64: David vs multiple Goliaths

Hey. It's editor Mitch. Unfortunately, Gavin's mic had a mad echo at times during this episode, so I did my best to go through and mute everything in Riverside. I'm sorry if I missed some things.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the episode. Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, CTO and Lateral Developer. I'm Gavin Tye, CEO, sales marketing and operations.

Now I've, I've added another string to my bow there, Mitchell Davis. Oh my god. How many, how many titles can one man do? We'll see.

I'll end up with all those BSC, CPAG, ED, all those things I need on my LinkedIn. Or the the directors guild or the, you know, all that sort of stuff. I have a I have some of that stuff I could put on my last name on LinkedIn. I just don't Do you really?

Yeah. Yeah. Have a heap. I have quite a few because I got a master's in I know you do the MBA.

Yeah. In entrepreneurship and something like that, and it gives me a fucking stupid fucking thing. Oh, you should get them out for next episode. You can give us the full list.

I'll give you one week of putting that in your email signature, and then I'll I'll take chance. Anyway, we are into year two of running a remote startup, sixsides.co. It's a community building platform focused on events, and we are documenting both the business and tech of our journey as we build our SaaS.

How are you, mate? Very, very well, mate. How are you? I'm good.

I'm good. It's, it's all going on. Huge week for us, but I fear I don't fear. I believe that will be our new normal.

Like we are just extremely busy people now, for the next year or so, I think it's a good My problem to role's changing. So I'm figuring out like what I've, when I like it, my role's changing instead of being on the tools to creating the structure. And I think that it's taken me a little while to get my head around it. When I was at Redeye and other jobs, like I was still largely on the tools and the management structure and reporting structure was like defined really.

Now I'm trying to get my head around it here and going, what are we trying to see? How do we make it effective or like easy to get to? And, so I'm starting to build management dashboards so we can actually see our progress and start beginning to optimise and take proactive action. It's very, it's well outside of my comfort zone and there's a bit of trial and error going on.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very interesting.

But, how are you doing that? How are you building those? Before we hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Woah, the train before we go too far.

This is your doing by the way. You've jumped to topic number six, right off the bat. Oh mate, come on. Come on.

Let's not, let's not pick apart. Who's done what here. We had to pause your honeymoon story last week because you were, you'd go off in a bit of a diatribe. So, let's pick that back up again.

Tell us about your honeymoon. What did you do for those of you who don't know, if you may be listening to us for the first time to our many hundreds of thousands of listeners, Mitch got married recently and, he's picking it up his honeymoon in Tasmania. So mate, that's right. Yeah.

So we went to Tassie the two days after the wedding, and it was good. It was really good. We went for a week. We went to Hobart.

Neither of us have ever been to had been to Tassie before. So, yeah, first time. And yeah. So we stayed in Hobart for a couple days.

Beautiful place, isn't it? It is. It is. It's very small town vibes, the whole the whole state.

They've only got 500,000 people. That's like very small. So, yeah, we, it was a little smaller town vibe than we expected to be honest. But it was really nice.

It was like a nice change of pace to to slow down. It is beautiful. It's very historic. There's a lot of old stuff.

Old convict stuff. Right? Like, Battery Point and stuff. Did you go around there?

Yeah. We did. So we stayed near the marina, in Hobart or near the port, whatever. I don't know.

But there were places for boats to be. And you reckon the marinas people would be happy with that synopsis? Well We'll we'll ask them. We'll get them on the show next time.

Anyway, so it was good. It was really nice. We got to see there was a boat that said Antarctica on it. I presume it goes down to Antarctica.

We didn't get to see it. Wow. Go do that. I just sat there.

Pretty smart. Yeah. I connected the dots. Yes.

We're in safe hands. We're in safe hands here at Sixth Arts. Nothing but the smartest. Yep.

Anyway, it was good. We went to Bruny Island, which, we had to catch a boat ferry, a boat ferry, a car ferry for, which I haven't done that in like fifteen, twenty years since I was a kid, I think. So that was a bit of fun. And then, we did a beer and cheese place on Bruny Island, and the beers were all really nice.

Three of the cheeses were quite nice. One of them reeked. It was really bad. So we didn't I we each had like a bite of that one, and then we left it at that.

So we did that. Nicole found out she doesn't like Tasmanian oysters. They're like too meaty or something, or they're not creamy like Sydney ones are. So, yeah, and I don't eat seafood, so it was neither here nor there for me.

But, yeah, she tried at three separate places through the trip. Didn't like any of them. So Really? Yeah.

Right. Yeah. So unlucky for her. Anyway, we went to Port Arthur as well.

How's that place? That's a amazing place to walk around. Yeah. So you've been?

Yeah. Yep. Sounds like we did exactly the same trip. Because we went Hobart we went to Port Arthur, Fraser and I sorry.

I'm taking your thunder. And then we stayed in we stayed in Hobart, but keep going. Ah, okay. So, yeah.

We went to Port Arthur and saw like all the old stuff, which is pretty cool to see because like you don't don't really see any of that side of our history in Sydney, at least I don't like sure. They've got some old like Captain Cook ships and stuff in the Sydney Harbour. Right? But not you don't get to see much of like what life was like there.

