66: Mitchell is becoming a real CTO

Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, CTO and Laravel developer. I'm Gavin Tye, CEO and sales and marketing. We are into year two of running a remote starter, sixsides.

co, which is a community led events platform. We're documenting both the business and tech of our journey as we build our SaaS. How are you, mate? Mate, I am very well.

We've had a big few days here in, moving and, yeah, down in my new office, down the back, away from the house. It's, great. What about you, mate? What's going on with you?

I'm good. Hang on. You just you showed me. You took me on a little tour of the backyard.

This looks fantastic. Got all sorts there. Tell us about it. There's a lot of grass.

There's a lot of grass. That's what appealed to us. It's flat, relatively flat. And so the kids can play.

I think it's just short of an acre and 80% is is all grass. So yeah. And so a few great trees around too. It's brilliant.

Yeah. It looks great. I can't wait to see it in November when I'm up there. So look forward to it.

Yeah. It it reminds me just that little tour that you just gave me reminds me a lot of, my one of my uncle's places. Yep. Similar.

I think your, block of land is much bigger, but similar sort of vibe. They had the big, trampoline out the back, and, they had a fire pit area and all this sort of stuff. Just with all that space, you can just do whatever you want, you know? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Like the kids were saying that feels like they're camping.

Yeah. Yeah. It feels like it's a of lot of grass. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. And then the house is up on two stories. Oh, it's a split level, but it's up on two stories.

So you're up in the trees. So there was kookaburras around and there was rainbow lorikeets flying around yesterday. Yeah. It's mate, it's great.

We're so happy that we moved here. Yeah. It's fantastic. Good on you.

And it's not too far from where you were before. Right? So the kids are in the same school and everything? Same school.

Five it's five minutes. It's right where I oh, I didn't drop you at the train station. I dropped you somewhere else because I forgot this train station existed, but it's only five minutes down the track down the road. Yeah.

Cool. Good one. Hate me. Well done.

Very happy for you. I'd like to give a shout out to Feedspot who gave us a shout out. We found out that from Anuj, who's the founder of FeedSpot, that, we appeared in their top B2B SaaS podcast. I think we were, like, number 18 or something like that.

16, I think we were, mate. 16? Yeah. Yeah.

So that's pretty cool. Nice to see that we're getting picked up on some lists. Good one. And then, what else?

We've got a follow-up from last week. So, I put a challenge to myself and said I wasn't too happy with how my fitness had been lagging and falling behind. And I I said I wanted to, I think I said four walks. So I'm happy to report I have done all of those, and I've also started going back to the gym as well.

So doing a bit of strength today. And you actually called me this morning and you're like, mate, I've got a bit more time if you wanna, start a bit earlier today. And I was like, I'm sorry. I can't.

I've gotta go to the gym today. So Mate, that explains the Under Armour shirt. I was like, oh, he's not wearing his usually ratty shirt. He's got a he's got a Yeah.

I know. I need to get some more shirts, to be honest. Yeah. But, know, I'm rocking this today, but I've got other clothes to get changed back into.

But it but I it's actually it's an event kit shirt I've got today, the brown one. Oh, yeah? So we we gotta get some more I think we gotta get some more shirts. Plus, we gotta get some some merch for the team as well.

So We do. We do. Yeah. That's been put on pause, but we'll we'll get onto that in the next week or so.

For sure. Yeah. No. Sounds good.

This time, it can have the right logo on it, though, instead of the rinky dick That wasn't anyone that was someone's fault. That was my fault. I know. That's right.

I'm I'm sad. I'll get it. I'll it'll be right this time. So Right.

Anyway, yeah, on on the fitness, it's going it's going well. It's early it's early days, of course, but I am enjoying moving more and not feeling like a piece of shit. So it's good. Yeah.

So You're married now, mate. You let you can't let yourself go. So Sure can't. No.

That's right. So yeah. Cool. So we're gonna talk a fair bit now about, how we're managing projects and development, specifically in Six Sides.

Right? So we use a tool called Linear, and it's a project management tool for software development basically. Was gonna say just give a background if anyone's listening for the first time, like, have recently hired an offshore team in The Philippines and, you've been using yeah. That's the context or framing Yeah.

Like the the the conversation. Right? So Sure. Yeah.

Okay. So, we've been using Linear project management for software. I've been using it for, I don't know, three years or something like that, three, four years, with, under Atlas, which is another of the businesses that I run and we do software development for clients. And, I'd always kind of just used it as like in pretty minimal way of just tracking like, okay, we get a project that will come in and a certain thing that we've gotta go do and okay, we'll go I'll add like a little description of it.

