220: Ben and Adam Wrap The Year

Speaker A: Yeah. So we got a lot of topics here that are kind of, like, a little bit scattered. So I don't know if, um, how you want to approach it. I think we could probably run through all of them. But there's also the appeal of just, like, the really tight, topical episode. That's like, a reference for people to come back to on things.

Speaker B: There is.

Speaker A: That was the, uh.

Speaker B: That was our last episode. I feel like this one can just be, uh, a. Just be a smattering of topics.

Speaker A: The old holiday smatter.

Speaker B: Holidays matter. Let's do it.

Speaker A: All right, cool.

Speaker B: By the way, I think people are listening to this. This is the pod.

Speaker A: Cool. All right, well, enjoy my coughing and weird mouth noises then.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we shut the company down, not permanently, but for the holidays.

Speaker A: Yeah. And when did that start? Was that, like, M. Monday was the. Kind of the first day.

Speaker B: Yeah. December 19th. So the last two weeks. Full weeks of December.

Speaker A: Yeah, we did the same thing, but this is our third year doing it. How's it going for you so far?

Speaker B: As far as I can tell, it's so I'm sort of the least impacted in a way, because there's no, like, support escalation going to me. That's really the big thing is, like, everyone can kind of just stop. That's fine, except for support, but. So we basically set an autoresponder that

Speaker A: was like, we're out, urgent server down, whatever type of stuff.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: How much of that stuff happens in your business in general?

Speaker B: Almost none. Yeah, I can sort of think of basically two times where, like, things were down in a significant way, which is kind of great.

Speaker A: And did they require you to do anything, or was it kind of just like, it'll come back up when the service provider we rely on, who is having issues comes back up?

Speaker B: I guess there probably was, I think, a third one where that was happening. I think maybe a Heroku problem. But. So, yeah, I think one of them was like that, where it's just like, we hope Heroku comes back soon. And then the other was like, we pushed a deploy that was not so good, so we had to do something. And then the third I'm thinking of was when we had this Covid surge, uh, in our business, and we just got overwhelmed and we had to do something again there. And by we, I mean, like, people that know how the systems work.

Speaker A: It's funny, this is relevant because it's, uh, almost Christmas. Anytime anyone says that, it makes me think of this, like, part in, uh, the Grinch movie. You remember the Grinch With Jim Carrey.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, I didn't see that one. I'm a classic, really.

Speaker A: The live action Grinch one, there's like a scene where him and his dog are on the mountain and he's like talking about all this, like, shit that they have to clean up or something. Like, we really need to come back here and deal with this. And by we, I mean you to the nice.

Speaker B: Yep. Um, so he's. He's also a CEO in a way.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: So, yeah, so it's. We're shut down, which is cool. And like this. I like this because it's a formalization of a thing that was already happening. Like, it was like we had this extremely sporadic, you know, availability during the holidays anyway, and everyone's off. And so it was nice to just be like, oh, we're just, let's just do this for everybody. This will be nicer. And then do it on support as well, so that it's like the people manning that queue can also get a break.

Speaker A: So how are you handling that?

Speaker B: So we have an autoresponder for anyone that emails us that's not a response to an automated survey or something similar or call feedback, and we say, we're closed for the holidays, we're back on this date. If you have an urgent request, email this address. And then if people do that, that actually loudly notifies people and people will respond.

Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah, I've been, uh, trying to think about how to handle that because you might have seen me tweet the other day. We do the same thing. We've been, you know, we give everyone two weeks off and no one at the company does support anyways, except for the partners and mostly just one of us.

Speaker B: That seems crazy, but okay.

Speaker A: Yeah, we just don't have that much volume. And I honestly, I would like to figure out how to reduce it even more, which is maybe something we could talk about too. Um. Um. The other, like, side of support we have though, is like, GitHub issues. You know, that's kind of like another flavor of support here. And I was debating doing this and I'm, um, still would like to do it, honestly, but it just feels like by the time I actually get this in place now, it'll be too late. But I kind of want to just not even accept issues and pull requests over the holidays at all. And just if you open something, it'll just be instantly closed. Open it again. Like when we're open for business. I hate the idea of coming back to like a hundred issues and pull requests that have piled up. And it's the same is true for customer support in the situation you're talking about. You know, people are going to get an autoresponder, but it's like, okay, if this is uh, urgent, email is here, but otherwise, like you're still sort of planning to come back to this big mountain of stuff to come through, which is just not great. I don't know, I think like, yeah, you can probably put it out of your mind while you're, while you're off, but wouldn't it be nice to just come back and things were just in the state that you left them, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Which for support I get is not really quite the same for GitHub, uh, issues. I kind of feel like we could get away with it because 90% of issues and pull requests that are open just get closed or moved anyways. Like they're almost all not valid. It's like, uh, basically I can't figure out how to do this, or here's a pull request that we don't want to accept because it's missing documentation or we just don't want to maintain the feature or whatever. So all of our time is basically spent saying no to people in kind ways, which takes like a lot of emotional energy and I would rather just not have to at all. But I don't know if there's a way to do that for actual support stuff too. Like maybe they're. Maybe there is. Email us again on this date if uh, this is still a problem for you. Because the reality is, man, for most people, they figure it out themselves, like before you get a chance to get back to them anyways or come up with some solution or by the time you do get a chance to get back to them, it's like, oh, thanks, but uh, I actually don't really even care about this anymore anyways. And I've long moved on and this is no longer a thing for me. But it's still sitting in your queue, so you still have to do something with it, you know.

Speaker B: So you're thinking maybe over the holidays, turn off issues or auto close them or something.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'd like it if it was a way to totally turn them off. GitHub does have this like interaction limits feature where you can set it up so no one can do anything to the repository unless they're like a contributor. But that prevents people from commenting on old issues or from creating new discussion posts and stuff, which I don't want to do. I just wanted to close down the things that become like, to DOS for us. I think it's reasonable for people to be able to like, post a comment on an old issue and say, hey, if the solution that was posted didn't work for anyone else, this worked for me. You know, like, stuff that adds value. I don't want to like, stop that. But stuff that's like, I'm using this old version of this thing without realizing I'm using this old version of this thing and therefore nothing's working. And also there's no reproduction. And I'm certainly going to figure this out before you get a chance to get back to me, so. And when you do get back to me, I'm not going to acknowledge it because I figured it out and moved on and I'm rude and this is going to waste your time anyways. You know that stuff. I would prefer to just like have it not even appear.

Speaker B: So that stuff sounds like it'd be great if it didn't appear ever.

Speaker A: Yep. And that is something I've tossed around too. And honestly, like, building something to automate some of this stuff could be useful for that in the long term. I have this, like, very controversial opinion that I would like all GitHub issues and PRs to be closed by default by a bot. Every single one, as soon as it's opened and thrown into like a queue that we manage privately, where I can just go through it and basically just look at an issue and be like, uh, do I think this is valid? I hit accept and it opens it up again so it shows in GitHub. If I don't think it's valid, I just hit dismiss and I don't have to reply, I don't have to to do anything. I just move on. But there's like some contributing guidelines in place in the template, whatever that makes it very clear. When you open this, we will decide whether we think it's valid and accept it. And the other outcome is you hear nothing. So if you want help with something, like, ask somewhere where like people are going to respond, which is like the discussions or like the Discord server or whatever. Because there's this weird power dynamic with GitHub. Uh, that's very different than like email, where you really do have to like take action on anything anyone opens and it's like a DDoS vector for your time effectively. Because there's no way, like, if I get an email that I just like, don't want to do anything with, I can just not reply to the person to ignore it. But if I get a GitHub issue, I have to close it for it to go away. And closing it without a message. If you close it without a message, you're telling the person, I looked at this and I read it and I pressed a button on it, but I chose not to type anything to you, so therefore I'm an. You know what I mean? But if it's just. It went into like the closed bucket by default and if we see it and think it's valid, we'll kind of reopen it. I don't know. It creates like a different dynamic that kind of feels more like what happens when you submit a bug report about Safari to Apple on their form. You know what I mean? It's not unreasonable. No one's expecting a response. You're hoping they fix it, but you also have this expectation in your head. It's like they're probably getting hundreds of these a day from whoever is out there, you know, and of course they can't give a personalized response to everyone.