It's all all those buildings is gone. Yeah. You know? Oh, they're they're still there.

They're just built around. Like, there's too far few and far between, but Hobart's just so small. Right? Yeah.

Yep. So, also, it's it had just recently been the thirty years since the Port Arthur massacre and so that was on my mind and we got to go there and see they had because it was this thirty year anniversary, there were like flowers that were there from just like two or three weeks prior to us getting there. And it like, it really brought it home that like that's a recent thing. Like those people I actually talked a bit at length about it with Nicole who's not very philosophical but I was like really thinking about it and reflecting on it while we were there of like, you know, these are people that could have still been going to like family Christmases and stuff that aren't there because of the actions that were taken there.

So yeah, that kind of, put some things in perspective, but, yeah, all in all it was Did you do the ghost tour? No. No. What's the ghost tour?

Oh, they had a ghost tour on at night at Port Arthur, and we we didn't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No. We were we were gone. We were only there for three hours, and it was a morning thing. So, yeah, we went out on like a little they had a mini cruise thing.

They take a boat out and go out to the Island Of The Dead, I think it's called. And that was pretty cool. Got to see some of that stuff. Anyway, finished at Port Arthur and we had seen on our way there, we'd seen this thing on the side of the road that said unzoo.

And I was like, what the heck is that? And both Nicole and I were interested. We looked it up. It's a it's a zoo, but the animals are free to like come and go.

They're not contained with the exception of the Tazzy No. They don't don't have any of those thankfully. And lions. No.

So it was it's more like a refuge place. Okay. But anyway, they have some Tassie devils there. And we got to those ones are contained.

They're the only animals that are like inside. They've got their own like containment, not caged or anything, big ass areas for them to roam around in, but still contained. So anyway, the guide there was awesome. This bloke loves his job.

Like you could just tell, and he was so knowledgeable on everything. He was a bit of a nerd as well in a good way. I say that meaning, well, he like, we were, he was taking us through, we were a big group of like 15 people and he was taking us through all the different areas. We went and saw kangaroos and he was like helping us feed them and went and did a bird thing, bird spotting and stuff.

And then on our way back from that, he saw some mushrooms on the ground that was like some different type of mushroom that he hadn't seen before. And he spent like five minutes, like, taking photos of it on his phone and like, was just it was awesome. So we spent, I think, another two hours there. And that was just like, it was really nice.

So, anyway, then to kind of speed things up, we we then went to oh, I tried my first Guinness. You ever you drink Guinness? No. I've had it a couple times.

It's not yeah. It's Not for me. Yeah. Just like just, ugh.

What's going on here with this drink? So, I had my first Guinness and yeah. That might be my last. I think I had a I think I had a Kilkenny, which is similar, like back in the day.

I dated an Irish chick for a while, so you kind of have no choice. Yeah. Comes with the territory. Anyway, then potatoes.

Yeah. That's true. Then anyway, we went to Frey Senay, as you mentioned, and, that was lovely. It's really nice, like national park there.

Nice bay area that leads out to the sea. So that's pretty cool. We did do a little hike. It's like an hour and a half hike up one of the mountains there or whatever.

I don't even know if you call them a mountain, but whatever. Went up this trail and, that was really nice. Got to see some nice views. And it's like a thousand steps, a thousand consecutive steps.

And we did it and it was, it was okay. Like it wasn't I thought I was a little worried to be honest. Like, fuck, are we gonna be okay with this? But it was alright.

Yeah. So that was fun. And then we finished it off in Launceston. So we spent a couple days in Launceston.

We got to go see Cataract Gorge, it's called, which is oh, you've been there? Yeah. So yeah. And it's huge ass like cable car span thing.

It's the biggest single span cable car in the world or something like that. I don't know. But your full sag, like, because there's nothing to support the rope. You sag down quite a bit.

So it was it was scary. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not a big like, I'm not scared of heights, but I was like, is this safe? Like, are we okay?

We are yeah. Anyway, so it was a bit, confronting. But yeah. And then, yeah, then we came back.

So all in all, it was awesome. And yeah, it was just I don't know that it was I didn't really know what to expect with Tassie. I think it was a little slower maybe than I would have liked, but that's probably also on us. They've got lots of other things that we could have done, but we just it is what it is, you know?

But anyway, the plan is that we will have second honeymoon in Europe later in the year. So, we're gonna have to figure that out with you and I to figure out what the plan is because I will be away for a few weeks. But likely I would we'll have to figure out like the plan is that that would be somewhere in between September and November and that's like crunch time for some of the police game stuff that we've got. So I'm gonna have to figure that out, but like I I will be going on this trip.

So, we're just gonna have to figure it out. So yeah. Anyway, that's, that's the honeymoon. So Brilliant.

Well done. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Alright. Why don't we get back into some business? So you've got here so many leads. I very much like the idea of this card.

Why don't you tell us about it? Me too. Me too. So I'm just looking at our pipeline and HubSpot at the moment, I don't have an activity to, I don't have a, like a view on last week, but the so many deals have come in.

