74: Six inches high and rising

Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, CTO and Laravel developer. I'm Gavin Tye, CEO and not Laravel developer. Well, that's true.

That would that would be redundant. We don't need you for that. We are into year two of running a remote starter, sixsides.co, and it's a community led events platform.

We're documenting both the business and tech of our journey as we build out our SaaS. How are going, mate? Mate, I have had an eventful weekend to tell you the truth. Unbelievable.

Yes. Okay. It's started on a bit of bit of of good. We ordered started building the wellness center here.

I ordered a sauna on Saturday. A wellness center? Yeah. Yeah.

No. Well, a home wellness center. So sauna and spa, which were slowly ticking off. Okay.

Yep. Then on Saturday, Mel would there's some leaky taps here. So we she goes, can you change them out? I was like, okay.

And so I changed out there's like a blue thing, you know, the single mixer taps. There's a cartridge inside. Yeah. And so I pulled five of them out of the house, turned the water off, and then we went to the shops and the kids had a swimming lesson.

And so the the water was off. When we got home at midday, Mel's father was pressure washing the front yard with the with the water turned off. Oh, no. He did not even think to check with us why we turned the water off.

He just thought someone had turned it off on the street. And when we got in the house, it was an hour and a half of five taps going full blast into the house. Oh my god. And then house was absolutely flooded, six inches of water through all the bedrooms.

The kitchen the kitchen was all flooded and went down through the walls. It was leaking through downstairs. There were lights out full of water. It was unbelievably stressful.

It was Oh my god. It was terrible. We had So to get out emergency service, like flood emergency people to vacuum it up. And now we've got like 20 fans and humidifiers going in the house.

Man, it was to say it was I've never been in a situation like that, but it was unbelievable. Mel was just like, I don't know what to do. It was like, fuck. Yeah.

Absolutely. Her dad felt like shit. Like Yeah. Unsure.

He didn't mean it, but it was like, why didn't you just call? Why wouldn't you just call and see what that was? He goes, yeah, I just didn't even think about it. Didn't even cross my mind.

I was like, well, here's a rule of thumb. If you ever see that again, call with you. Fucking unbelievable. Oh my gosh.

That's awful. Okay. Did what's what are they what advice have you been given of like, what's what are the next steps? Is it carpet?

Is it house carpet? Proper flooded. They think they'll save it. We called we've got insurance, so we called our insurance insurer.

And so we've filled out a a claim. They're sending someone out in a couple days to have a look. It's all stained under the house, so we might have to pull the roof out. TV got wet.

Some other things got wet, but we generally got away with it pretty easily. Like Yeah. We had nothing on the floor. Like, we have a tidy house.

Computers weren't on the bench in the kitchen because that would have been fucked. It got on the bench in the kitchen. You said six inches of over the roof. Like, the it's Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So, mate, it went at the end, after it all calmed down, I was like, I wish we just had a letter run for five more minutes to go and have a look and see what it was doing because it wouldn't have made any difference. Yeah. For sure.

Oh. Yeah. It was terrible. Shit.

Hey. Yeah. So Okay. Well, you can keep us updated on that.

Mhmm. It could be a doozy. What a shame. Just moved into this this place and then this happens.

Yeah. It'll be alright. We'll be fine. It's Yeah.

You know, we didn't come home to a house fire, but that's just unsalvageable. Right? So Yeah. It'll fine.

Yeah. So But it was just the shock of it and it was like, oh my god. Yeah. Yeah.

And if you have to take like take any walls down or whatever and you just got them painted and Yeah. We didn't do any of that, lucky luckily. Okay. Good.

Yeah. So Okay. We might have to take You don't need me to do doom and gloom. No.

No. We already know what may or may not need to be done. So there is some furniture damage and some of the cupboards in the bedrooms are all swelling out, which is okay. You know, we'll get them replaced.

But it was Yeah. No one was hurt. It wasn't me, thankfully. It just somebody else.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. It was an accident.

Yeah. Oh, shit, mate. Unbelievable. You just, I was like, oh no, John.

Oh no. Oh no. No. There was a time when I saw him pressure washing and I turned the water off.

There was a part of me that was going, it it just didn't go into the house. Yeah. And over the across the yard. And when I went in, I was like, oh, I could see water everywhere.

Fucking everywhere. Yeah. Christ. Know what you want, mate.

Okay. It was a fun day. Well Yeah. So something different at least.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. So, now we're all sleeping in the lounge room like it's like a camp.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Nice. I suppose if you're Yeah. You're sleeping in the lounge room anyway, but you've got your office out here as well. You could Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It's fine out there. You just close the doors. You would never know what's going on in the house at the moment.

Yeah. Right. Okay. Because it's you know, you just can't hear it.

Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay.

Onto some other more nice news. We got Changemakers out. So Changemakers is a a new podcast that we actually started talking about, like, ages ago. Right?

