Networks & Audiences

Welcome back everybody! Another episode of Bootstrapped Web. It's Friday, August 9th. My brother's family just left after being here for a few days. I've had a weird work week, mostly not working. We're back at it. Super hot over here, super humid. But yeah, we're going to get through it. So what does your brother have kids and it was like the whole family getting together? It was the whole fam, so my brother and his wife

and their three kids. Full house. And then we saw a great opportunity, so my dad came up from Florida. So we had a whole thing. It was awesome. It was the city, pool, beach, restaurants, fun stuff, color factory, whole deal. Very cool. Actually last couple days ago, we went wine tasting with some extended family who came into town. So yeah, nothing like hanging out with the fam and getting drunk for doing some day drinking. Good time. Yes. So what

are we talking about today? What do we got? Well, we got to talk about Ripple because I've seen you active on that front and I want to hear how things are going. Yeah. I mean, actually on that note, I mean, why don't we just kick it off off the top? Hey, if you are a fan of Bootstrapped Web, you can join the free community for Bootstrapped Web listeners on ripple.fm. So the link is in the show notes. Jordan's phone is blown up. Just my daughter.

Can't do it. Hang it up on your daughter. Love it. Yeah. So I was actually, I just went on to Ripple just now and I see so far we have 54 of our listeners on ripple and yeah, like just this morning I posted a message. It's like, hey, what should we talk about on Bootstrapped Web today? We've got a couple of responses. But it's really cool. So I think as of now, ripple is totally live and open. It's all free. Actually, yesterday I

moved it to the root domain. So you can just go to ripple.fm. I set up like a small marketing site for it. But the cool thing is that right on the homepage is like a podcast search box. So you just type in the name of any podcast that you're a fan of like like public podcast that you're a fan of. You can put in Bootstrapped Web. You can put in whatever like the acquired

podcast or Mixer G or anything, right? And then that leads to a sign up flow. And then you can just connect with people who are fans of the same podcasts that you're a fan of. You can like follow people. People can follow you. Sort of like a social network in that way. And so then so that's like one half of it is public podcasts with, you know, organic communities of listeners. And then there's the private podcast. So I have a private podcast.

And actually just in the last week, we have now like nine people have launched private podcasts on ripple.fm. And they've been posting episodes. And I've been listening to them. It's been really cool. So I mine has like 10 episodes, but you know, a couple episodes on the other ones too. I was just tuning into people like us talking about, you know, talking openly, I think even more openly than they would on a public podcast, you know,

talking about their work, talking about building products and stuff. And it's just been really cool. It's been a fun project to put out there and see it come to life. There's posts and conversations happening on the platform. People are following each other. And we, you know, Stratford Web has a little community going here now. So yeah, there you go. I don't know. It's cool. And I think it's at a point now where it's out there. I'm continuing

to hack on it. But I'm ready to kind of cool things down on my working on this project. I'm starting to look ahead to other projects to shift my focus too. But yeah, I like that it now exists and that people can join it. I want to see more activity happen on it. I want to do some things to try to get some more users and activity going on the platform. But yeah, I'm happy with the progress that I made on it. And like it's been about a

month, like pushing hard on this thing. And I think it's at a good point now. Yeah, it's pretty wild. When I, when I'm searching public podcasts, where is that feed coming from? Yeah, so Apple iTunes offers a free to use search API. So it hits the, well, I set it up so that, you know, so now we have about 300 public podcasts like catalog just in our own database of people favoriting podcasts, right? So when you search it, we initially

search our own database. Like if it's already on ripple, we'll, we'll show you, and we'll even show you how many other fans are on ripple. So, you know, if you search for like, I don't know, like startups for the rest of us, you'll see a bunch of people on the platform are fans of, of that already, right? Yeah. Give you a link and then you can join right from

there. And then if it's not, if it's not yet cataloged on our site, then then we hit the search API, the iTunes search API, and we pull in literally any public podcast. It's really cool. You can just pull in like the artwork from the podcast and yeah, that's what I was, I was just starting to search for, I don't know, something like group chat. If you ever listen to group chat, I like it. Right? These three guys that talk a little

mostly business. And as I started searching, I just saw, you know, effectively access to a feed of all podcasts. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. And then, and then I did put like, so there's like two tabs on the homepage. You've got the public search and then you can do the other tab, which is discover private podcasts. So people who have private podcasts, I give

them the option to make it discoverable or not. Right? Okay. I see that. And so, so, so these are like the, the podcasts on the platform that are, that are sort of like featured because they have the most episodes so far or the most downloads, actually, I should say. And so like if you're looking to, if you're looking for new like private podcast content and small private communities to join and meet some new people, like that's a cool little tab to,

to get it on. Yeah, that's what I'm looking at now. This is very cool. Congrats on the, on the progress, getting it out there. Yeah. Very cool. It's an interesting concept. What happens? Right? Let's say we're recording a podcast. What happens after this? Does something automatically, is like a notification center? Is it just part of the feed? So not for public podcasts, at least not yet. So, so the only integration with public podcast

is that you can find them and then you can favor it them. And then what that does is it, it adds it to your pro, so like Jordan, like you just signed up. So, so you have a public profile now on ripple, just like a Twitter profile and you can, and people can follow you, you can follow people. On your profile, it shows your list of favorite podcasts. And,

and so whatever you add to that will be on your list. The, a new thing that I'm working on now is the ability for hosts of public podcasts to like officially claim their podcasts. Right? So, you know, we've got a bunch of podcasts that, you know, there's a lot of popular podcasts where like their fans are, and so like the, the hosts should be able to go on and fill out a form and claim themselves is like, hey, I'm the official host of this

podcast. And I didn't really build this stuff yet, but they're going to be able to have like a badge on their, on their name to say like, this is the host, but also like giving them more abilities to manage, like maybe moderate the discussions around their podcast, maybe add more content to their podcast. Listing, you know, more direct access to their audience and the people who like their podcast, you know, so that's an interesting angle.