I think we're getting about two leads a day coming in at the moment. We still gotta go through the process and then more introductory calls, but yeah, it's actually made me stop and think about like going back to topic six, what I said before about the management structure is how do we keep, make sure we keep track of all this and how do we make sure that we're getting the right leads in? And, so I've been spending all week trying to just get an overview of everything instead of being on the tools, trying to help the team.

So, yeah, it's been great. Like the team are producing, we got some really good leads coming in. Yeah, it's brilliant. They they're way better at than what I was like.

Really? Oh, that's good. That's what you want. You want to hire people that like fill gaps in your skillset.

Right? And even when they're I'm looking at what they're writing, I'm I'm like, yeah, that's pretty much awesome. It's even to the point where I don't know what we're gonna do here. We need to figure out how to remove you from your LinkedIn because every like Ray is getting good engagement, but she's also getting you involved in these sales calls, which is what you don't wanna do.

I'm like, well, what do we do here? So, yeah. Yeah. We need to, maybe we need to elevate like Raya and Chris's profiles on a public map.

Yeah. Maybe, maybe, but, but we'll see on that. We're not sure. I do have some ideas.

I just had an idea pop into my head there, but we'll talk about that offline and then come up with a plan to see if it works. So, yeah. Yeah. It is funny.

Like we had, we had an email that we thought was we had an inbound email that we thought was our very first like inbound. Right. That just called someone coming in and then you asked them, hey. Yep.

We'd love to get on a call, but, how did you hear about us? And then they were like, Mitch has reached out to me a few times on LinkedIn and both you and I are like, oh, shit. You've had proper conversations with them. Yeah.

Like, you're full on conversations with them. So even I might've. So Oh, shit. It's hard to keep track of all this stuff.

And Mike Michael Dorinda has sent me, a few things, like a few screenshots of what Ray has been posting for on my, LinkedIn. Mhmm. And it's just yeah. It's just funny.

I look at that and I'm like, yeah. Ray is, like, killing it. You know? She's doing a good job.

She's taken over my profile, and I I love it. Like, it's great that it's, people are seeing it, you know, and it's working and it's stuff that I just have never wanted to do. So Yeah. It's what we gotta do.

Right? Well, if anyone's listening to this and they think they've been talking to you, apologies. We do bring you in. We do bring you in.

Oh, you'll get me on call. No. That's right. No.

No. We we do need you to answer a a a question back on there. We do get you in. Yeah.

I feel I was like, I said to Michael, I'm a corporate shield now. Like, I'm just, you know, I'm not any there's no personality to it anymore. It's just a man. Push you out.

Like yeah. Yeah. Sure. And when you made that choice, when you made that comment before about you think that boat has gone to the Arctic, that just that just sealed your fate.

That's right. I'm not smart enough anymore. I'm proud of that. Next week, I'll be hosting the podcast by myself.

Yeah. So anyway, in conclusion, yeah, there's so many, there's so much activity where we're actually the effort is breeding activity. So in about like leads coming in. So that's actually helped me to go back to your question earlier is I've been spending a lot of time inside notion, trying to come up with a leadership dashboard so we can review it on a monthly basis or regularly to see what our revenue is, what our contracted revenue is per month and what our actual revenue generated is per month.

Cause that will be different. And then what are our lead generation? What are our lead indicator activities like on LinkedIn? We'll introduce, we're starting to introduce email now.

And then we'll have, like, we're getting visitors from their website and we're not getting converted yet, but that's blogs. Then we'll add in, we haven't even touched attendees yet, which I think that'd be really gold. There's all these different things we want to do high level metrics and then be able to dive into those and have a look. So I'm doing that.

And I spent a lot of time this morning trying to get reporting all across HubSpot. So a weekly dashboard and then a monthly dashboard. Mate, the plugin for GPT into HubSpot has been amazing. Like you can tell me the reports I can have.

We're limited on our dashboards because we have the starter kit starter pack, but yeah, it's been pretty, you know, it's good enough for now. Like it's yeah. Brilliant. Yep.

It's been great. Yep. Well, you've been putting something you've been creating some Slack channels as well as a part of all this work that you've been doing. I'm in.

Yeah. I'm into it. Yeah. Yeah.

So I want to there's a lot of deals being produced or put into the pipeline every day now, like at least one a day. So what I want to do is let you guys know who won in Slack to say, Hey, we're actually, these are the deals coming through. So whenever we put a new deal in, we're not we're not doing deals on contacts yet because we don't have people filling our forms or anything like that, but we're putting in a deal. Because we're self generating the deals into the pipeline.

And once that happens, a trigger I've set up Zapier, It sends a trigger straight to Slack and says, hey, this this deal has gone in at this this amount. So yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Excellent. So I'll put another one sorry. Well, yeah, there's a few channels that are that are being created, and I wanted to talk about it. I'm curious.

The choice of having a separate channel, like, per thing as opposed to what I had set up originally for you was my vision was like, we've got a sales notifications channel. Yeah. And that's where it feeds everything into all these different things. Sure.

Then it's getting through that. So sales notifications are people who are, we're getting notifications of people joining. And it's getting, there's like, I'm looking at it now. We've had 40 people join yesterday, whatever.

We've had a shit ton of people joining yesterday for an event. It just gets missed already. It's getting overwhelmed in there. So what I want to do is put on the website visitors isn't working at the moment.