Speaker B: Is there enough worthwhile things that come through the issues in PRs that you. That's better than not? Just like turning them off and being like, oh, we don't accept these things. Here's a way to like report a bug in a different thing.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, we groom that stuff well enough that we, we do get valid issues through there and notice them, I would say. I think a lot of other projects can't even notice because there's. There's like 1500 open issues. So they find out about bugs from Twitter or from people they know who have the issues or whatever. It is kind of nice. The thing that sucks about closing issues or like turning off issues in GitHub, uh, is it makes all previous issues 404, so it like deletes the history of them effectively, which is kind of bad. Now that there's all this sort of information out there in those issues.

Speaker B: Do you get contacted by GitHub product managers to like fix these things or to improve these.

Speaker A: I've talked to a couple people at GitHub about things, but there's not that many huge projects on GitHub. I don't expect them to do anything about any of this stuff.

Speaker B: That's too bad.

Speaker A: The thing that's kind of interesting, right, is if you look at all the most, all the sort of really big open source projects that are really widely used, like they don't use the GitHub model, you know, if you look at like Git, like git doesn't use GitHub to like track issues and pull requests and all that stuff, as far as I know. I think there's like a mirror Of Git on GitHub where you can view the source and stuff. The same is true for like SQLite. You know, you can't report an issue on the, on GitHub or submit a pull request. And that's because like all these projects at scale kind of like recognize that that is like totally insane and chaos at that scale. So GitHub just doesn't serve those types of projects well. And if you look at any other big project that does use GitHub, they've basically just let themselves drown in that stuff to the point where that information isn't even valuable. We are in a very good place. We have like 35 open issues and pull requests across our entire organization. Uh, you know, which I think is like probably one of the best to run open source GitHub orgs on GitHub from that point of view. But it takes like more work than I want it to take for sure. Um, and it feels like work that we're like forced to spend time on. And thankfully we have resources and can pay people to spend like half their day every day just paying attention to that stuff, closing that stuff and whatever. And over the last like three days or even like the last five days, even while I was on vacation last week, I'm like checking GitHub issues on my phone, trying to like close issues that just need to be closed as fast as possible because like I want to keep that number down because I don't want it to spiral out of control. But it kind of feels like a stupid thing to spend time on at the same time because it's just like a public inbox, a public to do list, you know, that feels like the,

Speaker B: the opposite of that tweet you had about trying to avoid doing things because you could or because it would make you money or something.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean that's. And that's why thankfully we have, you know, resources to have a team that can work on that stuff and, and hire people that actually really enjoy like digging into gnarly problems and stuff like that. So it works out, but a lot of it is still just filtering through noise and I wish there was less of that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: To do.

Speaker B: It does feel like there needs to be a higher bar or a hurdle in the way of people submitting kind of low value stuff. The auto close seems like maybe a possible thing. I bet that probably would help a good bit just to keep your like Your numbers, the numbers you care about down, but maybe there's some other task you make someone do.

Speaker A: This is like, I don't even know if it's like, smart to even talk about this, but there's, there's like a fear I have of people just like, opening issues to like, bait me into, like, having conversations that I don't even want to have. We even get stuff where people are just like, get angry at you about things that they consider like, an accessibility issue that I don't really agree is an accessibility issue. And now, like, I have to like, debate that with you and risk like, someone screenshotting me saying something that's. And saying these people don't care about this or that or, or whatever. Kind of like the current thing is if we don't add a banner to the website or whatever, like someone opens a PR to, uh, add something and we, and I just like, want to keep that stuff separate, you know, Now I have to like, acknowledge it and respond to it and risk getting attacked because of it. Whereas if things are closed by default, you actually have like, the freedom to ignore things the same way. Like I can with email. Like, that's not. You don't have that luxury with GitHub. It's, it's kind of scary.

Speaker B: What's stopping you from trying? This seems like a good experiment to run.

Speaker A: Mostly, uh, the effort to build, the tooling to do it probably pretty.

Speaker B: Seems small, I imagine.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's not too bad. Like, I have a prototype, you know, where you're just listening for like, GitHub web hooks and closing everything. But then you need to like, keep that in sync with your own database. So, you know, like your own internal status of whether an issue has actually been like, triaged or whether it's just closed because you don't want that stuff public. I don't think. Like, I talked to people at GitHub about this and they were like, what if we added like a triage state? And now it's like, well, eventually I need to like hit close on the triaged one. And it still tells someone that I, I saw it and looked at it. You know what I mean? Like, I, I don't want to signal to anyone that I ignored your thing in this active way. I just want it to be like, known that this is the, the default state. And if we see it and want to do something with it, we'll elevate it or escalate it, but otherwise it's just going to sit there, you know, just like when someone Sends me a tweet that I don't reply to. You know, there's no, like, don't reply button that I have to press that they get a notification about. Adam decided not to reply to your tweet. You know, it's. It's just, like, socially, uh, a bad dynamic. I don't know that's tangentially related to the. The holiday shutdown thing, but I felt. It feels like the holiday shutdown thing would be, like, an interesting way to experiment with that and see what happens. Because I agree there's a good chance that we would do that and be like, wow, this is better. Yeah, it sounds like in general, that's a topic we've been thinking, uh, about a lot too. Is just, like, when there's work that you don't want to do at a company, like, it's tempting to, like, try and figure out how to hire someone to do that work. What I'm trying to do a lot more lately is figure out how can we just make it so that work doesn't even exist, you know, so no one has to do it. Support is an interesting example of that. You know, we get a lot of support questions around, like, custom licensing questions for Tailwind ui. Like, I know your license says you can't do this, but I want to build this site that's different in this way. Can I do this or what? If you guys build an API that lets me check if anyone who signs up for my app also has, like, a Tailwind UI license, then can I give them access to Tailwind UI templates from within my product? These are things that we get every single week, and they take up a lot of time because we have to try and understand these six paragraphs that this person wrote about. Okay, what is this app? Like, can I say yes to this, or am I, like, glossing over some important thing here that actually does make this, like, a conflict of interest with our product? And I should say no. And that's still something I don't have an answer for. Like, how do. How do I just, like, come up with some saved reply that's like, hey, if you have to write this many paragraphs to explain your thing, the answer is just no, unfortunately.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, I mean, it's feeling like you want different ingresses or different ways for people to submit things to you where you have more control on the open source stuff, but also the other business y things where it's like, oh, yeah, I'm Sorry, there's a 300 character limit for this contact us form.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's true.

Speaker B: Sorry, be brief.

Speaker A: That's actually a good idea. Something like that honestly isn't bad at all. And this is why so many like services, there are support channels. You have to like go through a nine screens before you finally get to the point where they'll even let you send an email. You know what, what do you need help with? Okay, here's like five articles that we think might answer this question. And as a customer that's really frustrating because like you just know that the answer isn't there. But maybe it is there for a lot of people. But I understand why you would do it as a business because it's just uh, you get overwhelmed with stuff that you've already basically provided an answer for. So I mean that's something we were talking about yesterday is trying to figure out how to stop more of those like support requests from actually getting in by just like answering them up front. Uh, better. So we're going to add like an FAQ section to the license. I think that basically restates a lot of things that are already in the license, but just in a different way.

