61: The great productivity explosion

Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, CTO and Laravel developer. And soon to be married. I'm Gavin Tye, CEO, sales and marketing of Six Sides.

We are into year two of running a remote startup, sixsides.co, and we're building a community building platform focused on events. This show documents the business and the tech of our journey as we build our SaaS. How are you mate?

Very well, mate. Mate, we're a community led events platform. That's our new positioning. You've changed it.

No, it's in the positioning document. You are not looking at it. You haven't looked at it. That's true.

I have looked at it. I'm not looking at it right now as I record the podcast. There you go, mate, you've got a week to go. You got a week to go too.

How's it going? How how's it getting going? Yeah. I'm good.

Like, all the stuff that could be done is done. It's I'm a little nervous with the weather, to be honest, which we can't control, famously, but, oh, it's cleared up now. Brilliant. So yeah.

Alright. There was gonna be some rain apparently on the Saturday. That's now moved to Friday. So excellent.

Thank you, weather. I'm feeling good because yeah, it's like, what an exciting time. This is something I look forward to, you know, obviously my whole life and the whole time I've known Nicole and, yeah, it'll be hopefully the best day of my life, at least for now. So we'll see.

The only, the bit of advice that I can give you for the day mate is enjoy every moment because until I realized it was the best day of my life, was 6PM and it was almost finished. And I was like, damn it. Like it was actually really fun. Like everyone I'm not big on parties and, I don't like necessarily being the center of attention.

And then I realized everyone was just there for us and they were having a great time and it was really, really fun. So, yeah, just don't get lost in the moment and, just enjoy every single second of it. Cause it's, yeah, it doesn't happen again. Oh, I will only ever happen.

Sure hope it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Well, three times in our lives.

Right. Yeah. That's right. Yep.

Yeah. No. Absolutely. That's I've taken that on board.

You you told me that a year ago and a couple times since then, and I have kept that in mind. So, yes. We are both now Nicole's been waking up at 4AM the last few mornings because she's just like got you know, her brain's just running a bit. She's a bit nervous.

So yeah. Today for both of us is our last proper day of work. It's Friday as we record, so the wedding's eight days away. And yeah.

So we've got the full eight days of, okay, just focus on on the moment and, yeah, just get ourselves ready for it. So it's good. With that being said, I will even though Monday is a public holiday where I live, I will still have to get on and just, dot a few i's and cross a few t's with the team, both, Chris under Atlas and, with yourself and Martin and Raymond on six sites. So I do have a little bit more to do, but I'll do that from home.

So Yeah. Fair enough. Do with your facial hair, mate? Are you grinding it out, are gonna shave?

What do you what's your plan? God. No. This is it.

It's what you see right now is what it's gonna be. This is my look. So, no, I'll, I'll keep trimming it. Yep.

Yeah. So I trim this every day. I have for the since we don't do a video podcast anymore, I have stubble. And I had to I used to have this a lot shorter because I found it would be annoying if it was at this length.

Mhmm. But, then when I got rid of all my hair, all my hair got rid of itself, then, I had to I don't wanna look like a thumb, so I don't think I'll ever be, like, clean shaven. Thumb. Yeah.

Well, that's basic that's what you look like. It's just a slab of skin, like, above your shoulders. So You do actually. You look like a white thumb.

Yeah. You don't have to say you in particular. Just we people in general. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, mate.

So, anyway, I yeah. Now I do this and then I grew the beard out just a little so it's more it's a little more full featured, but no, this is my look. I think I'll have this for the rest of my life. Yeah.

Yeah. Fair enough. Mate, it's, exciting. It's, yeah.

You guys excited? I know, I know you're coming down. You're gonna head out to Wollongong, right? Yeah.

We were gonna go out to Campbelltown and spend some time with Dean's mom and stay there. And I thought, well, we don't because when you have kids, you don't get a lot of time alone. I was like, let's just we were gonna stay in the city, but we've done that a few times. I was let's just go down through the national park, Royal National Park, and we'll go out and do a couple of bush walks and then go down to Wollongong and stay down there.

We've, and just hang out together. So, yeah, we're looking forward to that. Awesome. Then we'll come back up to Campbelltown, see Rowley on on Sunday morning.

And see Dean and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it's, we're looking forward to it. Yeah. Cool.

Getting them a stuff dry cleaned. Demel's picking it up now. I guess the state of my suit jackets, because I haven't worn them for ages. So couple marks on them and, hopefully they're ready to go.

But we'll yeah. Will that be the one that you wore, to your wedding? The, the and the one you wore to Abe? No.

No. I've got different ones since then. I've got a white one. I've also bought a green one recently, so we'll see how that goes.

Oh shit. Okay. That's a little different. Right.

Yeah. I can see that. Yeah. So we'll see.

We'll see. I've got a See what you wear on the day. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Sure. I've got options. Yep.

Yeah. Awesome. I can't wait. I'd I'm really looking forward to having you guys down.

I was thinking about this last night how like special that is to have you come down. You know, you and I are only, you know, we've known each other now for five years, but only really being close for the last two. Yeah. I think it's really special.

Like, that's a big deal to have you leave your kids with your family and come down, you and Mel come down and, yeah, and be there for my big day. I think it's it's awesome. So Yeah. It's nice.

I I'm really looking forward to it. Awesome. Thanks, man. Me too.