It was It's a long time ago. Probably six months ago. Yeah. Like, something like we're starting another another podcast, I think.

Yeah. I don't know. It was yeah. We're start yeah.

I've got it. Starting a podcast for lead generation episode 33. So that's gotta be, yeah, six months ago, 40 episodes ago. And it's finally happened.

So the first episode is released. I'll put a link to it in the show notes so you can go grab that. It's called Changemakers. You can find it on all the places you get it, iTunes, Apple, and Spotify, and all that sort of stuff.

And, yeah, you sat down with Nick Marchese, the Lawrence guy. We talked about the episode last week, but it's now finally on this show last week, but it's finally available now. So, yeah, go check it out. Have you had any feedback from it?

Have you heard anything from from anyone on it yet? No. No. Not yet.

Not yet. I can see some influential people are are looking at it. Like, I've had some CEOs of NFPs, like, liking it and stuff like that. So it is getting people are seeing it.

Awesome. But it's not really about just one. Like, takes as we know with our podcast or well, we're doing it for a different reason in our podcast, but it takes a while to get exposure. And we're doing it for a larger body of work.

Like, I'm thinking about if we, by the end of the year, write something, like take some lessons from the top five or from the 20 people on the podcast or something. Right? We're we're gonna the podcast is just the information gathering portion of it, and then we're gonna do something with it later. We'll we'll repurpose the content.

Or like even last week, the team produced so much content from it. We just don't have a place to put it all yet. So I even sent some stuff to to Orange Sky saying, hey, you guys might have a use for this Yeah. To give them some Why why why don't we have a place to share it?

Because like this was like LinkedIn carousels and stuff, and it looks great. Rhea on on our team, she works on your side. She's done a really good job of producing some carousels. Three quotes, a LinkedIn carousel.

We've got another blog post. We've got the post about ChangeMate because I can't post all them on on my LinkedIn. Yeah. Well, I'm like, I'm happy to post some of that stuff.

I am. So I think what we'll do is we'll put them in a folder and then you can go and find what you want and what you we'll give you some options of what you can post if you want, what resonate. And then you you make your own messaging around it. So Yep.

Yep. Okay. No. That sounds good.

Because we're starting to activate we're starting to activate Chris and Raya's LinkedIn now. They're gonna they're slowly improving. They're gonna they've put on that they're employees of Six Sides now. Okay.

Great. And and then they're gonna update their banner and all that kind of stuff, and then they're gonna start posting the the other stuff because there's a lot of content that can come out of this. Awesome. Okay.

So then on the subject of LinkedIn content, I put up I've been putting up a couple posts each week now for two only two weeks and trying to find the right tone for me to strike because, like, I'm still putting in time into these posts, but they're just not resonating very well. I'm only getting, like, a 100 impressions on the last two posts that I've had and like a couple of likes, and it's just like not it's not working. That's not enough. You know?

I've got 3,000 followers, maybe more. And so I spoke about it with you, and you're like, I think it's because you're posting about six sides and it's like producing it's like I'm trying to produce marketing content for six sides that is more technical, and that's not really resonating, it seems, versus posting more like posting a building in public type of vibe of like, hey, this is what I'm doing. And it just so happens to be I'm working on six sides, but that's not the part.

I'm not trying to sell six sides, which I think my last two posts probably have been. So this week, I'm gonna pivot it and just talk about some of the cool stuff that I've been doing, and then we'll see if that resonates again. Yeah. Yeah.

There are so much interesting stuff that you are passionate about that you talk about on the podcast, Tye specific. Like, as an example that and when also when we do our catch ups, think is other people would find really useful and you would help them step like, not step in the landmine because you have figured out how to you've come up against a problem and you've figured out how to get around it. And I think that's useful for people. Yeah.

Yeah. We'll see. I'll I'll try this week and then I'll report next week. Yeah.

See how how I went. I gotta find out. I gotta figure out what I wanna post about. But anyway But it's all like, you can't like, it's also you can't post for the outcome that you want.

Yeah. It's CF. You can't control the outcome. You can't control, like, the result.

Right? So you can only because if you do that and you don't get the result, you get disheartened, which is what's happening as well. Like, it's more about it's the effort of doing it and then you iterate over time and then you'll fall into your niche or wherever you wanna go or or fall into your voice, which is what's happening. So don't be disheartened if you do change this and the world and it doesn't respond to you straight away because I think it rewards consistency over time.

Right? Yeah. Rhea, I believe we just should check with her. She's commenting on posts under your name just to try to bring awareness to things, which is fine.

That's one part of it. The other part of it is, yeah, just finding your voice. Alright. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm more than happy for her to continue doing that under my account.

It's fine. And like people do see it. They do I it then shows profile views and stuff like that. So I think in a way that is all working, but just not the posting.