Speaker B: Totally. Yep, I've done that.

Speaker A: Support stuff is, is definitely the thing that I dislike the most. So I'm glad that we have like Jonathan who kind of owns that side of things here now we get like questions a lot too, like TOW and UI the license. We allow people to use it for open source stuff just because we try really hard to be permissive and let like if you're running an open source project with documentation, you want to use one of our documentation templates for your open source documentation, we'll let you do it. Even though like that's a risk to us because someone can fork it and now they don't have to pay for whatever. But we won't let you like make a template and sell it. You know, uh, like take our template, convert it to a docusaurus theme and then and sell it. And we get emails quite often from people saying, well, I'm allowed to use it for open source stuff and people can get it that way, so how come I can't sell a theme with it? And it's just like, uh, dude, you're just being a dick. Because like the answer to this isn't isn't me saying, okay, you know what, you're right, we should let people sell themes. It's like, uh, oh, well, I guess if people are going to be dicks, then we can't let people use it for open source. You know, we're trying to, like, be cool and chill here and recognize that odds of, like, our business being materially damaged by people forking, like, your modified version of this thing. Not, I mean, could be bad, you know, but we're willing to, like, take the chance on that, to, like, help our customers have a good experience. But if people want to, like, try and use that as a loophole to screw us over on other things, it's like, well, now you're poisoning the well for everyone, you know? So I don't know how we even got on this, but we get lots of that type of support stuff that we have to deal with, and that's the sort of thing that we can at least come up with FAQs for. That sort of puts our stance out there. So we're gonna. We're gonna do some of that stuff this week and probably make it. Probably invite people a little less to email us, you know, right now, like, the license. Not sure, like, if what you want to build is, like, in accordance with license, shoot us an email. We're, like, happy to look at your thing and help you out. And, like, that's how I felt at the time that I wrote that when we first released the product. But now I kind of feel like, okay, I want people to be able to email us if they need to email us, but maybe don't, like, invite them to do it. You know, let them find the email on the support page or whatever and. And reach out themselves. I had a tweet the other day that was, like, I didn't really get a lot of interesting responses. Um, but it was something like, what are some examples of things that you've outsourced in your business that most people hire for and don't realize that they could outsource?

Speaker B: We used to play with this more in the enterprise sales realm. I think, like, in the earliest days, if someone couldn't sign up with a credit card, I would just be like, no. It was like, no, we're focused on the product, and I don't want to do this thing. And so for a while, we were turning away larger customers who needed the whole enterprise sales thing. These days we do that stuff because now we can have someone do it. But I do continually flirt with going back to that in some regard, setting rules about what we'll do before we sign a contract or processes. We just don't engage in that sort of thing. I'm having trouble thinking of a thing where we're just like, oh, yeah, we refuse to do this thing. We Used to be more hardcore about that when we were more limited, but now it's like, oh, we can take advantage of these opportunities because we have the bandwidth.

Speaker A: One example that comes to mind for me, for you guys tell me if this is still true. But you work with an outside QA service, right?

Speaker B: That's true. Yep. Yeah, that's been good.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you feel like that's definitely smarter than, uh, hiring and managing a QA team?

Speaker B: I uh, would say so, yeah. I don't think we're super interested in running that kind of team. Mhm. So it's particularly nice to have someone else deal with that. And we've been happy with their work. So it's like, okay, this is great.

Speaker A: Does that spark any other.

Speaker B: We're going to do an experiment of uh, outsourcing basic tier 1 support stuff starting next year.

Speaker A: I know, like Derek had a company he was working with for doing support. It's the same sort of thing.

Speaker B: Same sort of thing, yeah. It's just people that just do this sort of deal. For SaaS apps, there definitely are support requests or things reported that are worth having a really technical person look at and deal with. And then there are other ones that are basic things, especially billing stuff. And I want us to like, try to drive those down to zero. Like I don't want to just be like, oh, well, we can outsource this, therefore it's fine if there's tons of these, but I think there will probably never be zero of those. And freeing up Dorothy to do more high impact stuff I think is going to be worth it. Even though it's like, I would just love if there were none of these. But since that's not feasible and I do want to free Dorothy up, I'm willing to. We're trying this experiment of seeing can we still give good support even on these sort of facility tickets.

Speaker A: What makes you feel like finding a service for that instead of like hiring people under Dorothy to build out a bigger support team is the right decision. Like what makes that appealing?

Speaker B: So like one nice thing is the fractionality of it. Like, I don't think there is full time work here. I think someone will mostly be kind of like twiddling their thumbs if they were doing tier one support. I guess we could hire a part time person, but there is an appeal to me of having most things in house so we can have the most control over quality. But yeah, like converting to a full time person or um, like an employee for this might be trickier.

Speaker A: The thing that appeals to me about that stuff and tell me if this resonates with you. And it feels like we can do more experiments with external services than we can with hires. Like if I want to try seeing if we can outsource something or even delegate something, hiring someone to try that out, like, that's not a great. That's scary to me. Maybe other companies don't, or other leaders don't have these concerns, but the idea of like offering someone a role, having them quit their job and then come here and then me decide, uh, you know what? Like it turns out we can't really like delegate this effectively. And um, I wanted to find out whether we could or not, but turns out we can. And sorry, uh, now you got to go find another job. Like, uh, that's like my worst nightmare. I don't ever want to put someone in that situation.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. That's definitely another advantage. I would agree with that.

Speaker A: Yeah, we were like on the fence about hiring for like an operations type of role here that I still can't decide if we should do or not. Like someone who could kind of handle a, uh, lot more of the customer support stuff. Someone who could sort of be responsible for paying attention to like our like tax due dates and stuff like that. Like a lot of stuff that's like second order priority stuff for us that we end up like procrastinating on, being behind on because we're trying to deal with the product, that's really important. I wish it was like the most important thing for someone, you know, so that that stuff really got paid attention to. Like I'm like two months behind on my corporate taxes right now because I just have been. It's just like. I'll get to that. I'll get to that. Yeah, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. Because I just got so much stuff going on.

Speaker B: I've been keeping a list. I started working with this executive, uh, coach that I like and she was encouraging me. She runs a few businesses of her own and she's a pretty extreme delegator. And so she encouraged me to start keeping a list of the things I'm doing and in particular the things that I'm doing that I don't really like. And so I just have a this sucks list that I'm just adding things to over time. And my goal is to peel all those things off my plate and just get these to other people. Uh, because I think it's easy to sort of thoughtlessly do stuff because you've always done it or because you just sort of implicitly assume like, oh, the fastest thing to do here is just for me to do this, or like, oh, it'd be too hard to outsource this or something and just not really examine the choices you're making around how you're spending your time. I think this is a nice thing to kind of stare at. Wow. In December I did like these eight things and like, I hated the. I hate these eight things. Like, which of these can I like get someone else to do?