Alright. So where do we go to from here? Mate, we've got, I guess this has been the first full week of your devs, right, as well. And, we're starting to productivity has really shot up in the business and, yeah, it's a massive change in work.

You think that your workload to go down hiring people, but my workload and my stress levels have gone up because there's an adjustment. Yeah. There's an adjustment of like problems that, that it require addressing and things that get out of my head. I'm like, I've got so much to do.

I'm like, oh God. Yeah. Plus manage my other clients or do all sorts of stuff. So how are you feeling from it?

It's a lot. Yes. I and I knew this going into it, which is why I was so apprehensive and slow with pulling the trigger on this. Right?

Because especially in the lead up to what I'm like about to go into and taking some leave and stuff, like, it is brutal because to give some context with Chris who works with me at Atlas, like, I now can assign him some stuff or he can self assign because he knows everything. Right? He's got the full context. He knows it all.

Has great relationships with our clients. It's great. And yet, and now with our new our two new developers under six sides, Raymond and Martin, they don't know all the context. They need to be told everything, and there's no slide on them.

I would need it if I was joining a new company. Of course you do. Right? That's how it works until you know everything.

And that won't happen for a year or two. So I knew going into the hiring that, okay, this is now my job is to record stuff, like write things down for them, be getting tickets ready, be hopping on calls and all of that. And that's exactly what's happening. And so, yeah, it has been a really full on week In saying that, it's been an awesome week.

So it's fantastic to have both of these guys working on the the platform. They're working on the web dashboard. I've got Raymond working on the mobile app, like, and we shipped some updates out already, across both of those. So, I can tell you about that.

So, on the in the mobile app, we fixed a couple of bugs around sponsors. Some things weren't rendering properly and sponsor names as well were getting cut off if they were a bit too long and that's a bad look if you're, you know, these people have paid a lot of money to have their companies in your app and their names are getting cut off. So, we've got that fixed up now and that got rolled out and, approved overnight on both app stores. So congratulations to Raymond for getting his first release out there.

So when does that get rolled out into the app store? You'll do that this morning. It's done, mate. It's already live.

So I put it up for review, yesterday and, after Raymond finished his changes. And, yeah, it was approved, overnight for both app store and play store. So I've already gone back to the customer that we had that was like has an event coming up under project hammer. I've gone back to her and just let her know, hey, this is live and she's come back and said, awesome.

So that's really good. Oh, I haven't just, oh, hang on. It didn't say that. It didn't say that on the thing and now it's updating.

So I will go back and check it. It didn't automatically tell me on the app when I opened it up, it didn't say, Hey, you've got an update to do. It might've already updated. No, it did just, just updated then just to, can you force, can you let people know that it's, It'll, it will update in the background on like within a week, every app on your phone is constantly checking.

Is there an update? So apple and I imagine Google as well, both in the background check all of your apps and see, okay, is there an update on the app store? And that's why like sometimes you'll find in that there's like an update area in your app store app on your phone. And it would be sitting there, but they also like slow release some of those as well.

So not everybody gets the updated app at the exact same time. So there's a few things at play. So if it wasn't coming up for you within, you know, ten hours of it being released, doesn't concern me at all. Right?

Okay. But even when I open the app up, it should say, hey, there's an update? Yeah, it should. So if it didn't, that's interesting, but it's okay.

It didn't. This is something that we can work on in the future. I'm not too worried about it right now. Alright.

Mate, I need less stress, not more. So then on the web dashboard side of things, Martin and Raymond have both been working on it, but Martin's been doing some really good stuff. So he added a Slack notification, which I'll talk a bit more. So now we get notified on Slack and our sales team for Raya and Chris and yourself.

Now they'll get notified whenever there's a new user that signs up, a new team or a new event that gets created, we can instantly see that, which we'll come back to in a minute. And then Martin's also been working on like updating checklist items when you open up an event and the organisers want you to like add a profile photo or ask a question or whatever. I used to have to configure all of that and now it's visible in the dashboard. Working on a few changes that we've had to make for marinas and that whole exhibitors, sponsors, differentiating thing.

We've got those changes made now. Attendees like adding some pagination and filtering and search and stuff like that for our attendee list. That's all gone well. And then Raymond's been working in tandem on notifications.

So being able to send and then store notifications from the dashboard, and this is all going towards scheduling future notifications. So someone organiser can line it up and go, okay, cool. At 9AM on Thursday, I wanna send this out to everyone, know, then twelve I wanna send out, okay lunch is at the blah blah blah whatever. Configuring all of that stuff because right now they have to do it in real time from the mobile app.

So we're improving that. But then also tracking on notifications of like, okay, I sent this one out. How many people have actually received it? How many opened it?

Etcetera. So just giving a bit more visibility on notifications. And then the final piece of that will be an inbox in the app and in the dashboard of, okay, here's all the notifications that you've received. And then you can mark them as read, you know, same as on Facebook or whatever.

So, yeah, it's like it's awesome having all of this work happen while I'd been away like working on the marketing side basically and doing review of like code review with with the guys and getting on calls and stuff. It's great to have this level of productivity. So how's it how's it been from your end seeing all of that start to happen? Yeah.

Really good. It it has been interesting. Like you and I are our own bosses. Right?

So and we the I think the challenge is coming from, if I'm honest, is we work to our own pace. Right. And we'll, like, we do it in the morning. Like I work at four in the morning.