And then typically it's Chris who works with me at Atlas. He's the one implementing a lot of the stuff that we do. And so he'll then go in, look at the tickets, we'll talk about, the the ticket or whatever, and then he'll often go away and work on it. And then he reports his progress back in as comments.

He can leave comments on tickets. And, that's worked pretty well with Chris, because we work so closely together, like where, you know, we get on and talk for an hour or two per day. When these when our dev started under six sides, instantly I could tell it was different and it wasn't enough because Chris obviously has like years of experience working with me now and he's got a great understanding of all the projects that we work on and he's been often heavily involved in like creating the projects that we work on as well.

So he's just naturally got all the context. But it was a big shock to the system that I had expected would happen when we hired that like, okay, well, these guys, they don't have the context. Right? Because they haven't been involved in the in the project.

So you gotta kinda get them up to speed. And, it was it was rough. And then especially given that I was going away, you know, had the wedding and then went away for a week or whatever. So it was just like terrible timing to get them on board.

So for that first month or so, we were quite unproductive, I I would say. Like, we were we were going okay. Things were getting done, but it was there were a lot of, like, bottlenecks and I had to get on a lot of calls and sit down and talk with them for an hour or two and explain things. And, so now that I've come back, from the that honeymoon, I have really upped my skill set in being able to manage them better through linear.

So we've implemented a couple of things. Firstly, we now have what I'm calling our engineering office hours, which is like thirty to forty five minutes each day, it's at the same time every day. And then if there's anything that we need to talk about, we know that already that's like we're having that meeting. Right.

And so everyone always comes to it anyway, even if they don't have anything that they need to ask, it's just a good way to kind of check-in and keep the up the team camaraderie up. But, that's when I'm gonna be able to answer their questions for them. And so it's really makes it really easy for me to kind of build around that structure, which is great. But then two, in linear, I've really upped my skill set.

So, I watched a video, by Brian Castle, and I'll link it in the show notes, but, he basically walked through how he manages an offshore team and, in the context of us of building a SaaS. And, it was really eye opening and very helpful to have, like, this is a framework you can follow. Like, he's already doing this. At least give me an opinion, you know, to go, okay.

This is one way to do it. Give it a try, and then you can make changes. And I have. So, yeah, basically, since we implemented some of these changes, and I I will talk about those, things have been much more productive.

Like, we're now starting to smash through things, a lot quicker. There's less need to have calls. These like daily calls that we're having, the office hours, like, they're turning up and there's basically no questions because it's all they've got all the context that they need. And then I can see the work that they're producing.

So it's it's working really well. So some of the things that we've done, I'll go well, do you have any questions at this point? Yeah. So I would say, so it seems like you're spoilt with Chris, but he's definitely, you've got to know each other over the long term and know how each other work.

And now you've had to evolve your, your management structure or you're going to the next evolution of you being your CTO, right? To managing a different quality or different type of developer. Yeah. Is that right?

That's right. Yeah. Absolutely. That's that's fair to say.

And like there there are, culture differences, language barriers. Like, I live a very different life to Martin and to Raymond. Right? And so, like, the things that we've been exposed to would be very different.

I don't know if they've been to any events, any conferences. Like, I you know, I'm not sure. So, that's totally natural. And so it does make sense that well, okay, the their work has to be more structured so that they don't go down any wrong paths, you know, and and in time that will all come, you know, but we're they've only been on board for less than two months, I think, at this point.

So, this is all normal and makes total sense. So yeah. Did you have any other questions? No.

No. No. No. That's Okay.

Cool. Cool. Who's Brian who's Brian Castle? Just some random?

No. He's a he's he's a podcaster. He's a founder of a few different businesses. He's been around.

So he specifically, this video that I watched, is on, his tool Clarity Flow. Okay. And he's been running that for a few years and yeah, has a small offshore team of devs and support people and whatever. He's very like he's super process oriented.

Sure. And so I I knew he would be a good one to follow. Then currently he's doing builder methods as well which is this project of teaching teams how to incorporate AI into their development process, that sort of thing. Yep.

And, yeah, he's on a couple of podcasts. He's on a podcast with Justin Jackson at Transistor and so that's how I've become quite exposed to him. And then it just happened to pop up. I was searching like Linear on YouTube and his face popped up and I was like, oh, I know him.

Okay. I'll give that a try. And it was super helpful, this video. Sure.

So Okay. So some of the things that we've implemented, we're now heavily using projects. So in linear, a project is just like a collection of tickets. And in the past and still actually under Atlas, the work I do with Chris, I would just make one project for the whole month.

So there'd be an April project, a May project, June, whatever. And then I would just kind of bring tickets in that weren't finished in the previous month. I would just bring them over to the next month. And just so it's just like a rolling, like a list of all the stuff that got finished in a given month basically if you go back and look at them.