Speaker A: Yeah. For us, like another example of like a task that someone in this operations might role might do is we had our team retreat, so organizing that, but that only happens like once a year. So it's not like an ongoing thing. But something I've been thinking lately is, is there ways to just like get this sort of help, uh, and a more like project specific basis or even like just trying to remove myself from things without actually needing to like hire anyone or even bring on any other services. Like, I had this experience this week where my accountant emailed me, hey, I need these T3 dividend slips from you for your taxes. Can you get those? Like, you know, I talked to Steve because me and Steve had the same accountant and he was able to just call the bank and they like sent him over to him. And I'm like, oh my God, I don't want to fucking call the bank and be on the phone with the bank and try and explain all this stuff. So I just like emailed someone at the bank who has helped me with other stuff that's not even business related. Just on the off chance, can you by any chance get these documents and just email these to me? And also going forward, can my accountant just like email you directly for these things? And they're like, sent them over and they're like, yep, no problem. So it's like, boom. I've like now made this direct connection between two people and removed myself from that. And that didn't require bringing on an assistant or hiring anyone. It's just almost just like demanding more from the, the, the services that you already work with. So I want to try doing the same thing for like our taxes. Like I'm going to have a talk with our accountant and be like, listen, like, I don't want to be the person who emails you and says, hey, uh, our year end, oh was last week. Could we get started on like putting together our corporate like tax return. I want you to email me and say, hey, your year end was this time I need these things from you or get them from the bank directly or, or whatever. And will that cost us more money? I don't care, like just how, how can I just make this a, uh, recurring to do that's like in your to do list instead of mine. To trust that that's actually going to happen.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Another thing was like, I like sending like merch to people, you know, like swag, but I get behind on it. And also the stuff that we like to send, we get printed locally because we can do like more custom placement of things on the garments and stuff that you can't do with like on demand stuff. This has been like a thing that my wife has just like shipped these things out to people and it's like pain in the ass for her because we were like young kids and whatever. It's annoying. And then we have to like get more stuff printed. So I just put out a tweet the other day and it's like someone introduced me to someone who runs a company that like stores inventory in the US In a warehouse where I can basically like send them an email with a person's name, address, insurance size, and they will put package it all up and send it out. And I got like responses from like four companies that specialize in this stuff and that doesn't involve hiring anyone. That doesn't even involve like, uh, originally in my head I was thinking, can we hire like one operations person that can just sort of like do the support, pay attention to the tax stuff, ship out merch to people, organize the team retreat. But now I'm starting to think if I can just like find the company that'll like store our merch and maybe they just tell us when like inventory is low and bill us to print more stuff. Hopefully, like, worst case scenario, we like have to like make the order from one company and tell them to ship it to that inventory company. But perfect world, like it all is handled by them. Um, same for the team retreat. You know, like I did it last time, but if we had an operations person, they could sort of do that. But then it occurred to me, 100% guaranteed, there is someone I could find on Twitter who's crafted a role for themselves in this niche of organizing team retreats for small companies. I can probably pay that person $10,000 to organize everything, pick all the places for us to go, make all the dinner reservations, figure out all the transportation, and just it's a one time price package thing that we just pay for when we need it. And that person's probably going to do it better than anyone that we would hire who is just doing it alongside customer support and a bunch of other stuff. So I don't know, I've really got my head in that space lately and just like trying to like figure out like what are the other things where I can like pay for these on a one off basis and solve them and not have to like make any more commitments or take on any more ongoing responsibility.

Speaker B: I think that pattern is really good. I think you're so close to what I think is the ideal, which is that you still have an operations person or uh, assistant or something and that person is owning the process of doing those things. Like you deciding to outsource the team planning to an expert is still a project, right? That's not done yet. There's still like interview people, review them, make a choice, get them paid, get them the information they need, give feedback on their proposals. There's still a whole thing there. It's easier than doing yourself for sure. I think you still want a person in the loop that I agree, but

Speaker A: I think we already have that person. Like Jonathan is like basically like our COO effectively and he's mostly doing product work and staying on top of all that stuff. But like anything operations is also like under his area of responsibility. He doesn't have to do any of it, but he has to like ensure that it's getting done, you know, and he's a partner at the company and I think for a lot of this stuff you kind of do want like financial stuff. I don't want to just. There's no way I can hire someone to be like responsible for making sure like taxes get paid properly and not still sort of in my head be like a little bit nervous that I need to like check on that stuff and make sure that it's actually happening, that it actually makes sense. Because like that's my business is money. It's like not their money. So they're just not going to treat it the same way that I treat it. So if someone who's a partner in the business is doing that stuff, I feel like they're incentivized to like really make sure that it's right, you know, um, but still trying to delegate as much of the gritty specific tasks ideally, honestly, just like service providers that we work with things like we do work with a va, but we didn't hire a va, we subscribed to a VA service, you know what I mean? And again, I don't know that we would have taken the risk on bringing on a Va because I just, if it didn't work, I would just feel like guilty about not doing enough upfront to validate that it was going to work before bringing them on and then having to let them go. But through a service it's like, well, okay, I can just pay you X per month and we can try this out. And if it doesn't work, like, you're still going to pay that person and find like another client for them to work for. So something that's been on my mind a lot lately is, and it's kind of related to some of these other topics that we've got in our document here, but just like basically strategies for staying small, if that makes sense. Yeah. And also strategies for moving fast while your company sort of gets bigger and your obligations grow and there's more clogging the arteries of the machine.

Speaker B: Totally. Let's talk about that, actually. So I'm feeling like we have taken a huge step forward, uh, in how we're managing work at Tuple. And I would say this probably started with promoting Steven to coo, which was just totally, uh, a great call. And he really helped us get serious about doing shapeup. And also just clarifying across the company, what are people doing, what should they be doing, when should that work be done? Just that simple of a Can, uh, we answer these questions and can the people doing the work answer these questions? But the answer six months ago was absolutely not. I view this as totally as a management failure, but I think I basically was kind of operating still in the. We're all hanging out in the bedroom. I don't really need to think about how information flows across the team. We don't need any meetings, we don't really need a tracking system. Uh, it was just way too chaotic and it was a thing that did not work as we kept adding people. So it's like there's more and more people and now we're doing, there's more and more wheel spinning. For instance, I found out about a project or an effort that had been going on and it basically had taken, I think something like six weeks of developer time. And I was like, I kind of barely care about this thing, but I just didn't really realize it was happening. And I didn't have a sync up with anybody who was in charge of it. And I didn't know the status of it and it was just like the effort wasn't wasted, but it was like I would definitely have spent that effort elsewhere. There are much better, much higher impact places to go. So Steven has been adding a lot of rigor to our process and we started to really do shape up for real. And we're having our first cycle in January, but to sort of like close out the year. We actually came up with it like, okay, what are the projects we want people on? When do we want to ship them? And the answer was mostly like, right before we go away for holiday break, let's try to hit these deadlines with these projects and let's start using linear for real. Have it actually reflect the state of projects and have due dates in there and have team leads and things like that. Uh, so we have a view of how everything's going and I feel like our shipping speed pretty much like just like kind of doubled just with that like effort right there.

Speaker A: That's awesome. Yeah, I don't really have a lot of questions because I just feel like that's a good idea. Yeah, I'm glad that we do the same sort of thing.

Speaker B: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I had you in my head as we were starting to do this and like I. You're given some reasons for why you like it and the advantages of it. And I was like, okay, ah, we're seeing the dividends immediately.

Speaker A: You definitely have to just make decisions about what you want to do and decisions about how much you're willing to invest in those things, which is sort of its deadline, sort of driven work. Then just like, yeah, work on them, commit to doing those things and take the deadline seriously is definitely the thing that is helpful for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, the deadline serious thing was like, it was interesting because we picked a couple projects and we're like, oh, we want these to ship in like early December. And the date came by and I looked in the project, I was like, oh, this isn't done. And I just went in discord. I was like, hey, we said we were doing it by this date. Can we ship this right now? And the answer was like, uh, not right now, but we can get out tomorrow. I was like, okay, great, let's do that. Let's treat these deadlines as serious and let's hit them.