Sometimes I work at night. But now we've got a team is we are like, we're getting four like, we have to we're answering to other people really because we have to get things done and people are relying on us. So now when it's like, oh, I just want to not work for a while or have a break and I can't, I've gotta get some stuff back to the team. But even just what you listed off there, like, because you're spread across other, businesses that would have taken two weeks to get out potentially.

Yeah. Yeah. The best thing last night is when I was watching TV and I saw someone created a, an account and signed up and then created a team. And I thought it was brilliant.

A shout out to Nick, for doing that. I do have a question on that. So will it show everyone who signs up for six sides on the mobile app or only people for the dashboard? Everyone that signs up on six sides.

Okay. So potentially for the next, project hammer event, that channel is about to get spammed. Yeah. But It is what it is.

Is that what you want or you don't want that? I think let's do that now and then we will scale it back if it's a bit too crazy. Right? Yeah.

But what I do what I was thinking about last night and it would be great to have that, you know, Nick signed up and then he created an event for SaaS developers in Nottingham. That was awesome. It would be great to get a and then a weekly summary to say, Hey, this many events were signed up. This many people signed up and this many events were created and we don't have it yet, but this amount of revenue was generated.

Right. And then we can have the weekly summaries and a monthly summary. Then we can be tracking that somewhere and then we can plot over time. I would imagine we would see some type of hockey stick growth over time.

And can you imagine that? Imagine when we go like month $5, dollars 5,000 of, of signups were done this month or $25,000 of signups were blah, blah, blah, blah, or where, yeah, it's this many people come into the app, like per per month, like the 400 people or 300 people, whatever it is, it'll be those metrics would be amazing. Yeah. Well, we can start.

We could have like an admin area with, with all of that sort of stuff in it. Yeah. Like it doesn't have to, probably wouldn't do like the weekly summaries in slack. I mean, maybe we could, but yeah, yeah.

We could definitely do some reporting in, in an admin area. I think that would be really cool. You imagine in, I can visualize in time, we start getting traction, then you would have a live dashboard of people coming in and events being created and, you would see week to week fluctuations and stuff like that. So yeah, it'll be, if we can do that, then we can, just so much stuff.

We have visibility of that stuff happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then identify, oh, we probably wanna reach out to this team, you know, whatever, like apply like personal touch with them versus, okay, this is a small meetup happening somewhere. You know? Yep. Yep.

Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. It's really good, mate.

It's really good. And it's the same on my side of the fence. Like, the guys of getting into training that I've paid for that I haven't had a chance to really immerse myself in. Like, Chris is and Raya are both producing high quality content already, and now we're moving into lead generation.

But Chris is setting up a sequencing, a campaign schedule to track effectiveness on content so we can alter it. And Raya is getting out to lead generation. We've got a few people come back already who wanna set up a time all on your profile because she's looking in your profile. We had three replies overnight coming back in.

Yeah, it's really, it's, it's, it says everything we wanted. Right. So yeah. Yeah.

And I haven't even switched over to six sides yet, to deal buddy, which I've gotta do with the team next week to start start doing some stuff there. So yeah. Mate, that's awesome. Okay.

So just I'll finish out the work I was doing on the marketing website. So I've started figuring out, okay, how could we do our docs and have like user guides and things like that all managed through this content system that we've got. I've moved out our tina CMS that we use to a separate interface now that is like behind the Cloudflare accessing, so it's locked down so no one could get into it. Not that they could before, it was still kind of locked down, but now it's off our marketing website completely.

I've got it all hooked up. So anytime a new Transistor episode is published, it'll automatically make its way to the website. And then, yeah, we now have like a proper draft authoring system for the team to use and they're writing blog posts now which is fantastic. So that's all going well.

But I'm also tying into that looking at like the docs and user guides and stuff like that for us, support articles, all that sort of stuff. I've been kind of playing with it. So I don't have anything to look at yet. Is partially working on my computer, but I'm moving down that pathway.

Like it's starting to get there. So I'll pick that back up. It's not super urgent. I'll pick it back up after I'm back from my leave.

And, yeah, I'll continue on with the doc stuff. But also this week, I started work on some of the design aspects of the website and for the marketing website. And yeah, I am struggling a little with the creativity and I've been thinking about it with my, like I've talked about my, like I have a sense of design. I know what I like and don't like, so I can critique.

I don't feel like I can create. I really struggle and I always have even like way back when ten, fifteen years ago when I was trying to get into doing just web design. I was like, I'm not equipped for this. I'm not good at coming up with, okay, this is how this page should look.

I'm fine to take a design and go, no. Okay. Let's change that and and do this instead. Or, yeah, I really like that, but I struggle hard to imagine what a page should look like.

So that's been a challenge. And then using the AI, it does not produce like I'm yet to find any, designs that were produced by AI in our app like as I've been running in Cursor that I'm like, oh, this is amazing. The well, that's not true. The only time that that's happened is with, when we were putting together some screenshots, like as a proof of concept for the police games back in January, I think we we did some like dark mode stuff in the mobile app itself for them.

And that actually came out looking amazing. So I don't know what happened back then, but I haven't been able to recapture that since. So, yeah, it's been a bit of a a bit of a challenge. So yeah.

That's interesting considering you told me not to have any input because you wanted to do it yourself. It's hard to feel sorry for you here, Mitchell Davis. I'm not asking for you to feel sorry for me. Just that it's yeah, I think ultimately I would like to get some help on the design.