But, I have found this to be quite helpful to go, okay, actually let's put all of these like, all of the work that relates to, our recap features in six sites. Right? Put that in the recaps project. And then you can go in and pretty easily look, when's the last time we did anything to do with recaps?

Oh, cool. It was two months ago, you know, whatever. Oh, maybe we wanna think about that. Right?

It does kind of help to have all the contextual stuff together instead of just a timeline because you can get a timeline view out of linear by just stripping away the projects and going when's all the stuff that we did, you know, in April. It's pretty easy to find that out. So, so that's good. Been enjoying that.

To give you a bit of an idea of the issue statuses that we have now, we've got like a bunch of ones under backlog. So new, noted, later, and soon. Like, these are like, hey, these are ones that are either we don't care about right now. We're just kinda jotting it down.

Or, yeah, we'll start working on this soon and then I can start if I'm looking for stuff that the team will be working on in three weeks time, I can go in to look at soon, you know. Then, I've got this I've got one called shaping and this means like it's assigned to me. I'm actively going through and figuring out what is this ticket need to be. I need to give them all the the devs all the context so that they can then go and build it without having many questions.

If I've done my job right, they won't have any because it'll all be really descriptive. Once I've finished with that, then I mark it as to do and that means I'm assigning it to them, and then it's it's up to them to pick that off their list whenever they're ready. Then we've got in progress, so they're working on it right now and I'm asking them to be really diligent of like, I only have one thing in progress at a time because I can then go in and go, okay, I know exactly what Martin is working on right now as he's at his computer, you know.

So if you stop working on something, just put it back to to do. That's okay. You know? And then I'm also asking them and they're not doing this at the moment which I'm gonna chat about with them today.

Leave a comment anytime you finish working on something and and have to move on to something else or whatever. Just always like leave a daily comment of this is where I got this up to and they're not doing that, which yeah, if we need to change. Then we've got ready for review, and then that means, hey, they're finished with it and I can now start going through it in review when I'm actually going through it. And then we've got a bunch of different deployment statuses.

So it's ready to deploy. It's deployed. It needs to be announced, and then it's announced. So for some of the big items that we actually wanna tell people about, we didn't just fix a little bug or whatever, then I'll make an announcement and that'll go in our change log.

And so I'm manually deciding, okay, which of these tickets are most important. Right? And then we have canceled as well and duplicate if somehow we've created a duplicate in there. So that's kinda this was a big suggestion from Brian's video, and it was awesome.

Because in the past, I just had I think it was like to do in progress done. And that was it. And it meant like I just lost all ability to track where anything is at. So, then another suggestion that he had was to create these custom views where you can go in and kind of see where, like, you can create a bunch of different filters to slice these issues.

So I've got one that's review pipeline and that's got everything in there that I need to know about. So all of the things that are ready for review, like there's currently 11 tickets here because the team has just been smashing out a bunch of things. There's 11 tickets here that I have to go through and review. And then I've also got like down I've got a deployed section and like anything that we rolled out in the last week, I'll also see.

But then after a week they drop off that list because I probably don't need to think about stuff that we rolled out three weeks ago. It doesn't matter anymore. This is like a living view. And then I've also got views for, each of us.

So myself, Martin, Raymond, so I can go in and say, okay, this is what Raymond's working on right now plus all the stuff that's assigned to him. So that's kind of it. There's a bit of process stuff around leaving comments and that we're kind of mixing and matching with the they're not leaving as many comments as I should and also the office hours stuff that we're doing. But, this is currently working, and I'm really enjoying it.

And we're, like, getting through a lot of work in a in a short period of time and the quality is pretty good too. So Yeah. That's good. Yeah.

Because we had a pretty happy one on Friday and the amount of stuff that was released last week was amazing. So Yeah. Yeah. It was really good.

So So on that point, the final piece of linear is these initiatives. So we have the World Police and Fire games. We've got the first release of their app coming up in August. And so a lot of work has been going into that lately.

And in linear, you can create these things called initiatives and it's basically like a a timeline of this is when a bunch of like, this is when you did it's a little hard to describe. We're not using it exactly the way you probably meant to, but, it's working. I'm using it as a bit of a change log and a bit of a keeping track of where we're up to for all of the work that we need to do that relates to the police games phase one. And so I've started using this every week.

We get on a call with the whole team on Friday. And, so I've got it set that an hour before that it's my job to go into linear in this initiative that we've got and create an update. And that's forcing me to go back and look at what did we actually do this week? Did we release anything?

Did we finish work? Are we stuck on anything, etcetera? And then just write it out. And this gets published to Slack for the whole team to look at, not just the devs but also your team and you.