I'm happy that I've taken that back over. Well, in in saying that, like, last week, Chris was commenting under my post with someone and the COO of a big company, she saw it and said, oh, and we become we connected. And she goes, I really love what you said. And I was like, okay.

And we had a conversation last week. And it was really, really positive. And she said, it's a very small community event space. I'd be really keen to see what you're doing in the community area, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that was all from posting from commenting. Yeah. Okay. So it works.

He's probably commented on a 100 posts and you just don't know which one's gonna be the one. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

That's good. I'm so glad we have a team to manage that. Yeah. A 100%.

Yeah. I just I I couldn't. I wouldn't, let's say. Not that I couldn't.

I wouldn't. I just don't have the time to do it either. Yep. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Cool. So on the subject of LinkedIn, you have crossed a milestone.

Mate, I've been working so hard for the last five years to increase my followers or increase my reach. And I I crossed over 10,000 mark last week. It's been consistent effort. Not any viral posts.

I haven't had any viral posts. It's just connecting with my ideal ideal people that I wanna connect with these days. And was largely to do with founders, but now it's moved over into the community space. So Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's Yeah. It's awesome.

That's a lot of people. It's a long time. Yeah. It was five years of effort.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah.

Because I'm on I'm only on a third of that. And when you and I first met, yeah, what, I had like a 100 people that I'd connected to or something like that. Yeah. So Yeah.

You're a long way ahead. 10,000 is a lot. That's good. Good one.

Probably percentage growth, it's probably you're probably higher than what I am. Right? Yeah. I don't know.

Yeah. But yeah. No. It was good.

It was was good to get over the market. Been circling that for a while. I got up close to it and then I must every now and then they cull a heap of profiles. They must have figured out their bots or whatever.

Or people are like, whatever it is. And so I went down a lot and then now I'm back up. So You're back. Yep.

You're back. Alright. So before we get into any more meat of it, last week's title on the Yeah. Mate, we got the most one of the most downloads and number of downloads in the initial period.

So what was it? What was the what was the title? What do you say we cut the chitchat a hole? And it was from The Rock, which we talked about on the show last week.

Yeah. Gotcha. Remember? Yeah.

Nicholas Cage. And I put a link in the description of it in the show notes to to that clip from the movie. And I guess it resonated because, yeah, it was it was tied for our most number of downloads in, the first twenty four hours that we've we've had. So don't know.

It's funny. I wondered if anybody picked up on that that's the second Nicolas Cage movie that I quoted. The first one. Exactly.

And I was like, lowrider? Donnie? Donnie? Lowrider?

And that was like episode 13 or something like that. So it had been a year. And I thought, like, stuff it. I'm just gonna that's gonna be the title.

Let's throw it in. Even if it's like it get ends up getting two downloads or something, at least I'm happy. It ended up being our time for best. So, yeah, it's thank you for listening.

So we've got a lot of different things going on with lead generation and we're trying many things. I think we're gonna like simplify what we're doing. Like, we've got too many lead gen strategies going on. Cold email is not working Okay.

With your team. It's not working at all. Right. But that's not to say I think it might work.

We just need to do a different approach or it has to work. We'll we'll do a different approach on it. But in saying that, we could just master LinkedIn and keep it really simplified, like activate the guys and their lead gen with LinkedIn, get them reaching out to people. And then we're doing the podcast and then taking the content out of that, which gives before the team were just making making up we're giving giving them topics to post about.

Now it's actually it's a lot more targeted what they can talk about. Right? I've gotta get better at managing them as well. Like I've created a mirror board.

So on Friday last week, we actually sat down instead of our team meeting. We had a sales team meeting and we reviewed what the team did and then put all that to bed or gave them actions like Raya's for for instance, Raya's posts on our blog site are structured more like a LinkedIn post with one line for every Yeah. Everything. And it's not it doesn't it doesn't feel right on a blog post.

So gave her some feedback and she's amending. But then we basically put all that to bed, and then I create the next post for Michael from LaraCon. He's then this week's change makers post. So we'll produce heap of content from that.

I got the style guide from Michael put it in there that the team can use the logos and stuff as they need, and then they'll work through on the Trello board. So have more visibility, give them more feedback. They don't really need much feedback. They're doing pretty good.

Yep. And then once all that started and simplifying, we can get Chris to do the podcast once you you can record what you're doing so he can we can lighten that load a little bit from you. And then also I wanna be able to start recording, but I can't do that. Recording videos for both six sides and deal buddy or sales market fit.

But I can't do that until I we get this workflow simplified or streamlined. So otherwise we'll be all over the shop. So Okay. Sure.

What videos are you talking about for six sides at least? I could probably do a video, say the top five lessons I learned from Nick Marchese at Orange Sky. Right? Ah, okay.

Yep. Alright. But there's also onboarding videos as well. Yeah.