I thought about maybe we ripple could subscribe to the RSS feeds of public podcasts so that we could then like notify and drive engagement around episodes as they drop. So that's something that I'm thinking about doing. Yeah. So I'm sure. I'm sure. Right. Endless feature ideas. But I think it's interesting that it is a, I don't even know if I was going to call it like a contained bet, but there isn't that much of a bet element in terms of like, you know, I hope this blows up and becomes some

huge thing as a business. As a business. Yeah. Yeah. I have a couple of, I really don't know where it could go as a business. I have some potential ideas of where it could go. They all depend on this thing becoming like they all depend on the thing like having a large growing active user base. Right. So my first priority is really just to get users and activity and make it a quality like that's why I built it is I want it as a way to

network. Right. There. I have a couple of thoughts around maybe monetizing with the hosts of public podcasts. Like everyone should be able to claim their podcasts for free. But maybe some additional abilities for hosts. A few people have already asked for and one of the obvious things that I could do is make communities paid like the ability for podcasters, whether private or public to charge for access to their private community and

make it like a like a paid and VIP kind of experience. And we can charge for that. That would be one avenue to monetize. But I'm a little bit more interested in just growing

an active user base. And then there's more business models once the thing has an active user base, whether that's like sponsoring offering sponsorship revenue or like exposure like you want to grow your podcast, you can expose your podcast to other listeners of similar adjacent podcasts because we have data showing that like people who like the

acquired podcast also tend to like these other podcasts. And we can, you know, we're growing what I think is a pretty valuable database, frankly, of people who like specific podcasts, you know. I like it. Oh, yeah. Cool. I mean, we're going to see like where

it organically grows and what comes out of it. And at the end of the day, like I still sort of amazes me that something like this doesn't really exist or at least hasn't become big because you other than I literally don't know of another way other than ripple to go find my people who are interested in the same exact things that I'm into. Like I don't really know a good way to just go do that. I mean, for example, like Reddit communities,

but that's its own maybe Reddit, but that's just so it's just so random. And, you know, like, okay, like if I want to go chat with a bunch of people about the US presidential election right now, I'm not going to go do that on Twitter, you know, why you don't want like the chaos that goes with it. It is chaotic. I have. I know what any time I mentioned something on politics, something comes out of the world. I'm like, I had no response

other than the block you because what I was supposed to do with that. Yeah, exactly. And I don't want to annoy my followers on Twitter because they don't want to hear me talk my opinions on politics. That's right. That's right. And also like I'm frankly I'm not interested in getting back a bunch of random disagreements or whatever about

whatever views I might have, right? And I sometimes I have chats with friends in private, like not everyone, not all my friends are into, but if I can find the listeners of a few political podcasts and then just post my messages in those feeds. Like if you're a fan of, I don't know, like, like, hacks on tap, which is about, which is a couple

like political people talking. Like that's, that's an area where, you know, like any of these like political or like a popular political podcast, you know, I can do the same thing for like Metz Talk. I can, I can go find podcasts about sports or about the sports teams that I'm into. And then I could have those chats in those specific communities because I know that only those people are actually interested in chatting about that stuff. They,

they added that podcast to their favorites, you know, they listened to it. Yeah, very, very interesting. I just added a few political podcasts in Rip Plyce. Nice. Yeah. Let's do it. That goes. I want to actually take that idea even to a next level where it's like, maybe leveraging like categories of podcasts. Like if, if you like this podcast, then you're

probably a fan of this topic in general. So, you know, or, or even like, like I could post a message to only fans of Bootstrapped Web or only the fans of, I don't know, New York Times, the Dali or something like that. But it would be cool if I could post a message and like check off a box of like five different podcasts. Like if, if you're a fan of these five different podcasts, then you'll see this message that I'm about to post. If not,

then you just won't see it. Yeah. Yeah. It does feel, I am self conscious of what I post on Twitter when it comes to politics because they feel like it pollutes my, what I normally want to talk about or listen to or, or look and read on the business side. And I'm like, it's not that I worry about offending, but you're almost, you have to curtail your public, like personality and be self conscious about it because everything is very public and

it's one feed and it's amazing in some ways. I thought the move toward anonymizing likes. I thought that freed people up. I know there was some pushback initially, but I now like much more freely because I don't have a history of my likes that I need to think about in the future. Yeah. That was interesting. Hey, how you brought that up. That changed and impact me at all. I don't even think about that. But I do. Yeah. Yeah. Just, but the

nature of the situation, I just like whatever. Just just to hopefully influence the algorithm in some way. But it, I don't even look at the for you. Yeah. Anyway, it's like a soft follow. I use the for you almost exclusively now. So I like is like a soft follow because I'm, I'm signaling to the algorithm that I like it as much as I'm signaling to the I mostly use it just to tell friends like, Hey, I liked what you just tweeted there. Right.

Right. But the, but the thing with Twitter is, this is the nature of any big public social network is that I think over time, just the way that it influences our behavior and our cultures. Like that's why we see so much garbage on Twitter. People optimizing for the Twitter algorithms or optimizing for likes and all that stuff. And that I think maybe one of the things that that I've always wanted on Twitter for years, I've been thinking about this as a potential

feature for Twitter. And I think it, this is probably an influencing factor that led me to want to do ripple is that I always wanted a way to have like sub interests on Twitter. Like for me to say as a Twitter user, like, Hey, I'm, I'm interested in sports. I'm interested in politics. I'm interested in tech. I'm interested in startups. I generally tweet about those four things. And you can tune into my startups tweets and my tech tweets.