I'm still from an actual designer is ultimately where I want us to go. I will keep persisting after this leave. I'll come back and keep trying with some of the tools and a fresh look at things again. I'll sit down with Stitcher myself.

The reason I don't want your help in particular beyond me giving you some options is because if it's your design, then I'm I have to like account for how you feel about it. Right? And you might really go to bat with like for, okay, I really like the way this thing looks, but I kind of wanna own that process the way that we look. And then I can present you with some options that I'm happy with as opposed to doing it the other way around.

I might not be happy with anything that you're, that you come up with. And I want to avoid that situation and it might happen vice versa. You might not be happy with what I come up with. And we've had that happen before.

But if you get stuck, if you're getting stuck, how, like what that leaves us with an impasse because you don't know what to No. I'll keep finding other ways. Like, I'll like I just said, I'll use the stitch thing to come up with some options. I signed up for that UI dot SH, which is this new tool by the Tailwind creators, and it's meant to help your designs feel a bit more polished.

I've used that. It is pretty cool, but it's not leading to anything groundbreaking for us. So, yeah, it's it's a little bit of a challenge. Ultimately, I'd want us to get a designer to give us like proper branding.

Like we put everything together ourselves. I'm not sold on that because we had those people give us inputs before and they were just shit ass. Like we were. But that they were doing that because it was free and they spent half an hour on it.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. We didn't they didn't spend a week or two just thinking about us and our situation.

Right? So that's not indicative of how a designer would be. So, I'm going to persist with this for now, but, yeah, there's every chance in the future that I wanna talk with you more seriously about we should actually get someone to do this for us now that we've got some budget. I think it will be worth it.

Yeah. I don't think we have budget to be honest. I think we're, yeah. Anyway, I have a different opinion on it.

So, you you knock, you feel your boots. All right. We will, we'll pick it back up, later after I try all of the other options. So I'm just looking at this, like at this, stitch it's called stitch by the way, not stitcher, around just some of the ideas, what they've had there.

And I do agree, like some of it is, you know, some of it's pretty shit, but there's one or two that goes, oh, okay. I can see that as a basis of starting something from there. Then run from because it gives you an idea and you run with it really. It doesn't really replace anything.

That's where I would see it being. There's a particular one that I'm looking at right now that I would think that doesn't look too bad. Well, that's so by all means, send over what you've got, but the Don't wanna do it out of sympathy. Like, we're not gonna do it out of sympathy here.

Yeah. No. Send yeah. Send over what you've got, but that is exactly what I'll start trying to do is just using some more tools, see what I can find, and then try and get some inspiration.

Something else that's a resource I found recently, is called Mobbin, m o b b I n, and it is it's basically like a directory of a bunch of different screenshots of popular apps from the App Store. I think they only do iOS and web. They don't have Android, which is a shame, but pretty cool tool. They take a bunch of screenshots of, like, all the different screens inside of big popular apps like Airbnb, and they've got Tinder, and they've got all sorts.

And they walk you through, like, their onboarding flow and how do you sign up for an account and how do you reset your password? All this sort of stuff to give us some design inspiration. And they show things like animations and splash screens. And so all of that is I think that's like very useful for you and I to sit down and go, okay, what do we both like?

And could we try and like get some influences from from other designs? What don't we like? You know? So that we we both end up with with an app that we really like.

And then even if we do go get some help with design, we could at least point them to, hey, we both really like these four apps. Like, let's create something that looks kinda like this, you know? So, yeah, so that's a really cool tool because we were trying to do this six months ago ourselves on Dribbble. And Dribbble's good, but it's not to this level of detail.

So, yeah, really cool stuff. I'll list it on the in the show notes. Okay. Buddy.

You can wanna say hello to Mitch? Hi, Mitch. Hey. That's just got you.

Podcast to say a quick hello. Say how are you, buddy? Say how are you? Alright.

Say bye, Mitch. Hi, Mitch. Can you shut up? Bye.

Yeah. Need to cut that out? That was lovely. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. Okay. Awesome.

Alright. So why don't we talk about some of the stuff you've been doing? So you've got a few items here. SOPs.

Yeah. So we've been building SOPs, standard operating procedures. So Friday is, I think I may have mentioned this last week is my old founder that I work with said, do it, document it, improve it. So every Friday we're going back and retrospectively building SOPs for the week before.

And already Chris has been doing some stuff and he said, I've already built the SOP for it and we'll review it Friday and then make sure you're happy with it. So it's actually been, setting the expectation and having them do that so we can at least make it useful, I think has been, and re and at least document it. And then we can make sure, get them to follow it and I can follow it and see if it works. If it don't, if we don't get the right outcome, then we can amend it.

But we're starting to get a process now. It's been three weeks with my team and we're starting to get some repeating patterns from Monday, Wednesday. We've got Monday, Tuesday, a little bit of Wednesday filled out and was like, okay, now we can switch over and start. Once we got those three days or two and a half days done, then I can switch over into deal buddy and we can just rep, repeat the process basically.

But yeah, it's going, it's been really good and refining it again. Like I've never been under, I haven't been under this much stress for a while, but it's actually, it's just, it's a different schedule and a different set of problems that we're, and challenges that we've got to solve. It's been, it's been really good. Sure.

Been, it's it's been really interesting to unpack. I think both of us, like we know things and we feel it and we've, we've, like, we've been in this business from day one. We haven't documented much stuff, but now we've gotta try to document it so we can teach others. And that's that's a real challenge and something I'm I'm really liking.