Like, which is the what you can see behind me, that's all set up, the studio. Yeah. Lights and stuff. Yeah.

There's that. But there's more onboarding videos there, I think, as well. And then with Deal Buddy and Sales Market Fit, there's just some YouTube to try to get discovered on YouTube a bit more. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Cool. I just we just the the it's not to say we won't use those domains and we'll have them. We can still use them. I just we read the no effort cold email approach or very little effort paid attention to the strategy of it.

It just doesn't work anymore. We need to figure out another way, which could be using Klay, which I've got a friend who's gonna show us how that how they're doing it. It might not it might be outreach into a webinar or something. There's a few different things that we can do.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just trying to simplify it a little bit because I think what the content that the team have produced is actually they can do it relatively quickly with these rich transcripts now.

And I think it's only three or four hours of that work. So but I just need to see it. So I need to be able to see it and give them guidance so then we can go right with that. Between the two of them, we got an extra sixty hours a week or something like that, forty whatever it is because they will be doing some work in six sides.

So Deal buddy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Great. Then what about the white papers? Yeah. Part of that is that as well.

Like, we do need to talk to you how we can do this is I've been writing I wrote another one white paper last week for someone, and it was very bespoke and very targeted for a specific organization, but we could actually make it more generic for the the peer to peer fundraising market. And it could be a download or it could be just the knowledge base we put there that the AI can crawl. Right? And which I think that's probably the better way to go.

But we just need to put it up there. It's a note like a we don't know how to do it. Where do we put documents up? Then we do need to talk to you about what we do with Tye and how to do it.

So that's on our list of stuff to talk to you this week on how to how do we step that up. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Yep. Sounds good. I got an interesting idea for you. Would so these white papers that you write, right, to let people in on what's going on, You might have a sales meeting with a a lead, and then if the deal warrants it, like the size of the deal warrants it, then you would potentially write them a a white paper and maybe give us some of the subjects that you've written, and then I'll take it back.

So it's like a look. Could be a white paper. Call it a white paper strategic brief. I think the intention of it is to I'm just gonna bring up some while we're talking, is to really get help someone that we meet get alignment within their business on what the problem is they're trying to solve, what the problem they're trying to solve and why they're having the problems in the first place and how we would actually help them solve it.

So we wrote one for someone the other week. It was a charity. Like, I won't say the name of the charity, but it's how this charity can empower community led fundraising into their iconic event. Right?

And giving them a different way of using technology to to bring that sense of freshness into that organization. Right? The other one, which is the World Police Games, as we work with them and we wrote a white paper for them called the most connected games ever, designing a unified platform to deliver competition, comradery, and community at at the World Police Games in Perth '27. Right?

So Yep. We knew what their goal was. They stated that. They said they wanna create the most connected games ever.

Right? And the white paper was showing the why why current technology is making it difficult and then how we would do it differently, essentially, then they could shop that around to whoever they need to and and discuss it. But it's an authority piece and an education piece, not a sales tool. Okay.

Okay. Yep. So those are very bespoke ones. Right?

But you have some more generalised ones that you have used in the past. Right? So what are those generalised ones? Because that's where I'm heading with this.

Okay. So how to find a founding partner for a like a sponsorship partner for a series of events is one. Alright? How they could support a more connected experience across a series of events, which is which is we wrote that for a specific event for a specific organization.

But even with the other ones that I spoke about is like the how blank can empower community led fundraising that could make it more generic. It could be how how how charities can empower community led fundraising events or something like that. Right? Make it more generic.

Right? So because what What I'm thinking is Yep. Could we do and would it be useful? Could we do something like like a fill in your email and the name of your company on the marketing site and we'll email you a custom white paper.

Right? That we depending on which page they're on on the website or something like that. If it's to do with fundraising, then we have a call to action and it's okay, give us the name of your charity and they put in, you know, blah blah blah. They put in volunteering WA and they put in their email address.

And then we type we leverage AI to take this existing, like, template. Yeah. White paper that you've got, fill it in with their details, maybe add like a little bit of customisation that's like contextual. The AI would have to be relevant to their business, and then maybe we can source their logo, you know, or something like that.

Would that so I believe that would be technically possible. Would any would something like that be useful is my question. Yeah. Maybe in the future.

Like, I do think we have spoken about this with briefly, and I think this is where you you've gotta make sure we have the intention. The intention isn't achieved, right, which is mindset change and adding the right value at the right time to to have them go, wow. Yeah. Okay.

I will pursue this with with them. Right? Yep. If we can get to that in time, yeah, absolutely.

Whereas but I do think it's probably there's a step in between that where is we have a bit of an an agent, whatever it is, in the team when someone comes in and will go, hey, what brings you here? And you go, this is what I'm doing. Okay. Tell me a bit about your business.

What's the and you go, okay. We actually have some content on here. Can I ask you some questions about your business? Like, what what are you trying to achieve?