And you can tune out of my political tweets. Yes. And, you know, but I, but at least I can have the ability to like, tweet about those things. And, or, or when I post a tweet to say, like, Hey, this is a political opinion. Only show it to people who actually want to hear about my political opinions. You know, and in a way, and that, that's why I did ripple that. I think because it's like, we can use the podcasts ecosystem to do that. Like if

you were in these podcasts, then you were interested in those topics. Yeah. That's like that's the whole concept. Yeah. The course selection criteria is your interests. Things that you're willing to spend a lot of time listening to. I have a mixed view on on Twitter and people mixing their political beliefs with their economic beliefs with their business approach, all that stuff. Yeah. I have, I'm not good at remembering who I'm supposed to

be mad at. I've never, I've never been able to remember. I like, it's kind of a funny, weird thing, but I can't stay mad at anyone. Most of you, because I don't even remember them, so she mad at them. Yeah. But that has taken on a very strange tone because some, some people I had have admired on the business front before I knew anything about their politics. I now admire them a lot less and I have to almost keep it in mind. That's

pretty interesting. That's pretty interesting. Like Paul Graham, love your writing. Not into you as a person at all. That's interesting. That was an odd thing. Yeah. That's very much how I think about Elon Musk these days. I kind of hate everything that what he talks about in stands for, but I still like his products generally. Yeah. Well, I'm still on the Elon fan, but yeah. It is, you know, it is funny, like a little bit of a political

sidetrack here. Like I've gotten to know some of the, I have like more private like political chats with friends and you and I have talked a little bit, but like other people and it's really interesting how people have pretty, very, very far different political views or voting patterns than I do. But I'm still a huge fan of them as people and a lot of times they're

business. You know. Yeah. Well, it's also kind of fun to like after being a fan of a person and their business for years and then only then discovering like, oh, really that those are your politics. I never knew that about you and it's interesting to see it to hear like how far from me you are, but I'm still a fan of you. Yes. You, yes. You sometimes like will get disappointed in them almost. Oh, you're not on my team in

that way. And then you have to enforce it to check yourself on like, okay, so I have to be more accepting. That's why I think generally the more the closer you are to someone, the more you know them, the easier it is to accept these differences, which is like a very key element in general of being okay with people with different politics and views and arguments and all this other stuff. But online and the distance has made that very

difficult. I mean, I've always thought that it's pretty awesome that we get to be in an industry and a community where we're connected to so many people from so many different locations, right? Because if I'm hanging out with just people from here in the northeast of the United States, there's still some variety of political views here, but people I grew up with. But you know, most part, it's, I'm in blue team country over here, you know? Yes. Yes. But like, it's, yeah, it's kind of cool to mix

it up. And I mean, maybe just my personal positions on things, I'm very, I'm like literally in the center. I'm a, I'm a centrist, whatever you want to think of that. Yep. So the extremes of both sides really turn me off. And I think that that, I think that just personally makes me more empathetic to people who I, you know, probably you and me, we probably have very different voting history, you know? Sure. But like, I totally relate to a lot of what

the other side technically, you know, believes in you. I find myself drawn more and more there, not quite crossing the line, but you know, that's where I am these days. I hear you. Yeah, everyone gets, gets influenced in their voice. Anyway, I love it. Let's see what happens with Ripple. Let's see what conversations happen over the next week in our

podcast. And I will be very interested to see if things surprise you, right? If like, you know, some subgenre just finds it and all of a sudden starts to use it as a place to communicate. That's just distant from where we are. Yeah. Like I haven't done really any active marketing of it yet, other than just sharing it here and on my Twitter. So, partly that's because I want to like smooth out the bugs and stuff first. I think it'll

be interesting. Like what I did ship this week is what I hope can become some sort of like growth flywheels. The fact that like, so there's a few ideas there. One is we have this public podcast search. So every time somebody adds a podcast, it gets indexed on our site. Or this is like a programmatic SEO play. So people theoretically, if you're

searching for a popular podcast, maybe over time, like, creates a page. Yeah, it already has a, like we already have like hundreds of pages of podcasts on the site right now. So hopefully that like, I don't want to try to compete with the actual podcast themselves.

But like, if people are searching for communities, that can be an interesting thing. And then like one of the things I want to ship soon is like a leader board to show like the top 10 most popular podcasts on the ripple platform and then promote that out on Twitter and social media. And that can attract other fans of those top 10 podcasts, but maybe even the hosts. And then this is something that I'm playing with like I talked about how how a public

podcast host can claim their show. I haven't fully tested this out. But like the idea would be like in order to get verified as the host of your show, you have to promote ripple to your audience on air. Like you have to, it sounds like a crypto thing. Like no, go out and public and post this secret key. Well, like, if you, first of all, like for some people that I literally don't know who they are, like I have to authenticate that

it's really them. Yeah. But also, this is like a growth hack. Like if, so if you're the host of a show, you tell me like, Hey, I'm going to promote my ripple community on the next episode. Then I listened to that episode and I verified that yet, like you, you've promoted it. Then we give you like the host badge and make you the host on ripple. But like that, that's a way for you. And it's like a win-win because it's your promoting

your community and you're connecting with your fans, you know, for free. So that's another idea is like to get, to try to incentivize hosts to promote their communities on air to their listeners, to get them to just come into ripple for free, you know. Yeah. That sounds like the ideal. The ideal is if a podcast host uses ripple as the place to go have conversation instead of Twitter. Yeah. That feels like the ideal. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like

also, it's like that. And I hopefully by having the leaderboard, it also gives them more of an incentive because it's like, Hey, my people are actually already on ripple. You know, if you're the host of a podcast and you're in your podcast as 50 fans already on and already connected on on ripple around your podcast, like it really does sort of make sense for you as a host to hop into those comments and start to participate. That's, that's

the theory of this little social experiment. I don't know. And then there's like the public probably the public, sorry, the private podcast side where like hopefully private podcasters will, will invite their audiences. So for that side, I'm thinking maybe like creators who want to have, you know, or founders who just want to have like a private like journal feed or a mastermind group or something like that, you can promote that to your people

and have them subscribe, you know, cool. We'll see. I don't know. What do you got going on on your head? So this week, the biggest thing that I focused on was advertising. So I want to talk about the experience I've had with this company that we hired. And I also want to talk about outbound a little bit also. Yeah, we got some questions about that. One was in Ripple, one was on Twitter about outbound. So yeah, we could both talk about

that I think. Okay. Cool. Let's talk about ads first. And then we'll get into that. And I want to shout out Brian Shackman, who has been helping us shankman, excuse me, helping us on the app on at Supercellus. I want to talk about that service. So these are like two services that I recently hired, one on outbound, one on ads. So this week was was the focus was ads. So I feel like I learned a lot in how this is done these days with short