Speaker A: It's a little tricky with long running projects. Even a full six week project is. And for us, like we kind of do like a loose six weeks now. We kind of do these two month cycles which basically we have like a January and February bunch of projects. March and April, you know, June and July, August, September or whatever. May and June, July and August. And we just like look at the year in those like six blocks, which is a little bit Easier for me than thinking of like six weeks plus two weeks. And they land on these random dates. It's just kind of like like, yes, December might end on a Tuesday. Like, who cares? Like we'll figure out where we're going to ship sort of near there. But just thinking about them as like these two months is. I think it's a lot easier for people to just look at like the calendar and the top of their computer and sort of know like, yeah, it's like January 28th, so we're sort of in the middle of the cycle. Oh, it's like February 17th. So uh, we better start shipping stuff soon. Like you just have a better mental model of like this that's working better for us anyways versus like the cycle ends on like February 13th. That dates like not burned in anyone's head. So like they don't have this like, just sense of where they are all the time. It's still very easy to fall into this trap of like getting to the last week before you want to ship something and it's just not where it needs to be or you think you're really far. But there's just like, still so much to do to actually deliver it that you end up just like having to cram a bunch of stuff in at the end. That kind of just happened to us. But something that has been helping, I think is, you know, we use basecamp and for the longest time we're using basecamp's like automatic check ins where every day we just ask, what did you work on today? What did you work on today? What did you work on today? What did you work on today? At the beginning of the week there was like, what are you going to work on this week? I think in theory those are good, but people kind of just stopped answering them and they'd maybe fill it out like once a week. Some people would go like a month without filling it out. And even like the partners weren't really setting a good example there. So I kind of revamped all that a couple of weeks ago and changed, uh, our automatic check ins. So now we have three automatic check ins per week. On Monday morning there's what are you planning to get done this week? Which I think is a lot different than what are you working on this week? And then on Wednesday afternoon we have like, how are your projects going this week? And then on Friday at the end of the day is like, what did you get done this week? And that's been working like really well because it's fewer check Ins so it's like there's less and they're all different. So like, if you skip Tuesday, well, you're gonna get the same question Wednesday. If you skip Wednesday, you're gonna get the same question Thursday. It's just like, it doesn't feel like you really like missed something. But since it's like a different question on each of these check in points, I think people feel more obligated to actually provide something. And there's just something so valuable about specifically answering the question, what are you planning to get done done this week that forces you to like, define something that can actually be considered complete. And it's so clarifying, even just as an exercise for me. Like, I find it valuable to, you know, get input into what other people are planning to do. But it's almost more valuable for me answering it myself than it is for me to like, read from other people because it just forces me to like, make concrete decisions about. Okay, I have a week. I have this project that's going to take six weeks. I need to have something done at the end of the week. How can I break this project down in such a way that there's and pull something out of it that I can actually consider complete at the end of this week? And then the Wednesday check in has been a really good way to sort of help notice when people are like stuck on things or when people are sort of like not feeling super motivated because, like, they're not really sure what to do with something. It's just this sort of pressure to be able to say, like, you know, this is where, where I'm at with it. It's been leading to people like taking more initiative and like getting unstuck on things because like, they want to have something that, to answer there. So people are more proactive about like reaching out to other people on the team to be like, listen, like, I'm thrashing my wheels on this here. Like, what can we like, help me like make some progress here because, like, I don't want to have nothing to say on Wednesday because I was kind of procrastinating or whatever because I'm a little frustrated with, I'm working on or whatever. So that's been, that's been good. Yeah. Specifically framing things around like, what did you get done? What are you planning to get done versus what are you working on? Uh, this week I'm going to work on this feature. Like, okay, but like, what state is it going to be in at the end of the week?

Speaker B: I like that a lot.

Speaker A: You Know, it's very different. So that, that's been good.

Speaker B: You know what's gratifying to me is like this topic of kind of like, what is the operating system of your business? How do you run an organization? Well, has gotten more interesting to me over time. I feel like in the early days I maybe resisted some of this or thought like, oh, this is kind of the boring stuff you have to do when you hire people or something. And these days it feels interesting. Um, I'm enjoying figuring it out for Tuple and running experiments and seeing what we like and getting it dialed in and hearing your anecdote about the power of a slight shift in the question. Like this is. I feel like I'm, I'm you know, going up the abstraction stack again where

Speaker A: it's like, oh no, it is fun stuff when you can crack things that like really seem to unlock productivity. I had to talk with like Stephen the other day to help me with like some personal productivity stuff.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: Because I felt like I had.

Speaker B: This is our Stephen. My Stephen?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, your Stephen. Ben's Stephen. I felt like, uh, for the longest time I'd just been sort of like seeing my role at the company as being um. I'm here to make sure that, that everyone is able to like execute on what they're doing as smoothly as possible and answer questions and help make decisions and whatever. And that kind of led to me just like get into the office, sitting down at my desk and then just like letting the day happen to me. You know what I mean?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: That was fine in the sense that stuff was getting done. I'm helping people with stuff, I'm helping make decisions, I'm pushing things along or whatever. And in some ways I wanted to sort of believe that I could like call that success because it was like, I actually don't need to do anything per se, you know, for things to happen. Like all the work has been like delegated. Things are going to get done. Yeah, I'm gonna like help steer things and answer some questions and stuff. But I don't really have to do anything. I'm basically just available and that's like freedom, you know, I've like, I'm free now. I don't have to do the actual work or whatever. And it was just like super unsatisfying and uh, not fulfilling. What I kind of realized was that I want to do things and get things done. It's not true. To feel like committing to like doing some work is like this signal that you don't have Freedom or something. You know what I mean? Like, maybe it's. That's true in a sense, but actually, like, the trade off is like, now your life feels like it's worth something and like, you're doing things that are actually meaningful and you can actually, like, feel good at the end of the week because, like, you achieved some stuff. And, um, so I started being a lot more deliberate about almost, like, assigning myself projects at the company in a way. I, uh, like this. The tip Steven gave me was, make sure every day your to do list has something on it that you're excited about. Because I was also just using my to do list only for, like, not forgetting horrible chores that I knew I had to do, but I was never putting anything on there. That was, like, the fun thing that I'm looking forward to doing that day. And some days, like, there isn't necessarily an obvious thing to do that needs to get done at the company based on whatever priority. I had so many of those days where the day was just happening to me that, you know, things just, like, weren't fulfilling. But what I've learned is just, like, deliberately, like, picking anything and doing that is. Just makes you feel way better as a. As a person. So, like, yes, there's not, like, anything pressing that needs to get done that I specifically need to do this week. So let's just, like, think about some ideas for a minute and think, like, you know what I want. I'm going to redo this documentation page. Is it, like, crucial? Does it, like, need to get done? Would it be fine if I didn't do it? Yes. But, like, if I put that on my to do list as something to do tomorrow when I get it done, like, I am just going to feel really good and happy and I'm going to be proud of it and I'm going to want to share it and my life is going to be better by committing to and doing some work, you know, that was like, a really powerful realization for me, basically recognizing that, like, I like working more than not working, and I'm happier when I'm working than when I'm not working.

Speaker B: Awesome. Um, dude, knowing what you want is. It's everything.

Speaker A: But it's funny because, like, doing what you want, it's easy to think that means, like, waking up in the morning and being like, what do I feel like doing today? Um, I'm going to do this. Uh, it doesn't. For me anyways. It doesn't work that way. Like, I need to, like, pick something deliberately, you know, I can't just like let my mood guide something. I need to like set a goal and achieve that goal. And that makes me way happier than just like feeling like I can do anything.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I guess, I mean like knowing what fulfills you is the thing that's, that's a super.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Speaker B: Whatever that thing is, it doesn't, it doesn't really matter, but as long as you know what it is and that. Because then you can go after it. But that's. I think actually that first step is kind of hard and it shifts. I think it changes over time.

Speaker A: Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. So I've been like very deliberate these days about putting like at least one thing in my to do list every day.

Speaker B: That's so good.

Speaker A: A good, like something that's gonna feel like I really uh, achieved something, you know? Um, that was fun the whole time too.