And then I, I'll present this during the call, that we have with the whole team, and then I hit publish on it. So yeah. So, and these are like, I don't know, six to 10 paragraphs long. It's a couple of list bullet points of, like, this is all the stuff that we got finished.

So, like, this week, for example, we delivered a few events with no issues. We've now shipped an internal first version of the police games app, which is great. It's still using the same underlying code base as our Six Sides app, but we've got the ability to customize certain parts of screens or entire screens completely, which is awesome. It's pretty exciting.

I talked about how we meet with customers and things like that. Anything that's kind of technical I'm using this as my like this is my writing piece for the week. I talk about stuff that we've shipped. So our recap feature is you had long asked for the ability to actually select photos instead of them just being randomly selected from like for you, for ones that you were tagged in and we got that rolled out.

Yeah. We we fixed up a bunch of things. We added a few small little features. And then I talk about stuff that we're working on next week.

And so to try and set some expectations that I then wanna meet for the next time I post, you know? So trying to trying to keep myself honest, and and do my job here properly. So that's been really fun. It feels very like I'm doing my job now, right, as CTO versus in the past, I've just been kind of treading water, managing it as best as I can.

And just like, stuff's just happening now. It feels a bit more prescriptive, you know, instead of reacting to things. So is it scalable now? Like, I know we've got two people, but how many people under you do you think you could scale this process to?

That's a good question. I don't know. I think we could definitely have more people on and I would just make it work, but I would want to stagger their hiring because it more Yeah. I'm not I'm not saying we hire more people, but what I mean by, well, I'd imagine over time, Raymond and Martin will require less supervision.

So they become more autonomous, but like, is there a cap of your attention here of ten, five people or 10 people? Cause otherwise you're just managing tickets all week. Right? So Yeah.

Which I don't enjoy. Yeah. I want to be able to also contribute code. And I did this week with the I did the lion's share of getting the police games app, the first version of it up, and now I've handed it off.

So that to me is really important. I don't know. Definitely, there's more room to scale, but what that number is, I've got no idea. Yeah.

I guess it probably means after a certain period of time, we gotta hire someone to do this. Right? And then you can freak you out more. So exactly.

Yeah. I just go one level up the chain. Yeah. It's just something to think about in the future, but yeah.

Well done. Yeah. Yep. Awesome.

It's, it's exciting. It's really exciting to have like this much stuff going on. That was the technical deep dive, mate. Yeah.

Well, that's right. That's what that's half of what people are coming here for. Yeah. So hopefully you enjoyed it.

Anyone technical? So a couple other less technical things, but still in the dev side. We started looking at how to do onboarding in our mobile app. So I just showed you some work that I did over the weekend, to go through and let people, like scroll through before we so when you first install the in this case, the police games app, that it will instead of immediately asking you to sign in or register, we'll actually tell people what does the app do and try and get them excited to use it and and make it clear why they should bother.

And so, yeah, I've just come up with a couple concepts and you seem to like it. So, and we'll be able to take those changes because it's the same code base and apply them to our Six Sides app as well, which is great. This week, we've also gone through and got the first version of our nesting of communities together. So this will be like having the ability to support for the police games, but it'll apply everywhere else.

Being able to go, okay, inside of the police games community, there'll be smaller communities, one for each country that's coming. Right? So that all of the Australians can be grouped together and share things, you know, within the Australian community and all of the Indian team can do the same thing for them. But also then on a sports level as well, there's a couple different ways that we're slicing it, like all of the archery people can be in one community, all of the swimmers in one community, etcetera.

And, yeah, so we've had to start making some changes to support that and we'll hopefully, we'll get that rolled out in the next few weeks. The work's already done. It's just there's a fair bit of like, it's gonna be a deployment process because it's a pretty big change to the app. Yeah.

We've gotta do that right. So yeah. So those are the big ones. Would you do that and the when we're one profile across all events, would you roll those both out at the same time, or would you do one then the next?

I have to have a look and see if there's any because they they've been built separately. Mhmm. Raymond worked on one. Martin worked on the other.

And so there's potential that there's some, like, overlap or some conflicts of the way that the code works under the hood. So we could, yes. I'd I could roll all of that out together. I just need to carefully check.

And the the tools that we're using will help me with all of that. That's fine. It's not even AI. That's just kinda built into development workflow, but, I'm not tied to doing both of those together.

Sure. So Yeah. Yeah. That's okay.

We don't have both big changes. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. They're both fund foundational change fundamental. So Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Nice one. Cool. So then, something else that we worked on, and you and I have spent a bit of time last week on was, thinking about our pricing and our positioning.