So we want to integrate Stitcher into that so we can see where who's landing on our website so we can take immediate action. Right. And then the pipeline updates is so people can see, oh shit, deal. Like I think it's different.

All those things are different. Yeah. Okay. Cause I want to see from the sales notification or maybe that's could be different, but I want to see when someone joins up and creates an event.

Cause that's why we're not there yet. Like, no, well, we, we are, we already like through the dashboard, people can create their own events. Right. And sure.

We're not letting them do that from the mobile app, but yes, they can. And people are like Nick did. Right? What I think we could do then is just for now, get rid of the user, a user was created notification or whatever that is.

We could just turn that off for now or turn that into like a daily summary instead, because I, when you've been creating these few channels, I think you've been adding like the whole team, including the engineering side. And I wanted to ask, is that on purpose? Yeah. Or is that it is?

Yeah. Because I don't know if the like website visitors, for example, is that relevant for the engineering team? What's harm in them seeing that their work is producing, they're part of the team producing results. Like there is seeing where there's outwardly facing things that they don't necessarily see.

I don't know. I just kind of, I see like, I I am fine with it, but I just, I wonder like Well, they can choose to to, leave if they want, but I think there's no harm in putting him in there and then reevaluating the later if they go, Hey, if you don't find it valuable, just take yourself out of the group. Some people would be curious. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. Okay. So if we did squash down the or like reduce the number of messages that those, like a user was created, notifications were, would you consider putting things in one channel or you wanna keep them all separate?

Well, I think just just it's okay the way it is. And let's just see later if we want to put it together. Right. Cause I do think they're all doing very different things with the sales notifications.

What, what I think is interesting or what could be worked on is it tells us the people that are registering, but if we delayed that notification until we knew what group or what event they registered to, like we know these people are going into a project hammer event. But in time the, maybe we delay it for a while, like for ten minutes until they register for an event. Then it says, Hey, Rod from X, Y, Z registered for this event. And then we can associate it to it.

What I do want to see. I would love to see, I like seeing people coming into our platform. I think that's a good thing. I would love to see when someone comes in that is not from an event and creates like creates their own event.

Right. And then we can say last month we had 50 events created and then we had 70 events and then 90 events and then a 100 events. Like at the moment, it's very, it's not that You can't see any of that. It's not that high.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

Okay. Yeah. All right. I think that's something I can talk about with the team, to minimise those notifications or like rework it so that maybe there's one daily summary, but then also like, okay.

Hey, Rod from XYZ just added, you know, the next project hammer event or something like that. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah.

Like, cause I think it's instant notification when they register, let's just like pause it for ten minutes and then see what event that they code they put in. Right. So yeah. Yeah.

We could do it like almost like every couple of hours we could go, Hey, okay. Which, what, you know, give me all the new users. Give me, did they add any codes? That sort of a thing instead of being in, in real time.

But we could still do real time for if someone makes a new event or a team or whatever, you know? Sure. So it's something we can rework and I think that would take much, much work. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. Okay. Do you have anything more to talk about on the management reporting structure?

No, not really. Not really. Oh, the only other thing is I can see once you get into the, into the groove, then people just create a shit ton of reports and never use them. So I really want to make sure I, the minimum amount of reports.

And then if I need to add something in later, I'd do it. So I don't get crazy. Otherwise if I'm asking the team to do too much, it just won't get done. Right.

And then we won't use it. So yeah, that that's the way my mind frame is. My mindset is, and I'm also trying to get to, can we get to the data in three clicks? If it's more than three clicks and it's too hard.

So Okay. Yeah. Cool. Love it.

All right. Why don't you kick us into the next one? So during the week I went to an event in Brisbane and there's a startup world cup going on where there's a 150 finalists go to San Francisco and pitch in the startup world cup finals. It's in a lot of cities around the world.

And so I went to the one on in Brisbane and it was about talking about, scaling into The US and all this kind of stuff. And they're trying to talk to people about momentum. If you've got to get clients first there and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, I think, I think we're heading into something that we're not quite aware of where we're heading yet.

Cause our first release date for the world police games is August. There's 10,000 athletes from around the world, which will essentially give us exposure into, you know, there's thou there'll be thousands of people or hundreds of people who come from The U S it will give us exposure into clients into The U S and it's like, holy shit. Like we have a massive three months coming up. And I also want to enter us into the world cup so we can actually start, so I can start pitching six sides better.

And, even for, I don't, I don't do it. So I just, I have to do that. That's my job. So I'm forcing us to try to enter into that to, to, to have a crack at it.

So well out of my comfort zone. Yeah, that's, it is takes guts. So yeah. Good on you.

We all have a role mate. So I think that's my role. Unless you want to do it, you can by all means, you can do it. I don't think it serves either of us for me to do that.

No. You say that, but you're fine. Anyway, but it's, it was a really interesting, so I was talking to the organizer and she goes, what about for you six sides on the night for voting and, for, for talking about that, the teams, I was like, I'm happy to do that, but I think I'm, I want to pitch if I'm lucky. She goes, well, it could be a live demo.

And I said, yeah, I think that may be unfair, but I can do that if you want. Unfair on everyone else. Yeah. Yeah.