form video. So I just want to share that because I was generally impressed by their process. So I hired a company called new form new form.ai. And they create and manage the ads. So they manage meaning like on the platforms bidding, you know, demographics, all the stuff that goes into the actual ad management. And they also create the ads themselves. They're creating videos. They are. And so these are short form videos that are intended to feel user generated

and are run as ads. So this isn't working with influencers. One of the key differentiators of this company, what I liked about them is that their ad creators are employees. So in house, they have employees that create these videos themselves. So like what's a give us an example of what's a video? What was it look like? Okay. So so this is probably the most interesting part of the process that I came across. So we signed with them a few

weeks ago. But we said, Hey, we need some time to get this product out. We need to get into beta. We need to make sure the thing works. The side up flow works. And only then are we okay with pushing a lot more traffic with ads. So this week was was the onboarding week. We agreed on it maybe four weeks ago. But this week it actually happened. So first is a little bit of technical stuff in pixels, right? No, nobody deal. But then getting into

the process, we had a call. And the first thing is explaining the product, the value, the ICP, the problems. So effectively giving them fodder on what to talk about in the ad. What's the hook? What should we talk about in the script? What do people care about? Who are we? Who is this intended to go out to? So after all that, they basically said, Okay, thumbs up. Be right back. We'll send you scripts. Three hours later, I get back scripts. So what

happened was they gave me three scripts. I give a little bit of feedback and end up in four different scripts. So these are like 90 60 and 90 second. And the script is talking about the problems. And right so an example would be something like, Oh, don't you hate missing phone calls when you're out on the job? And every time it goes to voicemail, no one leaves a message and you know you're losing money every time I found a solution for that. I've

been using Rosie, which is so okay. So that would be like a normal script. And so, but like do they position themselves? I'm just like this normal person who, Hey, I just found this cool tool called Rosie. Yes. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And it's like, you know, true and exaggerate. It's like an advertisement. Basically, you know, when you see an ad, it's not like the person's like, it's sort of like a hex clad out of the goodness of my heart.

And I want to make a video about it. No, you can pay it. Like this is what it is. Yeah, so it's like, it's sort of like a testimonial video. So there are different approaches. There are different types of scripts aimed at different customers. So we ended up with four different scripts. And then they took four different like video styles. One would be like talking head, right? Like right into the camera. One is walking talk. So literally

on the sidewalk holding your phone and walking. Another one with a different thing. So then they took the four scripts and each style and made one of each. So then you have 16 videos. And all of a sudden we have our first batch of videos. And then it moves forward. So all this was like in the span of three days. It was like scripts approved videos approved. And now the ad management and the pixel gets done today. And by the end of today, it'll

be pushed out. Where are we pushing this out to like Facebook, like TikTok, like where these going out? So their advice was to hold off on TikTok and focus on meta, right? So Facebook and the rest. And their point of view was that TikTok is very hit or miss. It'll either blow up immediately or won't work at all. And generally it's not the first thing to do the first week, right? It's meta is easier to kind of launch and optimize

and figure out over time. I like the winning ads there. And then push those winners. Right. So right now we are experimenting with 16 variations. And what we'll soon find out is which script works best, which style works best, do more of those and then come out with like another, you know, 16 or whatever varieties and keep pushing

those out. Interesting. So it's all about video. So in terms of like, okay, if any of us are going to invest in paper, click advertising, like I did some experiments with clarity flow last year. And it was just kind of straightforward like Google ads. And they, we got some data, some, some results, but we're just paying for search results in the search engine. Like the, the, the go to thing here is like video is a more powerful play these days,

you think? I think the nature of it is different. So Google ad words are phenomenal, especially for SAS when it comes to bottom of the search. For like search intent. Yeah. Very high intent keywords. Like, you know, coach, coach management software. Like, yeah. But if you're like going for branding and exposure, that's right. There you're going out in generating demand as opposed to capturing it. So I think eventually we'll have Google ad. We don't

have it up yet, but we'll have it up there. And eventually we'll start to bid against competitors. But the experiment here is, can we go out and generate demand or, you know, generate interest? And I didn't think we would be jumping into this so quickly. One of the things that convinced me is I found a case study with one of our competitors put out by TikTok. And if that case study is to be believed, which I don't have any reason that it would

be falsified, there is more existing demand in the market than I expected. And so I said, you know what, if they're getting that many signs up, sign ups on TikTok alone through this type of a campaign, that means people are more open to this type of solution than I thought. Yeah. And so let's push it. Why? I mean, yes, sure, there are reasons to wait.

But I don't like those reasons as much as I like the potential for. I love the idea of like a team, like an agency just recording these videos for you, you know, and making them like and not fancy, not like, it doesn't sound like they're like high production values. Just like it's supposed to be just like a person walking down the street with a phone. Yes, they are, they're a mixture, they're medium production value. So they feel

authentic, but they still have little graphics that come up. And you know, the screen switches from the person talking to the website, like go to rosy, you know, hey rosy.com and then you'll see like the site scroll by. So there's like this in between where it is produced, but it's not super, super, super pilot. I mean, I'm just thinking about like from a bootstrap perspective, you know, I feel like rougher, the better with video advertising,

right? Like we, you know, we can spend all day and spend all the dollars in time we want on like these fancy explainer videos. And maybe you want to put something like that on your, on your site or like a demo video, but like what it comes to catching someone's attention in the feed on Facebook or something like that. Like people just want to connect with other people on a human, like real level, you know, right? You kind of don't want it

to feel too much like an ad. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so this is one approach. What you just mentioned has been the other thing that I've been focused on this week. I found a product called screen.studio. Oh, dude, I love it. I use it all the time now. I want to talk about it. What a great product. It is such a great product. It's so well done. I, all my recent videos of showing my work have been screen studio. You can go in deep as you

want to produce. If you can, you can impact every single little variable. But I looked into it. It's an Indian. It's also like not overly. It's not like the script and it's not like a doby audition or any like it's, it's simple enough that you can just dive in and get a high quality video done. Yes. And it's an indie dev. And I hope he's making a bucket of money. Yeah. It's so cool. I started falling on my Twitter. You know, you like fall in

love with these types of things. This is clearly like I love software. And I'm going to make beautiful, great software. Yeah. For a normal price. No subscription. And that's it. I just hope he's rewarded. I forgot how much I pay. It's like some like annual fee. I think 99 bucks or something like that. Yeah. I think I paid for it twice that I have it on both my computers. So, you know, I earlier this year, I was talking about like doing