Speaker B: By the way, Steven does this coaching as a thing. If you want to hire Stephen for some private coaching, like uh, yeah, Stephen,

Speaker A: he's got it figured out for sure.

Speaker B: Stephen Dolan. If you want to look him up, he's great. I was thinking as you're talking a couple things or a bunch of things, but one was you talked about useful outsourced additions to companies. We've outsourced a fair amount of coaching. So we get marketing coaching and sales coaching and exec coaching and all kinds of things.

Speaker A: And you work with different people. Like how many coaches do you pay every month?

Speaker B: There's at least three.

Speaker A: Crazy.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I have a question for you. Something I've been passively, like, I wouldn't say looking for, but just like being like open to noticing so I can take advantage of it if I see it is I'd really like to find someone who specializes in. I don't even know if I would call it executive coaching, but I guess it kind of is that. But for groups, not just for like an individual. Think of it like, here's my use case. We're partners at a company. None of us are like experienced partners at a company. Just because like we uh, have cool ideas for making open source software doesn't mean like we have good communication skills even, or it doesn't mean we're good at talking to each other about things that are bothering us or whatever. And like I've done like couples therapy with my wife before. Even when like they're. Things uh, are going fine, you know, and it's been really great because it just, you have this like person who's skilled at helping you like talk to each other and understand each other better. And I want something like that for like the partners at the company where like the three of us can get on a call and have someone who can sort of guide us through like having hard conversations in a healthy and productive way and being better partners, you know, And I, I don't know if there's anyone who like specializes in that sort of thing, especially at uh, like, I mean the other issue is like, we're not trying to like build an Uber type of company, you know, Like, I want to be like a rogue amoeba sized company. Um, so I don't know, like it might even just be that, uh, we just. Maybe it's. Maybe it's actually a therapist and not a coach. You know what I mean?

Speaker B: I've heard good things about the conscious leadership group.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: I think they do this.

Speaker A: Nathan Barry talked to me about them before.

Speaker B: I heard about them through the great CEO within which, um.

Speaker A: Ah, yes, Matt Machari.

Speaker B: Yes. Machari referenced these guys, these folks. Uh, could be good. I think it's a really useful thing, like facilitated discussions plus training for critical relationships I think is a, is a really good idea.

Speaker A: Yeah. If anyone knows, uh, of anything like that or has worked with anyone that does that sort of thing, tell me about it. Because I think that would be.

Speaker B: This feels like exec coaching where there's probably a lot of people that say they do this and the quality varies a ton because there's like just kind of hard to.

Speaker A: Yeah. I only want to hear from someone who pays someone to do this, uh, likes the person that they pay. I do not want to hear from you if you do this.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Um, yeah.

Speaker B: Cool. Uh, of these other things on our list, what, what looks most interesting to you to talk about?

Speaker A: Oh, uh, man, I am into the band versus company thing if we want to spend like half an hour on that because I do feel like it's related to this. But uh, it could be a bigger topic too.

Speaker B: Maybe we save that for future chat.

Speaker A: What do you want to talk about?

Speaker B: I want to talk about. Let's talk about these two. Um, so I'm doing a thing briefly. I have this not that great video chat background. I would describe it as kind of terrible. And I want to come on my calls with people and look awesome. So I hired this guy Kevin Shen that I found through Twitter to do a, uh, home studio redesign. By the way, if you go to his website, it is dreamstudiocourse.com.

Speaker A: yes. I don't know how Kevin Sheng got on My radar, I think I saw that he, uh, was helping Steph Smith do her.

Speaker B: I think that was probably the first place I saw him too. M. I have a realization about marketing pages now, which is that if you can show a before and after, that is the absolute best marketing possible.

Speaker A: Yes, I agree.

Speaker B: And I realized this. So I'm looking at these examples. He has all these examples of people he worked with where he took someone with the crappy zoom setup and now it looks amazing and it's like, they're so fun to look at. The difference is very visceral. It's obvious what worked and what didn't. Or, uh, why it's good. As I was thinking about this, I realized this is the heart of the refactoring UI tweets that I feel like.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, blew you up into, like

Speaker B: a monster on the Internet.

Speaker A: It's true. I didn't even really make that connection now until you just said that, but you're right.

Speaker B: Yeah. Like, before and afters are amazing. And so I think if there's anything you can do to show your product in a before and after context, that will just crush as a, as a marketing thing.

Speaker A: I feel like I heard Sean talk about this on the, uh, my First Million podcast. At one point he was talking about this exact thing. Like, before and after is like, that is like the most golden optimal. If there's a way to do a before and after for your product, like, that is what you should do. Uh, nothing is going to be as effective as that. So, yeah, how does it work? Like, are you doing his course or did you like, email him and was like, can I just pay you a bajillion dollars to fly here and just do this at my apartment or the in between?

Speaker B: So I'm getting one on one consulting from him and his team. They're doing all the design, making all the decisions, telling me the things to buy. I'm doing the setup. Like, I'm not going to actually have them fly here.

Speaker A: So how do they know, like, this is the bookcase you should buy? And here's the website. Like, are they going to give you that specific stuff or are they going to say, find something that looks like this at your local.

Speaker B: Okay, so I did a call with him and a, like, video production, like an equipment expert on the, like camera, lighting, whatever. Uh, and then also a stylist. And so between the three of them, they are like designing a studio set up for me. And like, I'm just going to click buy on all the things and you

Speaker A: like, measure your space and stuff so they can do like a little 3D probably totally design thing.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'm in the phase now where they say they have a mock up for me. They want to review of what the studio is going to look like. So we're going to.

Speaker A: That's pretty sick. I am going to message, uh, him myself because I'm about to move this office to the bigger room in the house and I need to do it over again.

Speaker B: I mean, your setup looks pretty legit. I don't think you have that.

Speaker A: I worked hard on even getting it to where it is. I think it's fine. But I, I do, I do still feel like I just want someone else to do it. So I don't have this, like, could it have been better? Like, uh, did I screw up? Like, no. I'm just going to like, convince myself that this person knows exactly what they're doing and whatever they did is the right thing to do. You know, like, there's a lot of value and just like, we find this, like, with the designing stuff for the company too. Like, me and Steve, when we're designing stuff together, it's so easy to just like, get in the weeds and overanalyze things where we just like, James, can you just like, design this? And then like, we don't like, second guess any opinions that he had because it just like came from outside, you know, so there's value in just getting someone else to do it. Just so, uh, you don't second guess things as much, honestly.

Speaker B: Yeah. I have two thoughts on this thing. So I think this is actually a good example of it'd, uh, be good for me to go one level higher. So right now this project is stalled because they like, send me an email, be like, hey, we have a thing we want to review with you. Can you come over here and pick a time? And I just haven't gotten to that email yet and I know it's in my inbox and it's like, this project is not marching as fast as it could. If somebody else had that responsibility of has access to my calendar, can book this thing, can set it up. So I wish I had a person like, um, an assistant or someone in the loop. And it was just like, by default you are responding to these things and making sure these projects are moving forward. I want my studio redone. Run this project, please. That'd be great. So I have outsourced this thing, but it is still actually on my plate. Like, I'm still on the blocker for it. Right now. And it'd be great if I were not a blocker. And along those same lines, I also almost wish I had gone for the on site thing where they like fly out to you and like set it all up.

Speaker A: Do they actually do that? Yeah, like, is that like you just email them and talk to them and they'll do that? Because like, that's not listed on the site.

Speaker B: It is actually the very bottom, the ultimate package. On site consulting.

Speaker A: Ultimate package. Very, very, very, very bottom. Or

Speaker B: uh, not quite.

Speaker A: Let's see.

Speaker B: Search for on site.

Speaker A: One word on site. I do not see the words on site on dreamstudiocourse.com go, uh, to the consulting page.