Happy to do it. So anyway, so stay tuned for that. Like I have put in an application. It's not to the July 7.

But we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. Yep.

Mate. Awesome. So yeah, I guess how would we, how do you want to capitalize on the fact that we will be getting this exposure in other countries? Right.

Like what's the. What's in your head of like, what do we actually do with that? What are we trying to what's the first steps? You know, when when we go live for for them in August and now we are in a countries.

Yep. People are first looking at the World Police Games app. What do we do? What do we want them to see?

Do you know before they run a fair, they spend ages putting up the rides and making the fairground look nice before the people come? I think that's what we're doing for the next three months. Right? We have to build the website, iterate the website.

We have to try to create a, like a pay, like, I don't even know if we'll get there in time, but to be able to have people sign up and pay without us talking to them, We probably won't get there in time. We can try. But I think we need to iterate the website to have different use cases. So, you know, I thought about you wouldn't put police or fire up there.

You would have institutions and then associations and events and event organizers, and you would have the website ready to, when people come to us, they can, they can get the information they want to engage with us if they want. So, yeah, it's, it's so big. And then we're also going to, you know, you, we were talking about this earlier today is, we had a meeting with someone about how do we produce content to be more relevant for different institutions. So, different use cases.

So we're trying to work on that. There's just about 10 different things we gotta do it at the one time. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll get there. What do you think we need to do?

Well, I it's not what we need to do. I'm more curious, like, what I think when someone in Japan, let's say a cop or firefighter in Japan Police officer. The sure. Is that is that the sure.

Yes. A police officer Opens up the app in Japan, and we ideally wanna try and, have them become a customer of ours as well. Right? Yes.

Well done. Well done, how do we get their interest in what we're doing? Right? So Sushi.

Okay. So I'm not helping, am I? I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna take a guess. I'm not helping.

It's good. Good guess. Yeah. Yeah.

Good guess. I just yeah. Like, I don't know. Is it just, hey.

Here's here's this app. Yeah. It's kind of it's hard to know what the customer would want to see the ideal customer there would want to see and then connect the dots and go, okay. Hey.

We run a bunch of events. We could use this too. Like, it's a little don't know. It'll be it'll be interesting.

We we've got time to get there. Right? But, there's a lot of things that we have to do to support that of, an onboarding flow and being able to sign up and pay and whatever. But like, I think you do ask a valid question.

I just don't think that we are able to take clients in every part of the world. Right. I just don't think we're set up for that for support for every, we have to make, we want to make the six sides available for them. But actively trying to turn those people into clients.

I don't think so. I think we should make like Australia, people can actively turn us into events here than the, than The U S and then the English speaking countries. Yes. Cause it's just easier for us to support them.

Right. Okay. We do like a gated approach of like, If they do want to become a client, so be it. Right.

But I don't, yeah. I don't know. We can't be all things to everyone. Like, so we have to be able to, you know, maybe we could put them on a wait list if they're out of a region and saying, Hey, we can only support, we can only support these regions right now.

We'd love to put you on a wait list when we're ready. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Because if we go too wide, we'll, we won't do anything really well. Yeah. That's right.

Okay. Cool. We'll, we'll come back to it and figure it out over the next few months. So I wanna get into this the big topic for this week, which is how do we compete with our larger competitors?

Right? So to kind of set the scene, we won't name anyone, but there are a lot of big events, apps, ticketing companies, etcetera, in Australia and then also out more globally, of course. And we are a small team, a very new and small team of six people. Right?

Yep. Going up against some Goliaths. So we're trying to think of like, what's our advantages over our larger competitors. Right.

Do you got some examples? Of what to do or what you mean? No, no, no. Of our, like, what are our, what are our advantages over some of our larger competitors?

Right. Yep. So I can share with you what, how I approached this at Redeye when I was at this company. Right?

So Redeye was an engineering drawing management solution for operational drawings for people in the as built world, which it was called. But the, every business there was an Autodesk, right. Mostly which was a design business. So what you have to think of, what I, what we thought of was, well, what are their strengths?

Cause you never compete head on. Like I read, have you ever read Sun Tzu Zard of War? I've heard of it. Yeah.

There's so many business lessons from it. Like act big when you're really small, act small when you're really big, like don't fight face on with a larger competitor, like have used guerrilla warfare or think out of the box. So when I was at Redeye, we were like, we can't compete for advertising dollars with Autodesk. So, and they were really big and they would sell through resellers in Australia.

So our competitive strategy was make the CEO available or develop on a faster timeline because they would do quarterly releases. We would do releases every two weeks and we would let our clients influence on the pipeline. They have influence on the pipeline. And so Autodesk would not do that in Australia.

So I think here is we are really small. So we are small. We don't have the burden of legacy code. Are able to adapt and change things really quickly.

And I think we can think out of the box here a little bit. I do think AI levels are playing field if you do it in the right way. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I agree with everything that you've said. Right. And we have talked about this before a couple of times, but it's an interesting problem to have.

But it's an age old problem. It's not a new one. Every, every business has this, has, has goes through this. Every army that's fighting a war goes through this.

Like every person who's about to have a fight with someone goes through this. How do we compete head on whatever it is? It's an age old problem. That's just never going to go away.