And then we could write them a bespoke one roughly around that, which is what you're saying. I think that would be great to get there in time when we have a lot of things coming in over time. Yeah. Alright.

Yeah. It's not a play for now, I don't think. Even at the level of my idea, it's not a play for right now. It's just thinking about what's possible.

But yeah I think it would probably be I think it would probably be, yes, you could do it. A really a more interesting one would be, like, helping people write a business case for their business. I think it becomes really interesting with like a business case if you could help them compile one. Like, what are they trying to solve?

Yes. Okay. For this, it's gonna cost you $15,000 for the year. You would get this value in your specific context.

You could anticipate a $150,000 return or something or blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah. You'd wanna hold onto that pretty tightly though until you knew it was working.

Yeah, sure. But it would highlight a You know, that would be a lead indicator that you would get a sales team involved in. Yeah. For sure.

Okay. It's cool to have some ideas to expand and optimise later. This is actually where I think, in all honesty, where deal buddy where we'll it becomes it'll become into its own here when we have a version of our we'll build a version of deal buddy for six sides, and that will be the part of the presale or something like that. Right?

Yeah. Because we'll know that we we do have to do a lot of work on that in time to build that out. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Cool.

What about what about you, mate? What have you been working on this week? Last week? Sorry.

Yeah. We're recording this on Monday. Just FYI. So yeah.

So last week, big week, we got a lot done. There's a lot of things happening. The the big headline one is we have now implemented most of the community features both on the in the back end to support it and also the mobile app. App.

So you can now go browse a list of communities. You can go into them, see a list of members. You can create posts. You can comment on posts, react to them.

What else? What else? We're working on inviting people in to a community at the moment and then like managing those communities from within the app so you can make changes to them. You can kick people out.

You can add people, whatever. But, yeah, it's gone really well. It looks really good. So sat down with the team on Thursday, and we we were working on, like, version two of the design because three months ago or something like that, I mocked up a couple of screens for the communities feature the community features, and that's what we've been using like in demos and talking with the police games and stuff like that.

And those screens looked decent, but it didn't feel as cohesive with the rest of the app. Plus, there were just some, like, some some, like, not best practises stuff, like some really long screens and all this sort of stuff. So, anyway, we went through and we've kind of restructured it. We'd used the tabs to kind of split out.

Okay. Hey. Here's a list of hosts. Here's a list of events.

Here's a list of members, etcetera. So, yeah, just trying to make it all feel cohesive. It's gone really well. So I'm excited to check-in with the team a bit later today and just kinda see where we're at.

In addition to that, there's been lots of other stuff that we've been working on. So this last week just gone, Martin was working on the ability for people to delete their accounts, and that would help us comply with the GDPR stuff. And I haven't yet reviewed that, but the quick little comments that I've seen on it look pretty good. So there's like a lot of stuff that comes with letting people delete their accounts.

The main one for me is making sure that we don't delete anything that then changes the analytics of that event, any events that those that user went to. So, yeah, I don't I wouldn't wanna see, you know, volunteering WA had 200 people actually at their event, and then a week later they go in and they look at their analytics and now it says a 150 because we wanna be that source of truth. Like, right now, we're not doing the ticketing. Right?

But still, I wanna know. No. You actually had 200 people. It was just 50 of them have now deleted their account for whatever reason.

Right? So so is that like analytics is done on a, like, on a certain time, like a time frame. Right? Like a is that how do you how do you get around that?

No. We just like we can detach an attendee record from like a user record. So, a user is something you control. That's your profile.

An attendee is basically just a relationship between this user went to this event. So, we can count the number of attendees. That's how we do it now. But then if you go delete your account, then we just go, okay, let's empty out that attendee and no longer attach it to this user that now doesn't exist.

But the attendee record is still there. You were someone was still there. We just don't know who they were anymore. Right?

So, it's just it's things like that. It's just making sure that, okay, we don't shoot ourselves in the foot. Because I've never really had to deal with this before. Like, this is the first application I've been involved in that's had to consider some of these far reaching privacy concerns and all this sort of stuff.

So, it's been it's been good. But again, I haven't fully reviewed that, but Martin and I sat down for twenty minutes last week and kind of talked through some of these concerns. So, I'm curious to see what he actually came up with. So, yeah, there's been that.

You're in the big time now, mate, looking at all this global global compliance stuff. Welcome. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. So it is it is fun. The internationalisation, like the UI translations and stuff, that's all done, working really well. It's fun.

That's a fun challenge to have. The infrastructure in different regions, that's been a fun challenge, and I'm glad we've solved it. That's all still going really well from what I can tell anyway. Yeah.

And then like this GDPR stuff, it's it is interesting. It's it's fun to have some new problems to solve because I've solved a lot of other problems on like a more local basis over my career. So, yeah, it's fun to have some new ones. What else?

