's the first step?
Gavin Tye:Well, I really think here is I'm gonna start talking to some people. Like, I'm already having conversations with these key people. There is a I have a a north star that I wanna I wanna get our business into. Right? Should I call it out on here?
Gavin Tye:Do you reckon I should?
Mitchell Davis:Well, is it gonna is it a competitive advantage that you're gonna give away?
Gavin Tye:Well, I'm I'm I'm, calling it out in public, so we'll see. Like, it's week three. What's the date today? The the March 19 or something like that. I have a vision, and I have a I don't know how to make this happen.
Gavin Tye:I'm about to call it out, Mitch. Calm calm down. Keep your head on. In 2032, the Brisbane Olympics are coming here to Australia. Right?
Gavin Tye:And we are predominantly our mission is to help people build community and break down break the ice and bring people closer together and form a foundation. I'm gonna my my vision I don't know how to make this happen. I don't know if I can make it happen, but I'm gonna I'm gonna try to get us into the Brisbane thirty two Olympics to help them. At the moment, around town and all that kind of stuff is they're, they're having these meetings and trying to bring that community together already. I think, I don't know how it's gonna happen, but I'm making a call on it.
Gavin Tye:I'm gonna try to figure out how to make that happen. I wanna bring mission is that. Our mission is to help bring communities together. I would like to create a strategic advisory council around how to make that happen. Right?
Gavin Tye:Even if it doesn't happen, if you shoot for the moon and we come up short
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. We'll get a lot of value out of, what the council will will provide us, the insights.
Gavin Tye:Yep. That's right. So we need to like, I've got some stuff here. I've I've referred to my best, workmate, Chatchipiti, on how to, what to do. And the first one is to find a strategic value for participants.
Gavin Tye:Right? Yep. The first mover advantage, maybe we give them early access to certain things. Maybe we give them discounts. For me up here in Queensland, I give a lot of time away mentoring.
Gavin Tye:So a lot of people I've spoken to, I've also helped, I will help mentor their, their, cohort with sales strategy and stuff like that. And then it's, so that's one, define the strategic value for participants, which, I'm sure people would like to help here. I've got to figure out how to frame it. I've got to identify participants. So I'm thinking maybe only three or four, like Zoe would be one, that we're that we've been meeting with.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. A few others around the place as well, like Sarah, who I met the other day. Yeah. I don't know. What what do you think there?
Gavin Tye:What do you think about defining the strategic value? How would that help you?
Mitchell Davis:Well, yeah, that's a good question. Defining the value for what the participant is going to get.
Gavin Tye:We have to be. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. We you know, they're not just gonna do it for nothing, but you have already contributed a lot of value. And, like, I I've seen this with how you work. It's, like, front and center of almost every interaction you have with someone up front is how can I be helping you? You know?
Mitchell Davis:And you're doing it most of the time with little expectation of, like, an immediate return. You put a lot of good, like, goodwill out there with connecting with people, and then the hope, you know, and you've got the evidence to back it up, but largely that works out for you. Right? So so the fact that you've already helped a lot of these people that we'll be looking to induct into the council.
Gavin Tye:We'll have a sword, you know, or
Mitchell Davis:we'll That's right.
Gavin Tye:We need to get
Mitchell Davis:a merchant still going. Yeah. Sell swords on the merch store. Yes. The fact that you've already helped a lot of these people ought to help them.
Mitchell Davis:But Yeah. Totally, If we're getting, you know, meaningful insights from this group, then, yeah, if there's you know, we can help them out with discounts, like you said, or anything else that we can think of. Yeah. I think it's great. I think there's alignment there already.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Because these these people are thinking on a daily basis about, oh, wouldn't it be nice if this tool that I'm using could do that? You know? Whatever. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:And ways that we could help them, we're gonna get huge value from it. Plus, they'll end up with a, hopefully, better tool, you know, that helps them do their job as well. So I think everybody everybody wins.
Gavin Tye:Yep. And what about the strategic value for you?
Mitchell Davis:What do you mean?
Gavin Tye:So, what what value is it to you having this, advocacy group advisory sorry, advisory council. Yeah. What what's the strategic value for yourself? You're killing me. I'm mate.
Mitchell Davis:I'm a council bit. Yeah. Well, we don't build the wrong things. We don't build things that people don't want. You know?
Mitchell Davis:I want to build what our customers or potential customers want. Yep. That's how you build a strong business. Right? So that's the main thing that I wanna get out of this is like, well, what are people asking for?
Mitchell Davis:And in all of the meetings that we've had so far, we're constantly getting given great feedback on what we already have, but also like, oh, wouldn't it be great if it was this or whatever? And we might jot those notes down. Like, if we can have that happening on a regular basis Yep. That would be awesome. So that's the value that I'm gonna get out of this is we build the right thing, hopefully.
Gavin Tye:No. I think it's, an observation, again, from other businesses that I've worked in. When you get client facing people like myself, right, and you're like, oh, I don't have to do it. Right? And that's where you're like, I can just develop that.