YouTube and I went, I went deep. I went on like production value and software and all this stuff. And now I'm recording more videos showing my work on software products because I'm using this is going to be a total testimonial here. Yeah. Because I'm using Screen Studio. Like it's it's like the way that they can make the zooming like really really smooth and the mouse pointing. And it's just it's a really easy way. Like I'm already thinking

through ways to like share more video of my product work. And yeah. I felt the same way. I was like, Oh, I think I can get into this and I can just publish stuff all the time and then use it for document. Look, you know, we have users now. And we need documentation. We need help docs. So I look at that. I'm like, Oh, I think I'm going to make more videos mostly because of the software. It makes it gives you this element of confidence without

knowing that you're going to commit three hours to a short video. Yep. Yep. Great. Yeah. So that's it. Let's see what happens. I think we're we're going to launch the ads today. The next phase and what I'm really excited about is, you know, the advertising company they told us this can only work to the degree that your funnel is optimized. Right. And right now your funnel is not optimized. Your funnel is optimized for people

who get to your site, click a button and want to create an account. That's not the same people who saw an advertisement on Reels and click with some interest. What's in call to action for them. So the philosophy is basically to get them as deep into the funnel as possible before you add friction. And so a page that says user name password basically

register an account is the worst possible thing. So like like get them using the product before using yes, see or whatever you can give to get them deeper in and closer to the value before you ask for any additional friction. So I think we're going to do a lot of work over the next few weeks on what that looks like. And it gives me some new appreciation for our competitor that I don't think their site is good at all. But then when you click

to get started, at first I was like this feels kind of hokey. It's weird. Like come in and you choose a voice. Then you go this thing. So all this stuff you do and it's like step one of five. And in my mind, I'm like, that is crazy. What do you mean step five before I can like create an account? And if you view it from that point of view, like oh, people are paying to get into this funnel. They don't even know who the company is.

They haven't seen the website. Like totally different mindset. Yeah. And I have a new appreciation for it. Yeah. I like that. It will be interesting to me. The response of the like the types of users that come through those funnels like the video ads versus the types of you do the out outbound direct native businesses. Like I feel like those are going to be two completely different funnels. Yes. But we are going to push on both. Yes.

You want to talk about Apple? Yeah. Let's do it. I mean, I know you've been working with an agency. I've been setting it up myself for the past year with clarity flow. We can talk about how it's all working. You know, I know we've had a few questions here and there on that. Okay. Anything specific in in ripple that that we want to answer? Where was that question? I did favorites. This is kind of awesome. I can just jump in there and look at

the replies. That's awesome. Yeah. So it looks like it looks like Adam was asking you about how you designed implementing your cold outreach for clarity flow. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't get into all the all the weeds on it. But at a high level and I learn some things the hard way, you're setting up. So at first, I set up like a bunch of different sending domains. Like the theory there is like, you don't want to send cold email outreach from

your actual domain. You want to send it from like similar domain. So, you know, yes. If you're if your main domain is like example.com, you might be sending from like examples.com or example.co or, you know, because you don't want to ding the reputation of your main domain. It's it's almost like rule number one. Like you are we like there will be fuckery

involved here, you know, on on the number of like sending. So the nature of the beast is people are there's going to be some percentage that's going to mark you as spam no matter what. Yes. And the more like it only takes a few people to mark your email at as spam. And then like all of your emails will be going into the spam folder for like 90 days until it recovers, you know. Yes. And like all of your most important emails do like just like

personal emails for your domain. So you want to like avoid that. So that that involved at first for me, it was like setting up 20 different Google workspace accounts and paying for 20 like and and having like all these different domains and and because like you can't even. That's the other thing is like you sort of want to like separate the sending accounts to. I've I've since found that yourself. I did it was a complete pain in the ass. Okay.

And I've since moved to a service called Maldozo, which basically replaces the the need for Google workspace. Yep. Which is great. I think there are startups that they were knocking out some kinks when I was getting started. But. And then I use what's it called instantly that AI I believe. Okay. It's not even really an AI tool. They just have AI in their domain. Sure. But that's you know, it's one of the many cold email outreach tools that you could

use. There's another whole side to like building lists and all that. I don't want to get into all the details there. But there's plenty of tools to find your your ideal prospects. You know, yeah, we use smart lead for a lot of things. Mind with Google sheets. But just to talk about two two services. So Brian Shankman runs a service called super seller. So super

seller dot CEO. And that's who we have been working with on the app outside. So he set up the system, putting the domains and and the copywriting and then manages it also. So it was it was great because we have done that in the past ourselves. And even when we had on staff, some salespeople who had done it before and and were familiar with it. Brian just like elevated everything made everything so much easier and so much better at the

same time. Yeah. And now we're working. I have to give a shout out because Michael Mike is a listener. But Mike Benson runs a company called mail reef. Mail our E E F. And that feels like we're going from like the Civil War to World War one. Like things are like getting mechanized. So right now we did what what you did on the on the domain front with some tools that made it make it easier. You know, as opposed to doing it totally manually.