What I do think is interesting is the competitive advantage of a smaller company, like a startup to be able to develop faster and iterate quicker than a larger global company. I think that is shrinking with AI. Right. And you only have to look at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn now they are clearly doing using, they're developing with AI because they are rolling out functionality on their devices now and on their website that it's at a speed that I've never seen. They have been so slow. And now they're rolling out this new functionality at a speed that is, yeah, it's not great, but it's better than what it was. I think the gap of features and feature development is really, is shrinking between the bigger, bigger companies and the smaller ones to a degree.

Well, that's not a good thing for us. Right. If our competitors can then execute faster, you know? Yes.

Yeah. True on features. But if we have a mission or a fundamental mission that we're going to like their mission, they're tied to a certain direction of what they're, you know, Hey, they're an events platform. Like they are doing things all around events, but if we're a community led platform helping people build over many events singularly, it's still, it's just, it is a fundamental about different value proposition.

Yeah. That's why, but people can copy features quickly. And that's why we've having this conversation about our docs is if they're easily available and easily digestible five years ago, you could put them somewhere. People would just read them and maybe not get through them all.

Now they could actually take them and I think is put them into a cursor or a GPT and say, Hey, this looks pretty cool. You know what our tech stack is? Take this and add it into our tech stack. So we have similar functionality.

Like that's an, we could do that to people. Yeah. Yes. We could.

Okay. So perfect. You and I differ, I think, pretty strongly on how How sunbath we get? Yes.

Mate, I'm on fire. I'm I'm really I'm I'm it's one of my best days. Yeah. Okay.

I'm glad you think so. I think that's business, to be honest. And like in the past, that could have happened with, you know, any team that had, like, any sizable team could have just come along and gone, okay. Cool.

Hey. These guys are doing something. We're gonna put a team on this for a month or two and rip them off. And now that could be done in a week or, you know I mean, some of our stuff, it's more complex.

Right? So Yep. Yeah. I think probably a week or so with a a dev, going in with Cursa and absolutely someone could come and rip us off.

Right? Sure. But it that doesn't turn me off the idea of like actually publishing on our website. Like, these are our features.

Like, we've danced around what Tag Your It actually is on the podcast because we've been cautious to tell people about it. Right? But it's like it's one of our biggest selling points at the moment. Sure.

And so so, yeah, what I what I think we should do is just rip the Band Aid off and go like, hey. We are a product business. This is what our product does. This is what it can do for you.

And make that available. We can then start getting picked up by some of these LLMs in their training data, start getting recommended. Like, I feel like it's a tough position to be hiding who we are and what we do, but also trying to sell it. Okay.

Sure. I'm just using like, we're not doing a video podcast here, but I'm looking on this. We're adding some functionality into six sides that is similar to something that's out in the market. I wonder if there's a use case here that we would have in it.

I don't know if it's there cause you'd, you'd have to find it. Cause I don't know what I'm looking for. I wonder if there's a use case here in whatever they have here and seeing if, if it would make, if it would help just run a test case here, try to find their docs and see if it would influence our development of a certain piece of functionality. I'm also See how easy that would be to rip off.

Yeah. But I think like nothing's changed though, as far as that was always possible. It's now it's possible faster and cheaper, but like any product, you know, we could build a Trello clone by going and looking at their docs, but would we? True.

And why would we? And we don't have the we don't have the knowledge or the the understanding of like why these decisions were made to make this thing this way. Yeah. True.

So someone could come along and go, oh, cool. I like this idea or, hey, this app looks great. Let's I'm just gonna rip that off. Doesn't mean they know the direction that we're going after after or our, like, our mission, that sort of stuff that you're talking about.

I do agree. Gonna make different decisions to them. Right? Yeah.

That's just competition. We are I mean, as far as we know, we're currently the newest event app, but there'll be ones that come after us. They probably already are. Right?

People that started later. Community led event app. That's right. Yes.

Yeah. Right. And this is just the nature of competing in my opinion. Sure.

We would probably look at Trello to understand what they did so we could use it in some of the functionality we spoke about before with speakers. Right. And other things. So I do understand what you're saying.

I think this, the, how do you defend against this is the speed of development is what we, yes, they can see what we're doing today and catch up to where we are today, but they don't know where we're going tomorrow. Right. I think that that is an interesting competitive, that's our competitive advantage as well. And maybe we're just, I'm over, overconfident.

Why would people be looking at us anyway? Right. So maybe, even if they are, like, I just think like we, I don't see any world where this business becomes successful, really successful while we are trying to hide ourselves from the world. Yeah.

Right? And I feel like by not publishing docs or publishing features in a way that Google and ChatGPT and whatever can pick up, if you want to start getting those, like those referrals to come in, you have to make your stuff public. Okay. And it just feels like it's at odds.

Like, we're holding this back. We're definitely holding back our growth in my opinion. And we'll just deal with the competitors that come up and try and copy us. Go for it.

Let's go for it then. Yeah? Okay. You're very passionate about it.

So say I I am, but I We can we can always we can always take it down. Sure. I don't want this to be something that you feel cause you have felt quite strongly about this. So I'm not trying to bully you into a position here.