So Yeah. Yeah. It it it's interesting this on the stress levels stuff like earlier this week we got on a call with someone and I was just not in the right headspace. I'd been having day that day and I hadn't yet had a coffee.

And then you and I, we get off the call and we talked a little about it and then we were talking about some other stuff and you could just tell I was just like a bit sour. Right? And so he asked me like, hey, you seem a bit off. Like, is everything alright?

And I was like, you know what? I'm sorry. Yes. You're right.

I'm really stressed and I'm having a shit day. And I wasn't I don't feel like I was taking it out on you, but I was fucking negative Nelly that day and not fun, I'm sure, for you to be around. And so No. No.

I it's fine. I don't that's fine. I think there's times when you can have sometimes we have productive conversations when we challenge each other's thinking and we build on it. And at the end, we end up in a better place.

When one of us is not in our mood to be challenged and having a productive conversation, then it ends up being negative. It goes the other way. And then we were starting to have that conversation and I stopped. I was like, I don't think you're in a headspace to have this conversation.

You were like, you know what? You're right. And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Like, that's okay.

You can't force it. Like it's, it's what it is because there's times in my relationship with Mel where I go, she is not in the mood to be having a DNM or for me to tell her exactly what she's doing wrong. What, in what, in what relationship does that ever work? Yeah.

That's bold. Yep. That is bold. I'm I'm just kidding.

But, it just wasn't I could just tell. I was like, hang on a second. Yeah. We this is not going anywhere fast.

It's starting to bring me down. Let's just stop it and then we'll re pick it up. I can't even remember what it was about to be honest. But, Yeah.

Yeah. And then we spoke later that day and everything was back to being good again. So, yeah, it was just, it just, it showed me like, hey, I need to recognise that stuff in myself. Like, why is that your problem?

It's not your problem. You know? So sometimes you don't recognise it. Some and I think it's, I think it's good enough.

I think it's great that we have the relationship then some, then I can say, and then you can say, Hey, I don't think that you're like, you said it to me yesterday. Are you all right? And I said, I'm pretty fucked. And I was like, I'm just gonna wind up this call and then I'm gonna go have a an hour break before I gotta do some stuff in the afternoon.

And you're like, yeah. Okay. And, Yeah. It's good.

It is good to have that that level of like communication and trust in each other. Mate, we are gonna come up against some fuck. We're gonna come up against some stressful times. And at the end of the day, like, as you know, that I have your back and I know that you have mine, that doesn't matter.

So we'll get through it. Right. We're both on Well said. Yeah.

Well said. All right. You've, you've got some leads coming in here. We do.

We do. We're, we've had some other leads come in this week, like in, in some of it directly from Raya following up yesterday, like, cause we, you know, things do slip by the cracks when you've got many different things going on. She was going through and she was like, Oh, we've missed this one. What do you want to do?

And I've always been hesitant to let people respond on my behalf or your behalf, particularly in my experience and what I've witnessed when you have offshore workers who don't understand the culture and don't understand the wording and phrasing, it can come off like I'm really sensitive to it. And maybe because I'm in business development stuff, but her, her responses have been pretty good. There's been some slight grammar grammar stuff, but other than that, there's just learning.

And even then she'd come to me yesterday, and she was like, Mitch just told me about Australian language. How you don't use Z Z and stuff. I was like, yeah. And, and she goes, I did not know.

She goes, I was looking for other things and not the Z. And, yeah. So she just went We we went back and forth. It took like three rounds of of she sent me over this seat, and I was like, oh, it's good, but we gotta change this to this, this to this.

And then she sent it back. She's like, oh, great. Thanks. Alright.

I'll do that. And then she sent it back. And I was I combed through carefully. I found one more zed.

I was like, look, there's that one still. Let's get that one right. And then yeah. So she she's right on it.

It's good. Yeah. She she come back. We had a fun conversation yesterday.

She goes, can I can I be honest with you? And I like, yeah. She goes, I don't understand Aussie slang. And I was like, I was like, okay, can you give me an example?

She goes, no, I can't give you an example now. And I said, I've been trying to wind back the Aussie slang. I said, but you, you, if there is ever something I say Aussie slang, put your hand up and then I'll answer it. Otherwise we'll make a list of all the Aussie slang stuff.

All the common ones. Yeah. Send her a brief. Yeah.

And, it was funny. So, they're starting to, to relax a little bit. And Chris is Chris has been awesome as well. Yeah, it's been, good.

So we've got, I'm reasonably confident that we will get you some more revenue coming in soon. We invoice some more revenue for project rendezvous. Hammer. Hammer.

Hammer. Hammer. This week, we're talking about an ongoing agreement after that. Brilliant.

We're almost at a really high profile set of events. I think we'll get them as a client. We are working on a really big deal. Next project Rendezvous where I'm working on at the moment, they have 200,000 people in their network around the world.

We're only going to work on, the Australian component of it now, but it directly ties in with what we're doing with the word police games with multilingual, all this kind of stuff. That is a really interesting opportunity and massive. I don't know how that would look, but yeah, it's a, I think there's a chance I could go to Qatar later in the year pending no more war stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. What's going on with that? I haven't looked at the news lately. Is that, is that still going on?

The Iran's still going on. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's, it's interesting because all the petrol prices dropped down, which is brilliant, but then, yeah, it's all still happening.