Could Just on I just had a thought before we jump to the pricing, if that's all right. Sure. I think like in both of us are going through a bit of a change at the moment is now that we've been given, like we have people working for us doing a lot more of the work and it's allowed us to both start thinking about working on the business and actually the structure of it, which I never really thought about. I guess you don't really think about it till you're there.

You know, you're gonna have to, but yeah, it seems like you're going through a very similar journey. I've been trying to build a management portal as well from my side of the fence. So we can actually continue if we choose to, to keep bootstrapping it. Right.

Cause we can't afford to waste, not that anyone can, but we don't have the luxury of having a $100,000 sitting in our bank account. So yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna be as as possible and as productive as possible.

You've you've given me an idea here. I'm really enjoying and finding it helpful for my own thinking to write out those weekly updates. Would you consider making one as well? Yeah.

Yeah. Because it's it doesn't take very long. I'm not using AI at all. It's just my own thoughts.

Takes me twenty minutes to do of just look at the numbers, look at or like in your case numbers, I guess, in my case, more ticket based stuff. Yeah. I think that would be really helpful. Sure.

Well, I did do that email. Like I haven't continued it on, but that was a weekly update, which I could continue to do that. Right. If that's where yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's up to you. I'm not asking you to do this, but like it, I found it helpful for me just to think about where we're at and what we're doing and what's coming up next. You're the CEO.

That's probably pretty important for you to be thinking about as well. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

I don't disagree with you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Alright. Maybe that can be a Friday. It's the last day, the last action of the day thing on a Friday, I think.

Yeah. Okay. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. We'll see, see how, if your mood is different in it. Yeah. We'll we'll wind yeah.

We'll wind that up. Yeah. No. No.

But, yeah, no, you were right. You are right. So yeah. Just an idea.

So we sat down over the last couple weeks to sit down to to think about our positioning and pricing while also sitting down. And, and I just I was a bit nervous with some of the conversations you and I were having and some of the suggestions you had on the website of like, hey, let's talk about things like this. And it it felt like it was gonna be too hard to convince a customer or a lead that doesn't know anything about us. Like, what is it that these guys actually do?

Because a lot of it was like, okay, we've got one section that's on this per event model and it's all about events. But then we've also got this other aspect, is about communities. Right. And that we're a community management platform, but we're also an event management platform.

And so in talking about it with you, I was like, think we just need to go hard into we're an event platform with a focus on communities or a community led events platform. Right. And it's the events. That's the main thing that people are coming to us for.

Right. And so we've sat down and you kind of I was able to work through my thoughts enough with you that you were like, yeah, okay. I think you're right. Right?

And, so then now that we've established that, okay, the main thing that they'll come to us for is events plus community. And by that, by community, I guess it's just about helping keep people connected between events is probably right. When you think about it at the first principle level is events are points in time, right? Dates and points in time.

And then the community is being interacted with in between those points in time. So whether it could be a podcast, it could be a news, it could be, whatever. Right. And how do we support that?

Is how do we support them to make that easy and give them insights into how that community, not only from the community organizer, the association, but those relationships within the community potentially as well. Yeah. Yeah. We want people to connect with each other and to Yeah.

Yeah, grow their own networks and all that sort of stuff. Yep. Absolutely. So then this all led into like, I I'm still working on the marketing website as a bit of a background task for myself and yeah we've come up with all these feature pages and use cases and industries and all this sort of stuff but I know like we need to have a pricing page of some kind.

Right? And so I have always appreciated honest pricing pages that like tell you what the price is without having to reach out to sales or whatever. Right? And as we sat down and we're looking at the numbers of like, okay, this is what we think we'd wanna charge for an event with 500 people in there or something like that.

It's just like it's the numbers are in the thousands. Right? We haven't shied away from that. You know, to run an event costs a couple of thousand with us, and that's like on par with the market.

It just doesn't make a ton of sense. No one wants to see a number like $20,000 on a pricing calculator. That's The way it doesn't work. They get sh they get you can't control how you deliver the price.

So they get exactly. More often than not, they'll get sticker shock. Right? Yeah.

So even if we're not 20,000, we're not, oh, it'd be great if we could get $20,000 but we're not thinking about that price point. But if we go to someone right. And let's just call it $10,000 and then someone goes, fuck, Gwenelle Jesus. And then they call someone else and someone goes, oh, that, that six sides was $10.

He goes, oh yeah, but we're similar, but let me walk you through the value you get from us. We we have a dedicated account manager or or we do x y and z and we do a b c and we do this. They're like, oh yeah, can see that's that's quite valuable. And then they're they're off you onto them.

Right? You can't control the delivery on how we're position you can't control the positioning or pricing a lot easily, especially at that price point. Yeah. That's right.