Gavin Tye:I can go into my, what my natural state is. I think it's really important over time that you never lose contact with the customer because it's once you lose contact with the customer, then all of a sudden you start developing in isolation to something that ends up at sooner or later is going to probably diverge around what they want. So although it's not in a sales or marketing capacity, making sure that you know the voice of the customer, think will be the difference between being successful and not being successful. It's just putting you in a position that you're comfortable doing and you feel like, Hey, I'm not trying to sell it here. Like, that's not my strong suit.
Gavin Tye:My strong suit is properly developing something in a unique way that offers value. Right? Is is making sure that you never lose that contact with the customer, I think is really important too. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I completely agree. Like, that's how you fall off is you stop listening to what your customers want and they go find someone else. Right? So Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That's
Gavin Tye:right. If you're if you're not courting, someone else is courting. Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:So it says identify and recruit the right participants. I already think I have some people in mind. I think we're just maybe three two or three at the moment. But in here, says large event organizers. I have one of those already that I met at a networking event.
Gavin Tye:There's a couple of different people there. Executives or decision makers or heads of associations. So, yeah, like, I think I'm quite comfortable on who to ask there. And that says, where do you find them? Industry groups, event, industry conferences, professional associations.
Gavin Tye:Well, I'll put all this in a doc, Mitch, that you can actually just, put a link to a Google Google Sheet that people can download.
Mitchell Davis:We'll get that in the show notes. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Or we might we'll figure that out. On the website. Maybe we'll yeah.
Gavin Tye:Maybe we'll put it on a website or something like that just to join our mail we might have a mailing list here for six sides and, or the podcast or something like that. So, we'll figure out how to do that. Then the main thing here is structure of the advocacy group, The engagement model, maybe it's quarterly roundtables, one on one, LinkedIn group, one on one feedback sessions. It feels like for now it's probably one on one feedback sessions. We won't be developing a huge amount anytime, like we're still balancing our day jobs.
Gavin Tye:So I think one on one sessions, or working closely if they do have conferences or something, we'll work more closely with them to that. Yeah, and go from there really. So I have spoken to someone. We've got some other stuff on here. Right?
Gavin Tye:Leveraging that feedback. Next week, I will invite, Hirile Chur onto the podcast. He's the founder of a platform called Bussable. He uses a customer advocacy group to help develop his platform. So we'll find out some of the lessons learned from him and what he would do differently if he did it again or some of the benefits.
Gavin Tye:But, you know, I know he really, really well and he, it's helped him. It's foundational for him developing the platform and then word-of-mouth for him. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Awesome. Oh, I can't wait. Yep.
Gavin Tye:Cool. So, what else you got on next week, mate? What are you doing?
Mitchell Davis:Well, before that, a question, how long would you expect to keep this group going? Is it through the lifetime of the business? And I'm sure, like, people will come in and out. Right? We won't have people for the next ten years.
Mitchell Davis:But, like Yeah. That's the plan would be to keep this going so that we're constantly speaking not only just with customers at that time, you know, but then other people that, you know, in the industry that can help us out and keep that going forever.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Look. I think, yeah, I see it being an indefinite thing. I would see people would cycle in and out as we would go because people will only, in my mind, hey, I'm happy to give you three months of my time over every couple of months, right, like a couple of hours of their time. And then keep as you develop and you maybe develop more functionality and you start going up, or maybe we've looked at, hey, we're going to surface this part of the market now with that current functionality, then we go down.
Gavin Tye:Maybe then we look at someone down. Alright. So I think we've got to balance out where we're going for, how we're going to, how we want to get there with the type of people that we want to bring in. Maybe we have different advocacy groups, councils, strategic councils for different types of markets that we want to go under into. Right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I think, I think shutting that down and going, okay, we're big enough. We don't need to do that now. I don't, I think that would be a little bit arrogant to do that. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. What do you think?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I completely agree. And it's a bit boring, I guess, if we both agree on everything all the time. But in this case, I I think you're totally right. So Yep.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I'm excited. And, I'm guessing then I would be on all of these calls, if not, you know, most of them so that I can hear direct from these people about what they're looking for as opposed to you just having the call and then explaining it to me. I think that will be really valuable.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I it just depends. Right? I think there might be different the goal let's say what the goal would be. The goal I think the goal would be for us to get in a position that if we just had a quick like, you were like, oh, I'm thinking about doing this, you're like, oh, I'm gonna call Zoe.
Gavin Tye:And you feel comfortable enough to call Zoe and just go, hey, Zoe. I'm just thinking about doing this, but I'm not sure if it's fit for purpose for you or whatever the whatever programming language you use. Right? Yeah. But then you go, Zoe, can I just ask you a question here?
Gavin Tye:Would you prefer x or y? Or can I just show you? And she goes, oh, no. Absolutely, Mitch. It's this.
Gavin Tye:Thanks. Cool. And it Okay. That it could be informal. I don't think that all of it, we both need to be on every call.