So, anyway, it's not a political show. We better not get into it. What do you think about project earth? Just throwing something out there.

Do you like project earth? Good for this Yeah. For this one. If you look at the at the name and think about it a little.

Yeah. Sure. Earth. It's massive.

You don't like it? Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

That's good. Yeah. Okay. Sure.

Alright. Project earth. We've named it here. We'll see how we So goal is today is to just replicate what we did with world police games.

It's gonna be largely white paper based. So I have a white paper. I have a lot of information that we had a meeting with them this week. I'll digest that and I'll write them a white paper next week.

And then we will start planning it out. Interestingly, what we're doing is we're starting with three years in mind to have an event coming to Australia in 2028. We're working back from that. And, yeah, we're gonna reverse engineer it, which is the best kind of way to do it.

So yeah, I think there's a shot. Yeah. Like if we can pull that off, that's the next iteration from, from what we're doing now. Yep.

I don't know, mate. I don't know. I have a theory. Tell Couldn't it happen?

Why couldn't it happen? Like, that's right. That attitude is what won us the police game. So, Like why couldn't we?

Like when I was at Redeye, I just was like, if we do this and we offer this much value and we offer this much return on investment, why would they say no? Like, there's no reason they would say no. Like, and it's once you figure out how to get to that position and offer enough value that they'd be silly to say no, it's an easy, it's an easy thing. It's an easier equation to try to solve.

If, if you know what I mean? So, yeah, like I told you what I briefly, we spoke about it this week is my plan to continue bootstrapping. This is coming together. Right.

With the world police games is we were lucky to find this innovative partner that will help us get to the next level and there's enough timeline for us to build. And so it's going to fund us for the next twelve to eighteen months. And then plus as we add functionality in, it'll allow us to take more market share with our team. Right.

Our goal is to 10 X that revenue. Then we'll want to find the next project beyond that, which will stretch us again for the next period of time, which this I've got a couple in mind here. If we can happen to win them, or get them on board, then that will, that should see us potentially fund the business for the next two to three years. And then who knows where we'll be after that.

Right? I think you need to take funding when your development outstrips your revenue. Like it's a simple equation, but why can't you inverse that equation? Yeah.

Good question. Yeah. Well, we are a sales led organization, I believe. We are.

We're a sales business. Yep. Yep. So let's sell them.

Project Earth's coming up. Coming to you in in, in eight months from today, I reckon. We'll we'll get to unveil project Earth, hopefully. No pressure, mate.

Sorry. But, you can do it. We we can do it, mate. We can.

Yep. Through our powers combined. I feel like we can. So Bringing, deal buddy into the mix once we can, break the back of this, big project is will be really important for that.

Right? Yep. Yep. Yeah.

And For sure. Yeah. It's Alright. One one other thing.

I know it's now ten minutes ago, but I didn't have an opportunity to jump in. The with the the team opening up a bit and being a bit more casual, funniest, like, the Slack emojis that everybody uses every time cracks me up when I see it. So from and I don't know. I think it was me initially on, like, day one when Chris and Raya joined on Slack and on your phone.

There's, like, the raised hands, like, almost like praying or something, you know, raise hands emoji. And I use that, like, once to be like, it's great, you know, that the new team members have come in. And then now, like, almost every time on everything that Chris does in particular, he's, like, very guilty of using it. Every time he's like, raise hands, raise hands.

And then the other one that he'll use is the eyes emoji. And then Raya, like, starts using those as well. But then I've noticed with the, my two guys, Martin and Raymond, they use the salute emoji for everything. It's like, yep.

I've seen this. Yes. I'm on it. No worries.

And I just basically it in practical ways that they're letting, they're, like, letting you know that they've seen it. And then I think that is like, amen. Right? Like, amen.

I I I agree. So yeah. It's just it's so interesting. It cracks me up because, yeah, at most I'll, like, do a thumbs up emoji or something like that.

And then it's they got me to start doing it a little. I'm like, when you send something through that's good, I'm like, alright. Raise hands. Like, so funny.

So Can we create that? We're starting to build culture. Like, that's, that's becoming a part of it, which is awesome. So We can add our own emojis.

We can put a six sides dice in there. Brilliant. Nobody wants the six sides dice emoji. It's not cool.

Mate, we'll make it cool. It's everything's not cool until it's cool, mate. I think it's, I disagree. Anyway This is this is what I had to deal with the other day, guys, in a in a meeting.

The negativity, he probably hasn't had a coffee. And I have had a coffee now. No. I'm good.

This is me thinking logically that the dice is not is not that cool. But anyway. You're like the sea you're like the sea anchor in the progress of this business. That's right.

I'll keep us grounded. That's good. Well, you know, we're not gonna go adrift. Alright.

Couple final things here. Setting up an event in minutes. What have you got for that? Well, I went to a business development meeting yesterday with a potential client and on the way down I was driving and I was like, why don't I set up just an event to show them what it would look like?

So they have more of a sense of it, like putting it in their hands. And I was, I think, and I was on the way down there and I allowed myself ten minutes once I parked to make sure I wasn't late. And I was like, I've only got ten minutes. I think I can do it.

And basically all I did was pull up. Obviously I had to stop the car. But open up the dashboard, take, take the logo from the event, set it up, set up a dummy schedule. And it was done within about two or three minutes.

And when I walked in there, we had a conversation about their event in November. It's on the same day that the, volunteering WA event was on last year. And then it's a good sign. Yeah.