So that became a lot clearer to me. And the difference of like what we're doing, which is this is B2B versus like, you know, Riverside at $50 a month or whatever, that's more B2C. Right? It's business to consumer, which is why they can get away with having a fixed monthly price and they can display that on their site.

So I don't think we're gonna be a business that can have a public pricing page with any honesty to it because of everything you just talked about. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So that makes it tricky. Like a small community organizer that does four or five meetups a year of less than a 100 people. And then we'd go, okay, well either one, we still give that to them at no cost, but we get the users, right.

Like to be able to try to turn them into event organizers or, because that gives us a viral growth, potentially viral growth. We go from there. Right. Yeah.

Yep. I have some other thoughts on monetizing that at another time that I won't talk about right now. Sure. But I do have some other ways of monetizing that.

Not, it's nothing to do with selling data or anything like that, but it's definitely, I think there's a way there. I honestly think there's a way there. Yeah. Yeah.

So, we will end up with a pricing page that is fairly minimal, but the work that's already been done on a pricing calculator will become very useful, I think, for things like when you're having sales conversations with leads and things like that to be able to sit down and go, okay, well, let's actually plug in some numbers and see what it comes up with. Right? Yep. Sorry.

I just had to write down that, fantastic idea I had. Sorry. Don't forget it. We've got no paper.

Perfect. Look forward to it. Yeah. Yeah.

So so that work isn't wasted. We'll just internalize that tool instead. And then wouldn't it be fantastic to have that go from like pricing calculator to a hit a button, generate a quote or something like that, send that off to Stripe, they sign it, you know, DocuSign, whatever, have that whole thing start with a pricing calculator page. You know?

Yeah. Well, I think, there's a step in between that, I think, and that is, do you need help with a business case? Like, can we could help them write a business case like a for to justify the return on investment? Right.

And I think that is probably where deal buddy may come in play there. Okay. Cause we've got a lot of, we've already got a decent amount of high value pieces of content that we could lighten up a little bit. Or yeah.

So I think there are some interesting things we can do there. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Then once we get that working and then we insert agent, so then we can make that a lot less high, like yeah. Lower touch. Yeah. Lower touch.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. No.

A 100%. So yeah. So, marketing website continues to move forward just sadly without much of a pricing page, which makes me sad, but it is what it is. We did land on Friday looking at a pricing page where we just features while categorizing it and then saying, look, you have to talk to the team.

Like, there is no way around it. Like we can, we can say what it's about and what they get and we can talk with the team, at least so they have some kind of resemblance of how our pricing structure would be based on. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's kind of I think that's all the stuff I'm involved in. So, why don't you take us through some of these other ones, mate?

Comprehensive, mate. We're almost out of time. Four half an hour on the on the Mitch show. Yeah.

On the Mitch. Yeah. Well, basically, we're looking at we got an email this week about AIM twenty twenty seven. Do we wanna go back there again?

And I think that we should. Yep. So what was AIM for the uninitiated? Yeah.

AIM is the Australian industry blah blah blah blah. It's a it's a an event. It's an event event conference. So Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's the premier event in Australia. And I think there's one in New Zealand that we should probably look at next year as well. But it was really interesting to go there and get a lie a lay of the land, about, you know, people have been in this space for a long, long, long time.

Right? We also have not been known to many people in this space for a long, long, long time. So I do think we do go to it next year, but we start today on trying to get people to our booth. Right.

And one of the areas I think I would've talked about it a couple of weeks ago is we need to build our community, Right? How do we help people navigate AI in events, or how do we help them plan out an event or, like get some ideas on events and stuff like that. So we will build out a community likely on school and, we'll start, I'll turn that on this week. And then we can start inviting people into the community there.

And then, you know, maybe if we're lucky enough, Mitch, kick the can down the road and we've got three or 400 people in the community by the end of the year and maybe 10 people go to AIM next year when we can have a, we can have a dinner and invite 10 people to dinner. Right? And then that in itself would put us in a far stronger position than last year because we didn't know anyone. Yeah.

True. But I do think being proactive and getting the most out of an event. And I think that really revolves around if we're a community led events platform, we've got to be community, a community led business. Right.

And we've to add value, not only through Six Sides, but through other areas too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Genius. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, you know, the word gets thrown around a lot. It does, it does become mundane after a while when you just hear all these genius things, you don't, you kind of lose track and go. Yeah. Stop recognising.

Yeah. Oh, there he goes again. Oh god. Yep.

Yeah. I I guess did you have a look at where because they've already assigned us a slot, a booth tentatively. Yeah. That's right.

There's like a on hold for it. Okay. They'd moved the whole layout, right, of the whole venue. So we'll have to go on, have a look at if we're happy with that spot.