Yeah. That that's essentially what like mail dose. I don't know. Maybe mail reef is a similar idea. It's similar, but it's just like you can really scale. So you could do you know, you can get to a place where you're sending 100,000 emails a month. Yeah. So we are. I mean, and that's the other thing about having multiple emails like, you know, because there's a limit to how many you can send like per day. Like it's, you know, it's a question of like

how safe you want to play it. But it's like only like, I don't know, something like 50 or something like that. Like it is recommended like per day per email. Otherwise, you know, because these services will notice like you're sending the same email over and over again. So, and then there's, you know, for people who aren't familiar, there's also the warm-up period where there's a lot of tools that handle that for you, which is like, just getting

into the weeds. But like before you can even really start sending from a cold email outreach program, like you have to like show some what looks like organic activity in your email client to show that you're sending and receiving emails back. That takes about like four weeks to quote unquote, like warm up. Yes, that's the trending. I love that. I just love the concept of that. Just getting ready to hammer the market. We are currently in the warm-up

period with mail reef. So our outbound, right now we send about 450 emails a day. So it will be interesting to see what happens when that is like tripled, quite droopled, and so on in about a month. Yeah. That's, yeah, we're a little bit more than that per week across all the different email campaigns. And then, you know, and so like about twice a year now, I go through the process of, what do you call it, just like rebuilding our list,

right? Like we have a, we have a, we have a couple different ways that we build lists of prospects. And then we build it up to like something like 20 or 30,000 contacts. And that'll last us for like the next six months of Cold Out. You know, like, yeah. So I, and then that's like a, that's like a, probably like a month project. I have, I have an assistant who works that little task for me. And we just do that like twice a year

to build up a list. All right. Well, we're going to see where, where that leads. It, yeah. It does feel like the, you know, there's a question in ripple now from someone asking me, like, how will I know if this is like working? If we should, you know, what's the criteria? I have really stopped thinking about that I originally going in, if you recall a few months ago, I was like, you know, basically, you know, one product every four months, get

it up in two months, push it for two months. Let's see if we should stick with their pivot again or launch a new product. I kind of stopped thinking that way. And mentally all in, yeah, aren't rosy. And just, you know, what I think it's going to take a while to make it work. Yeah. But we like it. And we like the potential. And the feedback so far is, is good. And therefore, like, I've kind of shed the idea of another product and more around

the, well, we're just going to persevere with this product. And that might mean pivoting in direction and strategy and who we're focusing on, but not, not a different product. Yeah. I like that for you because you have the firepower, you have the funding, you have the team, you have a great product already right out of the gate. And, uh, and you're in a great space. And like, yeah, it, right? There's so many, there are so many more moves for

you to make. And so many more things to build and figure out on, go to market on all that stuff, you know, yes. Right. We were basically in search of a channel and a market to capture some element of product market fit and how to reach them. And yes. And then feel free

to get for careful enough on spend. Then you can kind of make it work. Yeah. I mean, you know, actually on that, on that note, like what's, what's next, like that's where I find myself today is I, I just spent the past month really hammering on this ripple idea. Um, and now I tweeted about this yesterday, like I got it to like what I think of as like a checkpoint, like a finished state, not finished forever, but finished for now.

Right. Um, there, there are still more things that I'm deploying to it. And, and, you know, I talked about the growth hack ideas, but like I'm not, I'm decidedly not all in on, on this product or any product like that from us to strategy. Yeah. Um, my strategy that I'm embracing now is build a bunch of ideas. Just get a, just, just, just get out of analysis, paralysis, get out of putting all my eggs in one basket. I don't have the kind

of funding or runway, um, of a, of a funded startup. I'm a bootstrapper. I, I have a consulting business that I'm running now. Um, and, and when I'm not working on client projects, I am hacking on product ideas. So I'm, I'm starting to turn my focus again to, uh, to like the sunrise dashboard idea. I'm playing around with some, um, programmatic SEO stuff to, to get that going, but maybe building that into sort of a system, maybe a product

around programmatic SEO. Um, I'm just starting to like hack on stuff. And, and I, and I think like having spent the last month on ripple and got and getting sort of like getting it to a finished product, that could be sort of like the pattern for me now, um, is like spending about a month to, to get the MVP of a product of mine into the world. Um, and I've been, you know, I, I talked about last time I, I launched my service one month dot app that I'm, I'm

literally starting on, on one of those for our client next week. Oh cool. Um, uh, so I'm, and this gets back to like screen studio. I want to be more public about the things

that I'm building. Um, I have ideas for content around like a series of videos on building an app in five, five business days or something like that, you know, or building an app over the course of a month and just really publicizing the work that I'm doing on, on these products, um, for the purpose of content, for the purpose of building and just for putting stuff into

my portfolio that could, who knows where I can, where can go? Like, I, I need to be planting more seeds because my portfolio of assets has been sort of stagnant, uh, for, for longer than I would like. So I need to get new stuff going. That's, that's my mindset. Um, I must say like building new, the speed that I'm able to build at now is incredible with, with the use of AI. It is incredible. Um, what should go to this is in development.

This is really interesting. We're doing a lot of things about cloud, a lot of things about cursor. Yeah, cursor. Um, I don't use cursor. I tried it. Um, I have not really used cloud. I want to check that out. Um, I'm mostly just using chat GPT. GPT, frankly, I do use some my coding, uh, text editor is Ruby mine. Um, it's, cursor is a, is sort of a fork off of VS code, which is like one of the most popular ones.

Now they all like cursor, VS code has copilot. I use Ruby mine, which has AI, which I think uses chat GPT. So like it's built into, into all the text editors now. But I, I, and I, that's what I've been using for the last like two, three years where, where like, it will help you complete a sentence or complete a line of code, right? And so that's good

for like day to day, small AI help in your coding workflows. But what I found in building new, building a new app from the ground up with, with ripple and I have an app template and stuff that I use, I find myself going directly to chat GPT, especially with 40, which is way faster. Um, to generate content, to generate stuff. So I just go to chat GPT and be like, all right, this is what I'm building. We need to, we need, we need to wire up the

controller, the view of the model for this. Here's how it's going to work. Here's the logic that I want, fired up. And then I copy and paste and put that into my app. And then I polish it up and get it working. And it's like so much faster than me writing all that stuff from scratch. So like the structural foundation of the app, like building a new app from the ground up is so is like, I mean, a hundred times faster than I was like two

years ago. Like, because it, two years ago, I was pretty good at building full stack. But I was writing every single part of it. If I'm, if I'm creating a new model and a controller, I'm writing every line of that model and controller. Like, yeah, I might copy and paste some common patterns that I have, but it's still me doing it now for the most part. It's like, okay, I need to, I need to do this, uh, this, this logic for this background job for this thing

that I need to do. Here's what it needs to do. Boom, boom, boom. Here's the, here's the programming logic. Pop that into chat GPT. It gives me, uh, it gives me like the hundred lines of code that I need for that logic. I grabbed that, I popped it into my app, I tested, I tweak it, I polish it and I ship it like the next day. Um, like that's the workflow. And it's, I mean, that's literally how I'm, I'm, I'm sort of amazed at like the taking