And then showed it to him and he was like, oh wow, like this is amazing. And I was like, well, what what's your key themes? And he showed me, I was like, man, we can do that. It gave us some feedback on a particular piece of software that they use for voting.

I think we can solve that. I've got a plan to solve that in the next couple of weeks. But and it w it just gave, it was just so fast to set up the event and it was so quick and we're removed so many weeks or hours from people setting up an event. And we make simple meetups now way more accessible for people to set up an event app and add value.

So, yeah, it was actually really, it was, it was impressive. So well done to you and, and, you know, and the team coming on board, what, from what they're adding to now. Yep. Likewise, mate.

Yep. If you're out there and you hate using whatever event software you're using, give us a crack because we'll save you a lot of time. That's my pitch. Yep.

What do you think? Right now you can mate, it was good. You missed the community led events platform thing again, but we're not gonna hound on that. Let's not dwell on that.

But you can set it up now if you've got like a meetup and you want to, set it up, go to six sides and start for free. And yeah, we'll just have a crack. We'll, we'll help you through. We'll see that you've signed up and we'll reach out and make sure you have the best experience ever in the world.

Actually, I'm gonna say that best experience in the world better than your wedding day. Yep. Yeah. Sure.

I don't know about that. And hopefully only if you're in Australia because Nick was telling us that we've got some lag issues in other parts of the world. And time zone issues that you probably need to fix. Like, there's yeah.

Yeah. I don't know about that, Nick. I'm not sure. I'll I've seen the email.

I'm gonna come back to you. Thank always, mate. Customers always, we'll see. We'll see.

They're always right until they're not. Yeah. That's right. You just have to not let them know.

That's the secret. Alright. So final thing as we wrap up is how we're gonna handle my leave. So we've talked about that.

Man, sorry. Monday. Quickly. I'm just looking at the time zones.

What's Nick talking about? They're everywhere. Yeah. That's what I thought.

I'm like, I I don't know. But, anyway so anyway thank you anyway, Nick. But yeah. So I will do one more probably half day on Monday to just make sure everyone's all good.

But, yeah, then I'll just be working an hour or less per day. No one I've already told my guys, and I'll reiterate it on our call later today that I'm offline. I'm off the grid on Thursday, Friday, and Monday, over the next week, like around the wedding, couple days around the wedding. But outside of that, I'll be available.

You obviously will be able to get me anytime. That's fine. And then, yeah, I'll just kinda check-in because it's such early days for me to be get like probably able to come. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. So it's really poor timing, but it is what it is. So, yeah, so we'll do that.

We actually, because our team, like my guys, are not yet fully across everything, they don't have access to production or anything like that, which we're doing for, you know, security and trust reasons. It's the right things to do, especially this early into having them on board, we actually had to push back on a potential lead that might have wanted to start on, like, the day before my wedding, which is next Friday. Like and so, we had to push back and go like, we just can't give you the level of support that you might need to run their very first event and have it all go awesomely if I'm offline.

Right? And you at that point, you would be down in Wollongong like we are not at home base. So Mhmm. Yeah.

That's something that I look forward to that not being an issue in the future, and you and I can both potentially be completely offline and we have a team already that's available to to help if there's issues. But Yeah. Yeah. That's a a long time away, I'd say.

So Yeah. Yeah. Like, it was too it was too tricky. It was the Friday night.

It wasn't day. It was night that the event was on, which means that I'm away with Mel in Wollongong, not can't be working there. And then you're, you're the night before the wedding. It was just all the times of the year.

Yeah. The only other thing that would be worse than that is childbirth. And it was like, no, sorry. Like I haven't, I gotta, I gotta text him today.

And, and see what he says. See, see what his thoughts are about the next one. But, yeah, it's, it's, interesting. So they're interested in, in going ahead that soon.

And we're the ones now pushing back. Like, that's good. Know? What about the, when I get my team to give me a daily summary, right.

It's actually out into the, they they're doing it a little bit too, too much detail, which is fine. We can scale that back over time. What about, have you thought about getting your team to actually do that same thing back out So you can at least read slack and quickly just, just for the weeks that you're away and then you can. No, so I won't get them in doing that in slack instead in linear.

I've asked them to be putting that stuff in linear and just write in. So Chris, my Chris who works with me at Atlas has shown me how great it can be to have someone that is very detailed and communicative in a system like linear. Cause on everything he does, he leaves a ticket, he leaves a comment after he finishes something, or if we have to stop halfway through for some other priority or whatever, he leaves like, this is where I'm up to with this. And he includes screenshots and, okay, this stuff is coming up.

It's brilliant. And that is how we've run Atlas for the last two years or so. So when, Martin and Raymond joined and they weren't doing any of that because I hadn't laid out those expectations for them, I just wanted to see what's their style and it was a lot of just message on Slack. I instantly I'm like, no, we need to do all this in linear.

Slack can be like, hey, you got a quick question or you wanna talk about like work in general, but if it's stuff that relates to specific items, put that in linear so that we can track it and then mark it off when it's done. Don't have to think about it. So I've asked them to kind of follow Chris's example of, okay, take screenshots and tell me what you got up to today. Even if it's not finished yet, I wanna know like, alright, what did you actually work on?

And they started doing that, which is great. So, yeah. Are you writing an SOP on that? So like on that particular task?

No. I think you should. We'll get them to write it or ask Chris to write the SOP that he's been doing for you. Cause he, he knows it off by hand.