I know where the vibe would be. Yeah. Yeah. And that yeah.

Like, that's facing the all the big competitors. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

So there was a I think it is we are near some competitors. So Yeah. We might just wanna move that, but we should probably get on it soon then. Yeah.

Yeah. I'll get onto it this week as well. And if we got a point it yeah. Yeah.

I think it is very worth worth it for us to go like it. Did it lead to here's a good question. Did it lead to any Yes. Business?

Did it? Who do we who do we have we signed anyone from a Toll? Yeah. Toll.

Ah, Yeah. And I'm still working through some other things as well. Other ones. I do I am due to go back and look at those spreadsheets.

I did think about that last week. There were some people I had to follow-up, so I will do that. And there is one, that I need to follow-up. I'll I'll do I'll do her today as well.

Yeah. Okay. K. Yeah.

Cool. I I I'm looking forward to it. It's gonna be a busy, a very busy time because we're gonna go to Melbourne for AIM in February, and then we're gonna go to Perth in March for the police games. Right?

Yeah. Absolutely. Period. Yeah.

I think, I think that all that next year will probably be around like a busy time. Hopefully, hopefully things will come, thick and fast. I would think we would make the world police games a focus of aim. Yeah.

Like, we would call that out like a community yeah. Go from there. Yeah. Use some of their numbers.

10,000 athletes, a 100 countries, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. 100 countries, but our banner at the back would reflect a lot of that.

Right? Think so. Yeah. I wonder if we're in a position now to just do the get the hirer, get the Harry the hirer or whatever to just use the printed backboard stuff instead of bringing getting our own banner done.

Oh, yeah. They there's different printing this year on the boards. Yeah. So yeah.

Yeah. So yeah. And they've they've already got like the furniture, all the booths, it's like standard. Okay.

They basically copied or very similar to what we had last year and standardized on that, which is good. So Yep. Yeah. Okay.

Cool. Anyway, alright. So then just a a couple of feedback, I guess, items from the last few events that we've run. Yeah.

So we released voting last week, which was great work to the team as well. And that was used both both at marinas and the start club, Brisbane start club, which is a pitch, like an accelerator for for new new tech. And, it both went down really well and got a lot of feedback. Yeah.

Marina's was also Monday, Tuesday last week, which was our biggest one yet. We had 385 ish people in the in the platform. Yeah. There is a discrepancy there.

When you look at it on the dashboard, it says three eighty five, but on the app, it only said two zero five. Yeah. It's because there's two zero five users in the app that had public profiles with that at least were filled out with their with a name, first name and last name. Okay.

So the mitigation for that moving forward is that after we update this onboarding flow that I talked about earlier, we will start the limitation is WorkOS and how it's possible to create an account without providing a first name and last name. Right. So, therefore, we've got a blank profile. And if someone then goes into an event with a blank profile, we don't know who they are other than their email.

Right? So I didn't wanna put them on a list of attendees. So, we will change how that works and make it so you can't like, accept an invite to an event without us knowing who you are. Sure.

But then we're also reworking this whole attendee profile thing anyway to do with privacy laws and all this sort of stuff. So Yeah. That's the discrepancy. Okay.

Fair enough. So, yeah, there was 385 people in the app, which is our biggest event yet. We're going we're We're going in the right direction. They were really appreciative of it.

They thought it was fantastic. Again, there were some lessons learned there on how they positioned us in the beginning. I think we kind of need to get the app where we talk about two weeks out. I reckon we need to have the app done or they need kind of need to have it mostly locked down and out to their audience a month out or something like that.

We can start educating them on how to use it before they get there. So they're not, when it's all overwhelming and they're listening to the keynote, they're still not trying, they're not thinking about the app and how to get the best out of it. It's too late. I think doing some stuff beforehand and that probably sits with us to educate them on, hey, did you know you could do this?

Or, hey, did you know you could do that? Like five days a Right? Exactly. Yeah.

It's an email sequence in the lead up to an event that they've claimed, you know, that's the ideal. Yep. A 100%. Yep.

To go, hey. Have you set up your profile? Have you you know, do you know how to get in and ask a question and whatever? Yeah.

And the app itself will do a fair bit of that in, like, this onboarding flow that I'm designing. Yep. We'll walk them through a lot of that stuff, but we should absolutely hit them again with an email series. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and then if they're a sponsor, then they get a different type of workflow than an attendee or something like that. And then we, I think there's so much we can do there that we haven't even looked at and, that, but we kind of want to get it once we pay attention to that email and onboarding flow, I think it'll be so much we'll get such a richer experience out of it, but we also want close the loop there to be able to turn an attendee into an event organizer. Right.