The testing. So last week we talked about Maestro, and you were a you were a big proponent for it. So we're going to sign up probably at the end of this week to actually test, like sorry. We've written tests now.

Written test cases, which is just like a file which basically tells the app, hey, open up the app, click on this button, type this in this box, you know, type in a username and a password, whatever, and then see does the word events appear on the screen, you know, because that kind of proves that, like, things are working. Right? If you can get to some certain point in the app after logging in and clicking on a button and whatever, then that's a good sign that the app is actually working and hasn't crashed or whatever.

So we wanna to add some context, we want to test our app on like ten, twenty different devices. And we're doing this to make sure that one, that it works for us because our app should work for everyone. But two, and most importantly, the the police games app, which we will soon be releasing in August, that that works for as many devices as possible. So we've done some research.

This is a project that Raymond took the lead on and settled on Maestro as a testing framework and has proven out like, he's already written five different test cases that kinda go through and look at different things. And now we just need to figure out how do we actually run them on devices because we're not gonna go buy 20 different devices and do this ourselves. So, there are services for this, but they seem very expensive. Yeah.

Right. So, we're trying to figure out, like, I'm talking $250 a month per device US. Right? And so if we were to do that, if that was the actual cost, then that's what, like many thousands.

I can't do the math right now, but it's a lot. So we get a seven day free trial with this Maestro hosted cloud thing, and I think we're gonna have a look at that and start that free trial like when everything is ready to go, which I'm hopeful will be like early next week. And then what I think will happen is it'll turn out that that $250 a month is just means we can run one one device at a time. That we can go switch whatever that device is.

Okay. Now we wanna run some old iPhone. Okay. Now an Android, a Galaxy, whatever, blah blah blah.

Like, I think it's just one slot at a time. Really? Because otherwise, how the heck is anybody paying this? Like, this this would be crazy expensive.

But I don't wanna start that trial when we're not ready yet. So, I'll find out. Anyway, even if it is somehow that expensive, when we have this free trial, we'll just smash through all the tests and go, okay, as long as they all pass, then we can cancel the trial after that. So Yeah.

But hopefully this becomes something that we can automate with all our future releases. And if it is only that $250 a month, which is not nothing, but if it means, okay, we know for sure that our app works on all devices that we care about at least, then that's probably worth paying that that amount for. Right? You're not Hiring someone to do it.

Right? Well, that's right. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. And we can have it automated as well. So when we roll out an update, it instantly it goes up, gets tested, gives us a report back, all that sort of stuff. So that's been fun.

But, yeah, we are down to just one week to go of development time. So the app is due to be handed over to the police games on August 17, which is three weeks away at this point. So the timeline that we had set ourselves was we wanted to be finished with development by the third third, which is at time of record is next Monday. So seven days seven days away, eight days away.

And things are going really well. So, one of the biggest pieces that we still had yet to implement was the community features, and that's now, I would say, probably 80% done. I expect that by the end of today or early tomorrow, it'll be a 100% done. I spent a bunch of time over the weekend getting in there and playing around with that, writing comments and adding reactions and all this sort of stuff.

So that's all going really well. So can people add photos and videos in there yet? Like, into the into the post? No.

It's just text for now. So that's something that we can add in time. And like to be clear, we will be continuing to add new functionality even through that two week testing block. But I would like to have, okay, this is what we are releasing to them, at least getting them to test as well.

Because that's when on August 3, the plan is, okay, we stop development. We start using Maestro. I get you in. We we issue builds up onto TestFlight.

We put the first release up for review by Apple, like, by the end of that week and Google, sorry. Start configuring like the Play Store listings and all that sort of stuff. It's all all that happens. But if all the testing goes well, by all means, we just we can continue adding some functionality.

So, posts are just text only for right now. It won't be a big lift to add images to it. We already support images in our app. And video is something that we've talked about, but I wouldn't support that yet.

It is a bigger Yeah. Yeah. Technically, it's a bigger challenge. To display video in the app, like, it's not it's not that much different.

But storing video and all the encoding that you have to do and all this sort of stuff, it's like it's a bigger deal than just images are. So we will get to that. Images would be ideal if we can get to it. Right?

Because that's gonna be the first thing they're gonna ask you as soon as you release it. So, anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So, the only other big thing that's still on my list is having the database of all of the registered athletes.

Right? So I had been working on this and I worked on it over the weekend. My plan for how to do this, I think it's pretty elegant. I don't want to What's a big word?

I don't want the Six Sides code base to really know that much about the police games and this bespoke work that we're doing because that then means that our system stays more generalised as long as we can still achieve the outcomes that the police games want, then we're all good. Right? And then the Six Eyes doesn't just become a police games only system. You know?