But you are, you are putting up a good argument. You are, you are convincing me. What I do think we should do, and saying this, there is a podcast on Lendi's podcast around product led growth. Right?

And so the lady that was on the podcast was talking about her time at Miro and there were certain visits to websites like the admin policy and privacy policy and all this kind of stuff. Or when they would add another admin to the, to the functionality, then it was an indicator that we're ready, they were ready to grow. So I do think that there's, we should take that. So if we are putting that stuff out there, let's monitor it.

We are using Stitcher, but let's just monitor it to see if we're, if there's anything untoward happening to it and we can go, okay, we can see co competitors on there or something like that. And we could monitor it and see if it does come back later. But even if I do understand, even if they did do that and developed, we would be way further down the path within three months anyway. So they're always playing catch up.

Yeah, that's right. But yes, let's put, let's, I might give you, I know you don't like this in a podcast, but I might find it for you for listening to over the next couple of months. And then, because if we can put, get notified when certain things are happening on our side or when they're in their platform, then, and it goes, Hey to the sales team, goes, Hey, Hey, like Gav's on his page. I think it might mean they're looking to grow.

We can reach out proactively. HubSpot do it all the time. A 100%. I agree that we should be doing that.

I think that's very, that's a good idea. Do. And I always of the opinion now I'm always of the opinion. If you spend too much time looking over your shoulder, you'll run into a wall.

So let's not, yeah, yeah. I do. I'm just protective about what we're doing. That's all.

Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. I'm stoked then.

So, all right. We will, let's park that one and, I look forward to having some feature pages and things like that that walk through what we're doing. That's really exciting. So Yep.

Yep. Awesome. Alright. So, I am in the process at the moment.

It's not live, but I'm adding a change log to the website. Now, for those that don't know what a change log is, it's just like a long list of all of the things that you've changed in your app or your product or whatever. And then you can go back and look at that over time and go, okay, hey, in May we added these things, in April we added this, da da da. Right?

And I've got a first version of that just running locally. It's not ready to roll out yet, but it's pretty exciting to see that I I should with using cursor to have it go through the history of our code base should be able to have that give me like, okay, hey, in February, we rolled this thing out, you know, and then I can go make a post out of that or it can give me some suggestions. We should be able to build up, you know, eighteen months or so worth of history in this change log and then use that moving forward to go anytime we add a new feature or we tweak the way something works.

It's just kind of a cool spot to have like a history of all the things that we've done in the app. And I'm fairly happy with the design. So I showed that to you this morning. What did you think?

Yeah. Look, I didn't understand the use case around it. Like, understand, yes, it's a change log, but how it was used, you did explain it to make it more searchable from LLMs and people who are curious. So, yeah, like, yeah, it's It leads towards like, if we wanted to send a monthly newsletter out, you know, and go, hey, oh, you know, here's some content.

And then like, here's a bunch of blog posts. Here's a new white paper that we did. And then, oh, here's some of the new features that we've added to the app, you know, kind of it's all like blends into one monthly update or something like that. It is also something that we can link to from LinkedIn, you know, hey, we just announced this new thing.

Here's, you know, in our changelog. Here it is. Or, you know, maybe we link to new feature pages or something like that. I'm not quite sure.

But yeah. And pretty low effort as well. Like, we're only doing so many releases where we're prepping to do one soon and I'll I'll walk through that in a minute and that could absolutely become a change log article that I can put together, you know, with half an hour's work. Like, so yeah.

We can get some screenshots in there of different things that we've changed and whatever. Like, it feels like we're becoming professional. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is like you say that with a smile on your face, but yes, it's it is. It's doing this sort of stuff that kind of signals to the audience. Oh, these guys are legit. You know, this is not some rinky dink little, you know, done put together in a weekend thing.

Like we are we're an actual business, with a real product, you know, it's exciting to get there. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of work.

Hopefully, we can automate that over time. Right? So Well, changelog, like, it's really not a lot of work to do that. And we can we definitely can automate some of that.

Co the these LLMs are very good at picking up. Okay. Hey. What is this block of changes done?

And then forming some things. So, yes, it's likely I'll automate some of that. But for now, won't take very much work on my side. So and that'll all be me.

I won't I won't put that on anyone else. So Cool. Anyway, so, as we start to wrap up, dev update. So we promised I'd talk through some of that stuff this week.

So since I've been away, so this is some things over the last few weeks which we've now I'll tell you the ones that we've rolled out and then the ones that will soon go out. So Bento, we're using Bento for our email marketing. And we now have our anytime a new user signs up in the app or on the dashboard, we're creating them in Bento. We're syncing them through.

We're not currently sending anything via Vento, but it's my understanding we'll be starting that soon with the team. So, yeah, so we've got that. I do need to add some way to do a complete resync to bring everyone in because it's only doing, like, new users as they come in now, but there's, like, a couple thousand users in there that haven't been brought over yet. Right?

So all the people from the last, like, six months or something like that that we should bring in. In the dashboard now, you can do on like our list of attendees, we've added some pagination and some search to that so that it's you're not getting a list of 500 people all on one page. So that's that's out now. And then some of the things that we've got coming up because the marinas event is coming up in less than two weeks now.