That that's a yep. Yeah. So definitely. Yeah.

It's coming. It was really good. I've got a wrap up meeting hopefully with them, tomorrow. I haven't heard back from them yet.

But, yeah, it was good. And same with the star club. We weren't I wasn't there and they got 81 people in the app for a two hour event. Yeah.

For the pitch night, gave the startups way more exposure. They got more questions asked on there on the app so they can follow-up. The voting met really well. And now we're talking to them about how to help them, for for another another conference coming up later in the year.

Yeah. Yeah. So Brilliant. Yep.

Mate, it's awesome. Yep. It's really good. Yeah.

It was cool because the voting all just went so well that, like, I didn't even think about it until the voting was e was over on for start club. Right? So I went in and I was like, oh, so I went out and went. And then it was like 70 votes or something like that.

55. 55 votes. Was 55? Yeah.

Okay. And yeah. It was brilliant. Okay.

We don't this is like this is very stable. You know, obviously, we wouldn't release something unstable knowingly. But, yeah, to have it go through its two first tests with no issues, sick. So The only thing that I would add onto it is you can't see the results on the phone without revealing it to everyone.

Yeah. So that's the only thing that I would change. Just show me the results. Show me.

And so I could do it without having to look at my laptop. That's the only thing that I would add to it. Okay. Yeah.

That that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

We can work on that. Sounds like a ticket to go into linear. Sounds like a ticket to go into linear. Yep.

I will get right on that. Yeah. Cool. Did you have anything else?

Because I got one more one more piece. No. That's it. That's it.

This one. This week, I'll we're what I'm working on this week is just reviewing last month. We've had a full month with the team now. We've got some great leads coming through, some world events, and some big events.

So, yeah, I'm hopeful in the next month we'll be able to close out a few new sales from the team's work, over the last six weeks. Nice. Very exciting times. Cool.

So, yeah, the the last piece that I wanted to talk on is you and I sat down on Friday, I think, Thursday, Friday to talk about our design system and how I'm finding it difficult to design a a good user interface in the mobile app while also supporting all the different customizations that we've allowed people to do thus far. And, and for anyone that's listening that's not in the platform, we let you set like the background image and and logo, and that's fine. We'd continue to do that.

But then also like 12 other colors, 11 other colors that you can set, and that's like background colours and foregrounds and borders and cards and secondary and tertiary and all this stuff. And, like, that's been good because it's got us to this point, but it's becoming really hard to design, like, components without letting people shoot themselves in the foot a bit. And we've had a few events where people are like, the colors have not been quite right, you know, but it's like, okay.

Whatever. They're happy with it. I'd love to move us to a more polished app where we provide the design and we just let you kind of add a bit of flair to it of, okay, cool. You can set a background image.

You can set a logo. You can add one color for your brand color or something like that, and we'll use that on a few of the buttons throughout the app, that sort of a thing. And I've I've made a start on that. I am leaning heavily into the Liquid Glass interface on iOS, and then I'll look for similar things that I can do on Android.

But it's going really well, and it's kind of it's a fun one to be able to take a lot of what we've done already and go, nah. Okay. We're we're either gonna bring this aspect across or I'm gonna completely replace the way that this works with something else. Like Yeah.

I feel a bit more unchained, with the design choices. And that's a benefit of the fact that, like, we only have a couple of recurring customers at the moment. Right? Project Hammer is a recurring event.

Start Club will be you know, they'll start using it more in a recurring basis. But otherwise, a lot of the customers that we've had are in at the moment, one off events. Yep. And so therefore Yep.

Yep. That's right. So there's there's not as much, Like, you always get worried about when you're releasing a significant design change for a project like, oh, is this gonna piss off all the customers? But in this case, lot of the time, it's just new customers.

So, I I don't worry about that as much. Of course, we won't do anything crazy drastic, and we'll walk our recurring customers through it. But Yeah. Yeah.

I think that ultimately it they'll be much happier with the result because the app will just this nailed down by August. Right? Because we don't wanna be doing a fundamental change after we introduce an app. They're like, who what the fuck you do an app for?

So Exactly. Yeah. Now I'm working on it now. Like, that that's a part of this onboarding stuff that I'm doing.

I'm already designing it with this new process in mind. Yep. So, yeah, it's it's all just it's exciting. There's a lot of fun stuff going on at the moment.

Cool, mate. Alright. Well, yeah. Where can people find you online?

On LinkedIn, mate. Gavin dot Tye. Oh, Gavin Tye actually is not .tye.

So how about you, mate? Mitch dot Dev. No. I'm kidding.

Mitch Dev. Yep. And otherwise, we'll catch you all next episode, and have a good week. Cool, mate.