Gavin Tye:I think it might serve we may not need to be on certain things, but as long as I think the main thing is is the type of relationship or the depth relationship would dictate the type of relate of way that you use or will not use as how you interact with the people on the on the council. Does that make sense?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I think so.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So sometimes I've got no issue. I'll text someone if I think I'm, like, in a good relationship with them just to find out their feedback, just one or two answers.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Gotta text someone. But, yeah, just a short, sharp, hey, I'm thinking of this. You know? What do you think about that or whatever?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Cool. So
Mitchell Davis:So back to your your question and plans for next week. We have a few meetings where there will be some interesting decisions Yep. Or we should get some interesting feedback. So some meetings coming up next week, which I'll be in, and I'm excited for both of them, the ones that I'm thinking of. On the dev side, it's a good question.
Mitchell Davis:We do have a list of, like, commitments that we've made as far as, like, new functionality Yep. That the platform will have. So I will be starting work on some of those. I'm not gonna talk about it now, but hopefully by next time we record next, if there is time in that episode. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Then we can sit down, and and I can chat through some of that, what we're thinking and and what we're looking at doing.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. So I think I was thinking the other day as well, we're looking at these screenshots, Maybe just going through a couple of the screens and going just talking through, is that the best layout? Right? Just maybe polishing it up a little bit. Yep.
Gavin Tye:Just having a look at that.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:That'll be interesting. Another thing we're doing as a because you and I live in different cities. You're down in Sydney. I'm in Brisbane. Is I think going on we've agreed to go on this journey together, and it could be two years.
Gavin Tye:It could be ten years, but we both have partners, and we both have families. So Yeah. One of the things we're gonna do is sit down and have dinner together with you and your partner, Nicole, and me and my wife and two kids, and we're gonna set up the laptops and, have a bit of a fun dinner, I think, because it's family dinner. I think it yeah. I think it's really important because you and I would be under in stressful situations, and it's important that each of our partners know each other, I think.
Gavin Tye:So Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:I think so too. I I can't wait. And Nicole had the idea of, like, we'll both Instead of just a call that's like a five minute, hey. How's it going? You know?
Mitchell Davis:Alright. Bye. She was like, yeah. What if we what if we had dinner, like, sitting at our table, we put the laptop at the other end of the table? You guys do the same.
Mitchell Davis:It might be a little harder with kids and and everything. But, yeah, we'll we'll make it work. So it'll be like a one big virtual Yeah. Table. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. And we
Gavin Tye:I'm actually looking forward to that the most. I'm looking forward that to most, to be honest. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Well, we were we were meant to do it a couple weeks ago, and then but we didn't have it in the calendar. And, yeah, then I'm like I'm telling Nicole, like, hey. You know, we're doing this dinner tonight with Gav and Mel, and and then it gets to I think we'd set it at, like, 07:30 my time or something like that. And I'm like I messaged you on Slack.
Mitchell Davis:I'm like, hey. Like, how are going? I don't hear anything. It gets to 07:30. Doesn't happen.
Mitchell Davis:And then, like, the next day, you're like, oh my god. I'm so sorry. So this time, it's in the calendar.
Gavin Tye:We will It's in the calendar. Yeah. It's in Mel's calendar. So if it's in Mel's calendar, it really happens.
Mitchell Davis:So Excellent.
Gavin Tye:Yep. Yeah. Next week, we got some interesting meeting, one in particular. The first one didn't go that great, and, so we've been working hard to rectify that. And Yeah.
Gavin Tye:If we can get that okay, like, that opens us up to a really sizable
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Opportunity. So we're yeah. And next week, I'll just start doing a little more business development, like, just reaching out to some people. And, yeah, we'll go from we'll go from there.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. It's exciting, mate. It's exciting times. Every week, I'm, like, I'm looking forward to how we're continuing to push the envelope. And I I need to do my part on the dev side now that this doc is out of the way, the overview doc.
Gavin Tye:Yep. So one thing one thing I'll do as well is we've been having these sporadic well, I've been having these sporadic conversations with many different people, and they've been not enough for me to record in HubSpot or a CRM, but there's too many now for me to I've forgotten some of the people that I've spoken to, and it's only when my memory's jogged. I'm like, oh, jeez. I needed to send that off. So, next week, what I will do by this time next Thursday well, we're gonna have a podcast on Thursday, but Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I will update our CRM. And so then you can put in those two conversations as well so we could kinda track what our plan would be. If it doesn't come off, it doesn't come off. But we will quickly, with two businesses and my other business as well, is I'm forgetting. And forgetting and not following up is the killer of all opportunity.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, let's do it. I look forward to that. I don't think like, obviously, we were not we're not gonna share any of those details, but we can talk about how we're doing that because that might be really interesting for, you know Yep.
Mitchell Davis:People in similar positions to us as well. How does a sales and marketing extraordinaire, I think you called yourself in the in the pre roll, how does someone like that keep track of everything in in HubSpot?
Gavin Tye:Yep. Mate, I think you should keep all that intro in the beginning where you're getting angry with me. Mitch is having a script that I won't follow. So Yep. Anyway, alright, mate.
Gavin Tye:Have a good week. Okay?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. You too. Alright. See you. See
Gavin Tye:you, everyone.