this idea of ripple from idea to what it is today in the last four weeks. That would have not been possible a couple of years ago. Would have been four or five months of work right there. You know, and, and then even the other part is like getting into. Okay. So you're building new. So you're going to hit a roadblock all the time. All right. This, this piece is really

complex. And it's okay. So like this week, I, I spent a lot of time doing like span bot protections so that our search box on the homepage of ripple does not get abused, right? Okay. There's stuff happening like underneath the hood that, that hopefully is invisible to users, but I want to make sure that we're not going to get hammered with spam on that, on that search box and hitting the API and hitting our database and all this stuff,

right? Um, like that's a pretty complex problem to figure out. Um, and, and implement in the right way without harming the user experience. And I just, is me in collaboration with chat GPT to get through all the hairy problems with that. It took like 24 hours to get it going. You know, like it's, it's incredible. The speed. So you are, you are accidentally a 12 startups in 12 months person. Maybe I don't know. I'm not, I'm not

like doing that thing. We're like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna proclaim that every calendar month this year, I'm gonna release a new app. Like no, none of that. I'm, what the pace, you keep it up. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm not necessarily trying to start something

and then stop working on it a month later. Um, but I am, I, I'm just following my gut on everything where it's like, okay, I, I know where this current project needs to get to where it gets to a point where it's okay if I could turn my attention to something else and, and it won't completely like kill all the momentum that I had over there. Um, yeah. So like, like just, just knowing like what is the next finished check point that

I need to get to? Like for, for ripple, that was basically where we're at today, which is like homepage is live. People can sign up and search and use it for free and interact. I've got some, some like notifications that go out to help engagement. Okay. So it's, it's at a good point. Now I can start to think about something else that can be more

of like a revenue generating type product. That's more what I'm focused on now. Um, and, and what, and so like, okay, like right now, my thinking is with sunrise dashboard, which is still just in an idea phase. My first task is to see if I could fire up a programmatic SEO system to generate pages that can start driving traffic to this thing. And I'll probably spend the next couple of weeks building that and deploying that. Um, and then it's like,

okay, let's see if that works and get some traffic. And I'll probably then turn my attention to something else for, for a few weeks. And then I can, as it starts to roll. Yeah. And then like here and there, a day here, a day there, I can, I can pop back into ripple and improve some little feature or I can, um, or I can go build sunrise dashboard. If I'm getting, you know, enough early access signups and things like that. Um, and it,

it just optionality, keeping it open, doing a bunch of things. I'm, I, I sort of like to jump around a little bit. I had a good conversation with Josh Pickford the other day on, on my other podcast. We talked a little bit about doing multiple projects and products and going down the rabbit hole for three weeks and benefiting from that, you know, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I, I, I like watching Josh do that. Yeah. Yeah. I like his, uh, he just

doesn't feel very self conscious about, uh, switching attention. Hey, that's what I'm into. I'm just going to share what I'm doing right now that is what it might be 3D printing. It might be taking down, uh, you know, a designer that screwed me. Yeah. But I'm a focus

on story. Yeah. Sure. Uh, but it's, it's also cool because it's like, you just get exposure to so many different problems and so many different new skill sets and, um, that, you can take what you learned from one thing and bring it into another thing and, and like everything that I build goes into my app template. So like, whenever it's something that I know, I'm going to reuse it. It goes right into my app template. So like, like just in building

Ripple, I 10xed my template. So like the next app that I fire up is going to be that much faster to get going. Interesting. Yeah. Cool. Well, we are, uh, we're going to see what the next week hold for us. Yes, sir. Uh, yeah. We're, we're officially self serve anyone that wants to jump in and test things out can feel free at Hey Rosie. Yeah. I got, I got

to try that out. You should. I'm going to post a video, um, of me inside of the, basically the what we're calling public Rosie, which is the phone number that you can just call to ask about our actual product. Yeah. And so it's an example of a SaaS company using the phone. For us, it's more important than maybe others because people want to hear and experience the product and the end result of the product is actually a phone call. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's been, it's been fun thinking about it in that context because I've showed it to a few founders. I showed to a few investors also. And it's a trip. It's, it's a trip. So I would have on the screen. It's probably what I'll show also in, in, in the recording that I make. I will ask a question on the phone on speaker phone and on the screen, I will highlight me asking something similar, maybe not verbatim. And then the response, I

will highlight in the app. And then also you'll hear the exact words that I want Rosie to say when asked a question like it. And then maybe I'll ask it a slightly differently and she'll give an answer that slightly different. So it's, it feels like a person like adjusting and saying the same thing but with different words. Where do, okay. So how do you feel about the product today as it stands? Like, like in your phone number for Rosie, like, what do

you feel confident in it answering? And like, have you found any spots where it's like, yeah, it's not quite there yet for this or that type of conversation or at answer. Yes. We, we, we find some things that are silly, some things that are serious and are already, you know, right now we're, we're listening to user recordings, we're reading transcripts

and we are identifying things that should be improved. So the way I look at it, the way I just explained to my team at all hands a few days ago, that we have a good product that is 80% of the way there. It works. You can ask a question. It talks back to you. It does things like set appointments. It sends you text message, confirmation. You can go into the app and add a new FAQ and the answer will be better for it because you just

trained it by adding an FAQ. We're 80% of the way there. The next 10% is from feedback and learning. So a piece of feedback was Rosie was saying, is there anything else I can assist you with today? Right. Totally reasonable thing to say. But if you say the those exact words three times in a two minute conversation, it's weird. Is there anything else I can assist you with today? You know, in the 30 seconds later, is there anything else I can

do? So we, so a lot of it is, is solvable with code. You just say, here's this phrase, say it differently if you've already said it before. And, and you know that as a developer, you just code that in. You say, well, if this comes up more than once. So now she'll say, is there anything else I can assist you with today? And then if it makes sense to ask something similar, she'll say, anything else I can help you with. Right. So these

little tiny tweaks that just improve things over time, I think that's the next 10%. The last 10% is going to be a challenge. Yeah. Combination of breakthrough innovation, model improvement, time, user feedback. And that I basically have set the expectations our team. That's going to be really hard. And churn is not going to be really good until

we get to that last 10%. So we're in for a lot of work. I'm guessing the last 10% is more complex, like working with customers to help them are like, almost like consulting customers, like the AI being able to consult customers on stuff. There's some of that. And there's also human conversation. The edge cases are not that edgy. You know, something that comes up that isn't just what when are you open, what services do you offer? Can I set an appointment?