So that's really what I'm trying to avoid. Now the way I plan to do this, there's a couple of things that we need to do to achieve this. Right? So the main one is the police games will give us a spreadsheet, just a CSV of their registered athletes because we're not handling registrations and we are happy with that.

They've got an existing system for that. This spreadsheet will give us a list of all of the attendees that have registered, the countries that they're coming from. There's some contact info in there that we're not gonna use, and the list of sports that they are registered for. So what the the other requirement here is that you can only get access to the app if you've got one of those valid registration numbers.

Right? Because they only want this to be available for athletes and people that are in, you know, their families. To have a ticket. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so how I will achieve this is basically we will make like one little customization in the code base, which is if you are trying to register a user account using the police games app.

When you first hit register, it'll ask you for one extra field, which will be that rego number. So we currently ask for, like, first name, last name, email, a password if you're gonna use password authentication. Authentication, We we would would just just add add a registration number. And then what we'll do after that is there will be some custom code inside of the main Six Sides code base, which will then go, okay, they're trying to register for the police games.

I need to go do this one other thing, which is go off and check against this spreadsheet, basically. And then if they exist in that spreadsheet, then allow them in record, attach that rego number to the user that has now just been created. And then that's it. It doesn't act the Six Sides system itself won't actually store like, it won't know, hey, Mitch is attending the swimming and the, you know, the rowing or whatever.

It won't know that. That logic will all be maintained in a separate sidecar application, which will just kind of sit on the sidelines. So that one is fully bespoke and written just for the police games. So it will be the one that then goes, okay, hey, I'm actually the spreadsheet.

So Six Sides itself won't be looking in a spreadsheet. It'll be making an API call off to this other thing, which is where all the bespoke logic will be. And then that thing will then be able to go and add people to events, add them to communities, etcetera. And I'm not even writing it in Laravel, which is pretty cool.

It'll just be a Cloudflare worker. And this will allow the team at the police games to go upload a spreadsheet at any time with a list of new people in it. We'll then automatically figure out all the changes, go run those changes in the background and go, okay. Cool.

If Gavin is now attending some new sport, we'll be able to pick that up, automatically add you to those to any new events. And then similarly, if someone gets removed from a sport, we still have to figure out and probably just talk with the police games team about, well, what would they expect to happen at that point? And we can just write it as custom. So what about and then What about if they try to get in and their code's not there?

What's the step from that? Because you don't want let them in? Back to us. Yeah.

But would you would you point them to the a support number for the police game? We'd have to point them towards an email or something. Right? Exactly.

Yeah. So this is where, like, during this testing two weeks that we will have, we should definitely get on a call with the police games, walk them through all of this, make sure they're happy, and then get some guidance from them on, okay, what do we do under these certain scenarios, you know? So, yeah. Yeah.

So Yeah. That's how I'm building it. Now I sat down. I expected to have that finished on the weekend, and I sat down and came up with a plan in I'm actually using Claude more.

So everyone is going on about Claude Code as opposed to Cursor. Actually feels like Cursor's a bit fallen out of favour, but I still use Cursor all the time. But I'm integrating it with Claude code now. Anyway, I sat down with Claude and came up with a plan of, hey, okay, this is how I wanna build this out.

And then it's just I just wasn't happy with it. It felt like it would just turn out to be a complete mess. So I'm gonna sit down between today and tomorrow and plan out the right way to do it. Hopefully.

Hopefully, the right way. And then it'll be really quick to build. It's just coming up with that plan, which is the the tricky part. So, yeah, feeling pretty good about the overall the architecture decisions that are being made here so that the main app doesn't get bloated and filled with bespoke stuff.

And then this is like a perfect way for us to if we get another huge event, you know, that has like specific rules and things like that, this is a perfect way to kind of build out these custom integrations. Yeah. So, anyway, the only other thing on the dev side is onboarding. So, we have some onboarding screens in the in the app, and you and I still need to kind of sit down and figure out what we're gonna do there.

And this week is the right the right week to do that. So we'll have to book in some time. I do think there's some onboarding, like yes. It's in the app, but there's also there's some stuff here where I can put on some webinars or something, like, during the night, like, at different parts or different parts of the world that introduce the the games or the sporting associations to the to Six Sides and let them know that it's coming.

That'll also hopefully give us some exposure to as well, which I haven't even spoken to the police games about it, but they may or may not want you do those as an actual webinar or would you just record a video for them and we just email that out? No. I would like to do it, have them register for it if possible to one Okay. Refine the message.

But two, because it also gives us a chance to talk to people. Yeah. Alright. Yeah.

Sure. Would you do that based on as people sign up in the app, we send them out an email? Or would you wanna use the police games list of emails? Because I think that might be better if it's people that have actually signed up in the app.

Right. Yeah. It could I would probably prefer to do it to the the England Police Sporting Associate, like Police Sporting Association or something like that to do to the association. And then But we'll see.