Speaker B: Consulting the header and then search on site. It just says contact sales, basically.

Speaker A: Sure, yeah. I mean, what I would like to do that I think would be fun and obviously, uh, I don't know, the way I would want to do it is like pitch them on. I have like 150,000 Twitter followers. Like, come here, let's set it up, let's record the whole thing and like turn it into content. And obviously I'll just pay you like your full rate for everything anyways. But it would be like, you'll get more value out of doing it for me than you would for like a lot of other people, let's put it that way. You know what I mean?

Speaker B: There's a close to 0% chance they would not say yes to that.

Speaker A: Yeah, that'd be pretty fun. I think the hard thing is like, how do you make sure you can get all the things that you need if they have to be shipped here? You probably still need to do some online pre planning calls to figure out the design and order things so that they don't have to come here for three weeks and wait for out of random, out of stock lighting stand to get delivered to my house or whatever.

Speaker B: But it's funny, you and I were talking before the call, so I think this is probably an amazing business. And you and I had talked about this like maybe a year ago or some, some amount of time ago, suggesting that somebody should do this. And I'm not going to say that we like caused Kevin to do this, but I'm going to take like a little bit of credit anyway.

Speaker A: I could totally see there eventually being a point where you can like buy your studio gear pack from his website through affiliate links or whatever. You know, like, here's, here's like the hobby pack where you get like this lighting stand and like, and it's all curated. And here's the pro one where you get the hair light and your whatever.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah. And then I think there are companies who would want to sign up for this package for all their employees or at least all their executives. Right.

Speaker A: Or like salespeople. Anyone that does like remote sales.

Speaker B: Yep. Just click here to set up your consultation because we're going to have somebody make your setup look awesome as part of onboarding. Because we're.

Speaker A: We. We spend five grand for every person that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah.

Speaker A: You know, starts here to make sure they look pro as hell on every client call that they do.

Speaker B: Totally.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: It's legit. I mean, like, I definitely get on calls with people and I judge them based on their setup. For sure.

Speaker A: Yeah. Mhm.

Speaker B: So like, it has an impact.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think there's a lot of potential for this to. I'm surprised that this is like, the only person I've been able to found that like, does this in such a clearly positioned way. Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. Marketing's hard, right. There's probably a lot of people doing it, but like, they just haven't been able to reach you. Yeah, they haven't figured out how to do that.

Speaker A: That's cool though. I'm excited to see the, uh, before and after m. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker B: I get to do some before pics.

Speaker A: Just do it shirtless. Pushing out your gut too, right?

Speaker B: Exactly. Terrible lighting, bad haircut.

Speaker A: Don't shave. Yeah. Or shave half your face or something.

Speaker B: I'll try to look my worst. All right. And then the other thing, uh, is I'm off Twitter right now.

Speaker A: You're off off Twitter? And what, what do you mean by off Twitter? Like, you have no Twitter account?

Speaker B: I, uh, know I have a Twitter account, but I sent Stephen my password and asked him to change it on me and he did.

Speaker A: Okay, so you did the James Clear

Speaker B: move is, uh, that what he does,

Speaker A: his assistant only gives him his password once a week and then changes it for the rest of the time?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm liking it. Overall, it's a little annoying to not be able to respond to tweets that people say to Tuple or to me because people would just be like, ook, uh, I wish you would xyz. And like, I want to respond to that, but the inability to compulsively check Twitter has been great. That's been awesome.

Speaker A: How do you feel about, like, my anxiety around that is just like, not being in the loop anymore, you know?

Speaker B: So I get. I set up a digest through Mailbrew to send me like, the top tweets from people that I follow once a day. So I get an email at 5 o' clock and it's like, here are the things. And I like, kind of skim it pretty fast and then I just archive it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I did that for a while, but the habit didn't stick very well. I should try this. I hate Twitter and I'm deeply addicted to it at the same time. Probably one, because I'm addicted to it. Uh, two, because it feels like it just brings up like the worst of people. It's. It's just like this arena of toxicity and people trying to like, the concept of a quote tweet perfectly captures like the worst of Twitter as a feature, you know what I mean? All it is is just like a big feed of like, temptations to get into arguments with people about things, you know, and it takes like, so much discipline not to do that. But at the same time, like, it's like the best place for me to notice when like, some cool new release on some tool that we use came out or, you know, for me to ask a question about. About something that the scale of like, my Twitter audience, I can basically get an answer to, like anything within five minutes, you know, which is, uh, is really cool. I'm looking through Twitter right now. I'm trying to think, like, what. What would I actually, like, miss here? And I think, like, I'm having a hard time like, seeing anything that I would actually miss. So maybe it's purely, purely addiction. I, like, I. My Twitter feed is so curated with like muted words and stuff like that to like, filter out. I had to have like, the word Twitter muted for two weeks, like right when Elon took over, because it was just like, you know, Twitter was the, the main character on Twitter. It's just like, um, too much. We've like, leveraged Twitter to grow, like, our business so much that I, like, I'm a little afraid of like, just cutting it off.

Speaker B: Yeah, me too. There are good parts of it. I think I could use like a mostly, uh, like write only interface. Like, if I could like, respond to mess. Like, if I could. If I could tweet stuff out and respond to mentions, I think that would be useful to me.

Speaker A: Yeah, you can kind of do that if you use like tweetdeck by just like creating columns that only show you, like, basically here's like my mentions and my own time, my own profile or something, you know, you could do something like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I just, for me, I'm just. It's just like so addicting that it, like, I Think if I have anything other than cold turkey, I'm not sure I can, like, really do it. At least not right now. Yeah, I need to, like, I guess

Speaker A: I just fear if I get, like, disconnected from it, that my Twitter activity will turn into, like, Seth Godin's Twitter, which is just, like, super impersonal, not authentic, just, like, automated. Here's my blog post.

Speaker B: Um, I know, Yeah, I agree.

Speaker A: Just lose it, you know, it's true. The magic.

Speaker B: I noticed this thing. I noticed this pattern, uh, of thought I was having, which was I would think of something, oh, that's interesting. And then I would immediately start, like, formulating a tweet about it. And, like, I kept getting dragged away from the things I was thinking about into, like, how do I make this a thing that's going to get me, like, a lot of likes and retweets and, like, show people how smart I am.

Speaker A: Unhealthy.

Speaker B: And it was just like, I don't think I like that this default, uh,

Speaker A: kind of related to this. I tweeted something, like, months ago asking, um, who are some examples of, like, people or groups or something who. You mostly don't hear from them, but, like, when they have something to say, everybody listens, you know, Because I basically wanted evidence that, like, I could ignore Twitter and not use it at all and not be, like, every couple of days trying to put something out there that keeps me top of mind, but not, like, lose my sort of influence or not lose, like, my audience. You know what I mean? And there were some good, uh, replies to that that actually made me feel confident that you can do it. Like, one example that stood out was, like, Ramstein, the band from Germany. Like, no one knows what they're doing, but then, like, they release a new video and it's like, the thing, you know, like, no one forgot, you know, it's like everyone was waiting. Or like, the new Tool album comes out after 14 years and everyone wants to hear it. They didn't have to put out a new single every six months for people to not forget about them, you know, so you probably, you have to hit, like, a certain, uh, threshold before, like, you've achieved that sort of, like, permanence of mind share. I do think there's a lot of evidence out there that you don't have to be on, like, the sort of engagement treadmill for your message to still be, like, heard when you finally have something to say.

Speaker B: I think that's right. I think especially if the impression or the reputation you have in people's Heads is that you make awesome stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh, it's been three weeks or three months, like, whatever. Like, I know if Adam is like saying, I just made a new thing, you should check it out. It's gonna be great.