Like, it's actually a lot. A large percentage of conversations have at least one element that is slightly different. It's just a matter of style, how people speak to each other. The way I call the business and the way my wife calls a business are completely different. Very different. I like to pick up the phone and explain and then ask the question. I like to ask

the question, I mean, whatever it is. So matching that is difficult. And there's also a ton of work on the UI and the UX itself, where we are getting good as a team, improving an agent, and making it better. But that does not equal a total stranger being able to come in and within 30 minutes, have it be working really well. Yeah. I know you're really going to be the self-serve strategy on this.

But I just can't help but think that what you're building really, there's still an opportunity for your team or someone to be the consultant for your customers to help them set up and optimize their agent. Yeah, we're starting to see like maybe two tiers and they literally might match with pricing tiers, where someone that values speed and being able to do on their own without talking to anyone and just getting their agent their own 80% of the way there. And that's just a

huge help and that's 50 bucks a month and they're happy with that. And then other businesses that are more sensitive to what it says and how it responds and getting closer to the 95% and that is where it might make sense for our team to jump in and offer a service or to have the tools that if you are willing to spend hours in the tool making it awesome that you do have those tools. Yeah. And of course we can help with that if it's $250 or $500 a month tier as opposed to 50 or 100.

I do want to have like different versions almost. Like I want to try to find a way to offer a phone number for clarity flow customers. And that's why I'm really interested in Rosie because I can't really I can't really afford to have somebody on a valve on the like I would like to use it for pre-sales. I feel like I could potentially use it for pre-sales questions. If we give it our own FAQ

like these are the features that you could educate customers about. And then my fear is that like existing customers will call it and and their conversations with cat or customer success. Like those are much deeper and way more complex because they're actually setting up their whole coaching practice on clarity flow and like it's really complex. That's why cat does what she does. You know, right. That might not be good or it might need to be effectively pushed toward leaving

a detailed message. More so than getting help right there. But yeah, I think the pre-sales. I mean you want to try it. I'll just call it right now. Yeah. Oh hell yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. Hello. Thank you for calling Rosie. Our call may be recorded today for quality control purposes. My name is Rosie. How can I help you? Oh hi. I'm on your website and I'm just curious if you have a free trial. Hey there. Yep. We do offer a free trial. You can try Rosie for seven days and it

includes 50 minutes of free usage. If you go over those minutes, you'll switch to our $49 month plan. How's your business handman calls after hours right now? Right now. It just goes to voicemail which we're not that happy about. All right. So let's say I go to the free trial and then what did you say is $49 a month? What's my minute limit for that plan? For the $49 month plan, you get up to $250 minutes. Hey, I got over those $250 minutes. It's $20 per minute after that. How's your

business handling those miss calls right now? Once that. Hold on. Hey, Rosie, can I hear? I don't know if my speaker can raise my name to you. Hey, Rosie, I got a quick question for you. Rosie, how does the setup process work with me and my team for my business? I hung up because I don't think she was able to hear through this. Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's it. I'll give you that phone number and you can ask that.

And I think what you should do is just create an account. I'm putting your URL and it should be trained on on that. That's the easiest thing is website scraping. Then it's trained on the information on the URL. And then I think the best feature we have right now is this the thing that we're calling FAQ. Yeah. What it is, it is like it is your when you're in the admin and it's your Rosie account. It's like having the ability to train an employee with your knowledge. I love it.

And when someone asks you this question, like, I want you to be able to say this. This is the right, this is the correct answer. And then I can add 30 of those FAQs and you don't have to remember them. Rosie just knows them from then on. And she does a really good job of adjusting the answers based on how the question was asked. And very, and you saw there, like we started, we started doing this thing. We're instead of just asking, answering the question. She goes, how are you doing that now?

Yeah. I should notice that. There's a very like sales sales lead factor there. I like it. Yes. Yeah. I do want to try it out later. Because I wanted to ask it, like just like explain to me what what the setup process is like, like trying to get away from like a yes or no answer, like a yes. Super cool. And so what we should do is we should be listening to those, right? As a business,

yeah, we should be listening to those. And that is such a great question from someone who's interested in the service that I would then say, how would I want my employee to answer that question? And I would open up a new FAQ and I'd say, what's the setup process like question mark? And then I would write exactly what I want Rosie to say in that context. Because sometimes on your website, the answer might actually be too long. Whereas in the phone context, you may want to say,

this is what happens and then this and then this. And if you need, if you need the help, we're always here for you. And also I can see I can see you using AI to analyze the recordings, right? Like because that's the other thing that that you know, because over time, if a business is generating a lot of

phone calls, they're not going to take the time to actually listen back to them and optimize them. But but you can use AI to like, hey, these are like the top five questions that keep coming up again and again, focus on these and you know, right? You don't have an FAQ for for these two, do you want to create them now? Yeah, great idea. Yeah, like, oh, these are some questions that we don't have, that these are some questions that came up that we don't have an FAQ for yet. You know,

awesome. Cool. That's fun. That was cool. We got to do that again, the live AI call on air. Yes. I want to get to a point where it's really easy to like, that's my goal with with the recording that I make either today or two week to be able to just go and show how easy it is. You put the URL

in the coast into your account. I mean, that could be, you could maybe already have this, but like, you can even have a couple of like quick videos maybe using the screen studio thing, but like on the website, like, yeah, you could just call it and test it out, but really demonstrate like, hey, these are like five or 10 different recordings of real people calling Rosie, calling our Rosie number. Yeah. Cool. Good stuff, man. I don't know.

Good to see you. Thanks everyone for listening. Have a great weekend. Later, folks.