We'll see what they're Okay. What they say. Well, this will all be a part of talking with them. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Okay.

Cool. Final thing. So last week we met up with some designers. So we met with two designers.

Went pretty well, I think. And these are designers that have worked on some, like, decent sites that I'm aware of, you know, in the Larrowood community and things like that. I'm not naming names yet because we Unfortunately, we still haven't settled on one. This has been waiting with me.

It's entirely my fault. But we sat down and we had a conversation with one in particular and it was clear that the like, they offer, you know, development services for somewhere around it was like $5 a month US. And so we originally were thinking like, okay, well, our budget is probably about, you know, about somewhere around there because that works out to be like $78,000 Australian. And we get on and we're talking through it and he asks us our budget and I say this and he goes, okay, well, you probably I'd only be able to do, you know, a couple of pages for you, which is what we expected.

But then you were thinking like sorry. They had a a retainer option which was like first, if you do a minimum of three months, then it becomes like a thousand dollars a month cheaper or something like that. And you actually brought up on the call like, well, we've got no shortage of stuff for us to work on that could be nicely designed. Like and it was interest it kind of threw me as a in a good way.

I was like, oh, because you were now suggesting, like, maybe we could spend some more money on design. So I want to chat with you on that just a little. Yeah. Look, the whole point of us doing this is one to get a fresh design perspective, but then also to lighten your workload.

Yeah. I think it does the first part, but doesn't necessarily do the second part because you're still gonna have to design a lot of stuff. Right? So but These are like pages on the marketing side you're talking about?

Yeah. What could we get what does he offer over three months? Which was the minimum engagement. Right?

So do you and if we're gonna spend 15,000 US, which is 21 k ish Australian, like, what's our ROI gonna be on that? Well, first of all, can we afford it? Because we just can't throw money away. No.

Second of all, what will we get? What's the outcome? So in saying that, Melanie's on her way down here now. So she's coming down here for the end of the podcast too.

We can sit down with her around what you have in your spreadsheet and tell her what we wanna achieve, and she'll go away and put it in a more professional looking document for us to make an informed decision. Okay. Which for those who haven't listened before, Melanie's my wife. But the re I think, like, if we're gonna spend 21,000 on it, we have to fucking back ourselves, I think.

Like, it's gonna have to produce an ROI. Right? And forget what like, you've said it's one shot. Right?

To land a good first impression. If it can look really great when we release it for the police games And it can generate 50, a 100, a 150. Like, it's gonna pay for itself, I think. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. And Yeah. But again, it's the balancing act.

Can we afford it? And that's what we need to do. We need to get we it feels like we can, but we run really close to the wire. Like Yeah.

If we don't bring on any new clients. But if we don't bring in any new clients in the next twelve months, I think we're failing. We're not doing something right. Yeah.

That's right. Not working. And then it's probably not worth running the business if we can't if we struggle that hard to Yeah. Find customers.

So, yeah. So But anyway, so Mel's coming down and we'll run some numbers. But yeah, that that that's where my thoughts were. So Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, it was was encouraging to see because Yeah. I just I was like, wow.

Okay. Great. If you're keen, then I'm keen. I'm very keen.

So, as long as it works It's just the whole thing The one thing, the whole thing at the moment is is we're moving too slow on this decision. We gotta get faster. Right? Because we can't Yeah.

We're mulling it over for three weeks now, which we really need to get going. We're because they're not gonna wait for us. So Yeah. Yeah.

We need to get something started this week, I would think. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

Okay. You had one final thing here? Mate, I went to the Brimstone Brawl on Saturday just to end the podcast. Now you may not know what it is, but it's basically men and women in medieval armor.

And they just bash the shit out of each other in a ring. It was crazy. Like with axes and swords and Yeah. Cool.

Proper, Yeah. Like one on one, three on three, a whole 15 on each other. It was crazy. But it was so cold.

It was so cold. Oh, Melanie's here. Hello. Hi, Mitch.

Yeah. Hey. We'll we'll wrap up the pod now. But Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. That's awesome. Yep.

Was great. Before. Yeah. Yeah.

It was interesting. It was definitely worth going to have a look at. I don't know if I'll go every time, but it was definitely interesting to see how they would have done that back in the medieval days. Yeah.

Sure. And they weren't just play fighting. Yeah. Yeah.

Doing it for real. Absolutely. Cool. Yep.

Awesome, mate. Alright. Well, where can people find you online? On LinkedIn.

Gavin Tye, t y e. Excellent. Probably in my lounge in my house mopping up the mess for the next seven days. Yeah.

Yes. No. No good. Poor buggers.

You can find me on LinkedIn as well at Mitch Dav. And, yeah, we'll catch you all next week. Maybe we record on Monday next week as well to tie it in with when all the development's done. Okay.

Let's do that. We will see. Alright. Awesome.

Cool. Okay. We'll catch you next time. See you.