Speaker A: Like, yeah, like Panic releases some new software like seven years after the last thing that they did. You know, people are, are gonna care. So. Yeah, I mean, something I've been like, talking about with people. I made this note on our little thing here before I knew what your topic really was. But everyone's like doing this, like Twitter. Not everyone. Like some microscopic amount of loud people are on there, like Twitter exodus and trying to find like some other place to go like Mastodon or whatever. And in my head like, I, I do not think I would want to go to another Twitter like platform. I think if like Twitter was just going to become irrelevant for whatever reason, the obvious place for me is YouTube, which is like not like Twitter at all, but a much better place for me to do the same stuff. It would mean that anything I want to post had like a way higher barrier to posting, which I think is good because it's gonna like make me do less of it and it's all gonna be high quality. I can still like make great content about like here's like this new feature that I was working on in Tailwind today. Or I can do a live stream to like engage with people or whatever. You don't have like a timeline of to go through. You just pay attention to the people who are replying to your content. You know what I mean? Like, it's a totally different thing. It's video. It's not like tweets or whatever. But I think if you zoom out and stop trying to think like, oh, how can I port Twitter to like another website? What is the thing I'm trying to do with Twitter? Like, is there a better way to do that that's still like social? And I think to me YouTube is much is the obvious choice for me. I think if you told me today if uh, I had no Twitter account and no YouTube account and I was only allowed to pick one and try and build like a following, I would pick YouTube 100%. I wouldn't even consider Twitter. Yeah, I think so.

Speaker B: Uh, even for like, uh, building a

Speaker A: developer focused business, I think so. The only reason I even know who you are is because of videos that you made, you know, interesting. It wasn't like gym M tutorials and you're like TDD videos and conference talks and you know, like, if I look at, like, the first, like, 15 people I followed on Twitter, like, most of them are people who I followed on Twitter after, like, getting into them through other content, like Jeffrey Way or you or. And look at, like, the power of YouTube compared to, like, look at, like, MKBHD on YouTube is, like, influence there. You know what I mean? Or like, Mr. Beast or someone creating, like, educational content. It seems like a much smarter investment than Twitter to me because YouTube's also, like, the world's second biggest search engine, you know.

Speaker B: That's interesting.

Speaker A: So,

Speaker B: yeah, I can replace my. How do I tweet this thing to how do I make a great video? And what will the thumbnail be whenever I have a thought?

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And that's going to take you a long time to do. So you're only going to do it once in a while.

Speaker B: Um, right. Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker A: I think it's healthier, too. YouTube doesn't have this, like, built in, like, amplify your hatred of someone's, uh, content to the rest of the world mechanism. Yeah, I think, like, Twitter does.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think you. This is more of a problem for you than me.

Speaker A: I think it's a problem for anyone that reaches a certain threshold of Twitter followers.

Speaker B: Yeah, I just think you're over it and I'm not really.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Like, a funny point that I saw someone talk about on Twitter not too long ago is like, Twitter is, like, the only social media platform on the entire Internet where you can't moderate the comments to your content. If someone suggested being able to delete replies to Twitter threads, Twitter would, like, be like, this is Orwellian bullshit. But like, Facebook lets you delete comments on your posts from other people. YouTube lets you delete comments. Blog posts let you delete comments. Every single other platform lets you, like, delete comments to your own content. You, like, control it, you know, But Twitter's the only one where you can't, which I think is Twitter. In a lot of ways. Twitter is like, unique kind of ingredient that makes it as. Makes it what it is. But is what it is good? I don't know. I said to someone the other day that I kind of feel like the fact that the software development community sort of exists on Twitter is like a bug of the software development community. It just happens to be that that's where everyone decided to get together on things. But every other community I've been a part of online has always been like, message boards and, like, in different areas that felt a lot that didn't have that, like, Twitter Element. I was talking, like, Ian Lansman about this the other day. He used to be, like, really big in, like, the Joel on software forums back in, like, the mid-2000s or whatever. Right. And I know he's, like, super nostalgic for those times. Like, that kind of is Twitter now, too. But, like, there's evidence here that those same groups of people can have healthy conversations and, like, a message board where it's not, like, connected to the greater world. You know what I mean? It's more of just, like, this, like, private community. It's public, but it's private in the same way. Like, only people who want to be there are there. Whereas, like, every conversation you have on Twitter, everyone who hates what you're talking about is. Is there too. They're not going to create an account on the forum, you know, to, like. I don't know. I don't see why, like, there couldn't be programming communities that existed elsewhere that were better. I think that just happened on Twitter, like, in this sort of Darwinistic, you know, evolution, roll of the dice way. But I don't think that Twitter is, like, uniquely the right place for conversations about software development to happen. It's just like, where they landed when they fell out of the sky, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So,

Speaker B: yeah, I buy it. You're going to step back, you do something, you're going to walk this talk.

Speaker A: Let's be real here.

Speaker B: You've been reading Twitter this whole time, haven't you?

Speaker A: I'm going to. I'm going to tweet something in the

Speaker B: next five minutes, you son of a bitch.

Speaker A: Uh, maybe I should just do it as, like. As an experiment to.

Speaker B: I think you should. I think you should try it. Like, just do that.

Speaker A: Like, just, like, let's find out what happens.

Speaker B: You know what I mean? Like, see what you validate.

Speaker A: Validate my fears or prove them wrong.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. What things do you miss? What things actually do suck? Like, what would you want to restore? Like, just, uh, like, my. My goal was to try it for a month. I started. I've been doing it for all of December. Um, or, like, started very early December. So I'm gonna do it at least through the new year. Uh, but maybe give it a shot, something like that. See what you think.

Speaker A: Yeah, maybe I will. Maybe I will. Cool, man.

Speaker B: I have two plugs I want to do.

Speaker A: Seems like a pod. Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. Two quick plugs before we go. Uh, one is we're doing another cohort of the Code Quality Challenge, which, for those who don't know, is A month long challenge. We send you a little code task every weekday. Like go through your repo and like delete to do comments because you're never going to do those anyway. Let's be honest. Or give your read me a once over and see how the setup stacks look. Can you actually spin up this thing? We do it as a group. We have a forum. People report their results. Uh, it's good. It's a good little course. People like it. Uh, we're starting January 3rd. Um, I think it is probably second, but you can still get in when you hear this POD and sign up. That's cool. And then also we're still looking for a CTO of Tuple, which is a bigger topic, which I guess we haven't talked about here. Maybe Spencer is stepping down to kind of tend his garden and move to an individual contributor role. And so we're looking for a new CTO to help us out. And so if you know somebody or could share our job description, that would be awesome.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's it. And if you want the job, Adam, you just let me know.

Speaker A: I do not.

Speaker B: Fair enough. Don't let that dissuade you from applying.

Speaker A: I'm good. I've got a good thing going. Yeah, I do think it would be a fun job for someone who really wants to be like a real programmer, you know, or cares about real programming. That's what I see Tuple as in my head. It's like, it's very real programming, not like website forms and post requests and delete requests type of programming, which is what I do. And I don't consider it to be awfully.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's real. There's pointers and stuff buffers. It's. It's definitely real.

Speaker A: Like you want someone who has John Carmack poster on their wall.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, ideally.

Speaker A: Or John himself.

Speaker B: And he likes the stuff that we were talking about today about like how do you run a team really well. What are the rituals you need in place to build really good software? Like how often do people have to like talk synchronously versus not? And what do you prompt people with and their questions and wants to sort of do that really well for us.

Speaker A: Yeah. Good luck with that. Hopefully you find someone.

Speaker B: Thanks. Yeah, me too. I agree. All right, that's pod. Good talking to you.

Speaker A: All right. Okay, bye.