Right. And then get him to, write it so you can take it and replicate it for them. It's otherwise I think I'd write it. I would, I, I won't ask Chris to do it.

It's not. Sure. I don't think that's good, but I I could write something for them. It's just this is how we follow it.

Because I like, we did go through. I documented the whole process of getting them set up Mhmm. Like, bringing them into the business and all the different things that we needed to give them access to. So this could be a natural extension of that.

So, yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. Because if you don't, if we don't do that, if you don't completely set out that expectation, they'd veer off. Like, it's whose fault is that?

Because you haven't documented it. Right. Now you could do, there's a couple of different ways you can do it. The Loom video Loom allows you to, record the video and then go create an SOP from this.

So you can actually talk that through in your screen recordings and it will build you a detailed SOP. We may have to sign up for that. That may not be a free version of it, but that's okay. We need loom's fine.

We need loom anyway. I can just put it like, I don't, it's not, I'm not, it won't be more than a couple of paragraphs. Like it's really quite simple. Just the one thing that I have asked them to do is don't use AI to generate these comments.

By all means use AI in your code, use it in the pull requests where they write up like, okay, this is all the stuff that this particular block of work is going to change in the system when you deploy it. No problem. That's fine. But I want to know that you have thought about this thing that you're doing as you do it in your own natural language.

Right? So Sure. I can see Martin has been doing that, which is great. So he writes these comments and screenshots and stuff.

Raymond is using AI and I spoke about it with him and he said, I actually struggle a bit with writing out like language as writing out in English. And I said so he's like, I don't wanna write something and it looks like stupid, you know, or it's not, it's not detailed enough. So I use the AI to help me with that. So I asked him, look, I understand.

Can you please just write it in whatever language is working for you? And then let's just see. So, I think he's gonna start doing that from today and then we'll just see because it might be at the level that I'm okay with. I'm not expecting him to write an essay.

These are just like, just tell me what's in your head as you're going and building this thing, not whatever curses come up with. Sure. And there's also that process you had at the beginning, where you took a long time to get them set up with that nuance of the, whatever that means that they were on. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that is something that you should try to, I know you're going to leave now and it's probably a bit too late, but to try to capture before you forget. But yeah, I think that might say. No, no, no, it hasn't.

So yes, I, I will. I already have the changes that we had to make to the code base. I've got those there ready to go for the next person that we bring on. So Yep.

Yeah. No. That's fine. Yeah.

So it's it's good. It's a little bit of a change for me in, like, getting more organized, getting all the shit in the one sock, as you say, but that's good. It's a good challenge. So Yeah.

I I just think if we're gonna we're trying to build redundancy and all this kind of stuff, if we can get it and set that expectation, like from the beginning. I don't think doing just SAPs on one side of the business and not on the other. You know. Yeah.

I think it I think that would be the only one that we would need to be honest. Like, there's not the approach to development is so getting any one project. Like, you and I oh, you and I sat down yesterday and we went through, okay, this is all the stuff that I could have the team work on while I'm away. And we had to sit down and go and I had you were throwing out all these ideas which were brilliant and are things that we need to build, but a lot of them were like, no, this is yeah.

Something I'm gonna have to Exactly. Seems to be a recurring theme. We've got an SOP for shutting shutting shit down. Yep.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah.

It's it's hard because the job of building software is more loosey goosey. It's very dependent on, well, what are we actually building that will define what are the 10 different things I have to do to understand what I need to build there. It's hard to write. Okay, this is the three things that you need to do before you can write any feature for us.

It doesn't it doesn't work exactly like that. But I think that documenting what you've done, sure, I could I could write out a procedure for that. Yeah. Cool.

Alright. Well, I've gotta wrap it now. So, mate, where can people find you online? LinkedIn, mate.

LinkedIn. Gavin Tye, t y e. Pretty simple. Gav.

Gav Tye. Is it? Or is it Gavin? Gavin Tye.

Yeah. Gavin Tye Gavin. Gavin Tye is someone else. Yep.

Or come across to the, 6sides.co and, jump in on the, we've got a chat now on the bottom right hand corner. You can grab me there. It's true.

It's true. Very true. Thank you for asking. You can find me on LinkedIn under the handle Mitch Dev, couple other places.

Probably wanna get back to you myself personally for a little while because I'm going on some leave, but I've got Raya there. She's on hand. She'll more than be more than willing to reply back to you. And, yeah, and and we'll go from there.

So I won't I'll see you in a week, but I won't be on next episode. You're interviewing your lovely wife, Mel. Yep. Yeah.

That'd be fun. She'll, she's not gonna pull any punches, so it'll be more entertaining, I think, she's than what you and I get up to. Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah. I'm looking forward listening to that. Nicole's last name, mate, or are gonna keep your own? I'm gonna keep my own.

Yep. Fair enough. Yeah. I'm glad she She's an odd way to ask a question.

She will be becoming a Davis, which she's got some she feels a little, it's interesting. She feels very whitewashed. But, you know, it is what it is. So It is.

Yep. Well It is anyway, not a political show. You're the whitest you're the whitest man I know. So with like a thumb.

Anyway, good luck, mate, in your wedding and, speak to you I'll speak to you in a couple of minutes, but otherwise everyone speaks to in a couple of weeks. Exactly. Yeah. Yep.

Awesome. Alright. Thanks, mate. See you.

Bye.