We're just adding the final touches to that. So we've got notification scheduling coming up so you can go, hey. At 8AM on the day of send out this notification, etcetera. Go through and schedule all of those.

We've got adjustable logo heights as well. So that's kind of that's been something that's been in the background as a request you've had for a while. Different logo sizes to support like if a logo is more portrait than landscape, for example, being able to kind of size that the way that you would want it to. It's quite hard to do that automatically and just have it always look its best.

So we're giving event organizers a couple of options there of how they wanna size it. So that should go out probably next week. And then the last big one that we're working on is voting. So we're adding the ability to do votes into the app and see that information in real time in the app and on the dashboard as well.

So that's gonna enable like, okay, someone can ask a question or, hey, you know, like what's what's maybe, do you have an example of where this might get used? Like a startup pitch night where they would say, hey. Vote on the number of who you want to win. So Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So there so there's two, like, the ones that the mariners will have that And then like the pitch night that I that's in a couple of weeks, I'll have two votes. One will be the judge's vote and the other one will be the, or the audience vote.

Oh, no, sorry. It's only the audience vote. Cause the judges will give them a give them their their vote on paper. So Yeah.

Okay. Because just then I'm like, oh, shit. We have not accounted for different people can vote on different things. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. That makes sense. So, yeah. So, that's a perfect use case.

Other ones might be like, you know, in a technical talk, hey. Which of these technologies have you used or things like that? Just audience participation. So we've gone through.

Raymond has mostly been steering that one and he's done a really good job with it. He's got it in real time so it updates, you know, every couple of seconds. It'll go through and refresh on the dashboard. It's pretty cool.

And then, yeah, the hope is that we will get that rolled out today. So I'm checking in with the team. We're doing a weekly, like company wide meeting on Fridays. And so we'll have that coming up soon.

But yeah, I met with the engineering team, Martin and Raymond yesterday, and we sat down and went through a few things that needed to be tweaked before we can get an update rolled out for marinas. So that should be happening by end of day today. Yeah. So I'll check-in with them.

I'll try and check-in with them before our company wide meeting and just make sure everything's on track. Yeah. Oh, and then a a final final thing on how we're like running our like how I'm managing them. Originally, I was trying to do everything with just like pull requests going back and forth so super high level stuff.

They would make a change and then prepare that for me to go and review. So, hey, go add this voting feature or something like that. They would get all of the code up and online on GitHub and ready for me to review and then I would go through. And for the first week or two, was I was like on GitHub, you can leave comments and go, hey, actually I want you to do this this way, etcetera.

I found it's probably just through a lack of my experience, but I found that to be quite difficult if it was only like a few small little tweaks that I wanted made and to have to send it back over the fence to them and go, hey, can you change this? And then now that pulls them out of the context of whatever they're working on at the moment because they moved on to the next thing. So this week I've just started going, okay, if there's just a few small little tweaks, let them get it to 90% of what I would want it to be and then I'll just go do the last 10% tweaks myself.

And so in doing that, I was able to roll out a few of these features within an hour or so of of extra time on my end. So that seems to be going okay. I'm enjoying that. Don't know if that's how we'll run things forever moving forward, but what I will implement with them is that we'll do a weekly review where I'll walk them through like these are the changes I made to your code.

I'd like you to start writing code more like this so that I don't have to make these changes, you know, and we'll just get that feedback loop. So, yeah, it's feeling like everything's going okay, which is really nice. It's just very busy. So with the notification with the new functionality, is that gonna go out early to like, when will that go out?

So we just wanna try to get it up and like So we got a call with marinas on Monday. So I'm going to like, I'm tracking end of day today to have an app release put up for review. And then it will have all weekend to get reviewed. And we can show the people at marinas.

We can show them this working Sure. Even while we're waiting on, the app to get reviewed. You know? Sure.

We'll be able to roll out that functionality to the dashboard already. Yeah. Like that's fully under our control. But yeah, then just any tweaks we just have to wait for the app store to When would the dashboard stuff go out?

End of day today is is the plan. Yeah. Okay. It's all like all of this is tied together.

Okay. So, it'll all happen all at once. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Alright. Well, what we'll do is we'll set up the on Monday before we catch up, marinas, they're voting for them so they don't have to set it up.

I know how to get to what they wanna do, go from there. But yeah. So then next week, we we'll have we're gonna sit down and plan out, like, the actual steps and deliverables for the World Police Games, and then we're gonna report on that next week. Yep.

Hopefully, we had some progress on some of these other clients as well. Yeah, it's should be good. Busy three months, mate. Busy three months.

Yeah. Sure is. Yeah. We'll get there.

Awesome. Yeah. Alright, mate. Where can people find you online?

Mainly in Notion at the moment, because while I'm trying to figure out the reporting dashboard, but Gotcha. Or on LinkedIn. Tye Tye contact you on there. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Tye to find you in Orin Park. You're not really giving that up, are you?

It's That's true. Yep. LinkedIn, Gavin Tye, two y e. Yep.

Excellent. Newton's me. LinkedIn, Mitch Daz. You can speak with me or Raya, depending on on the day.

But you can get there through the handle Mitch Dav. Alright? So we'll catch you on there. We will catch you all next week, and, yeah, thanks for listening.

Alright? See you, mate.