17: Ecosystem of Cards

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Hello. Hello. La la la.

I think I think we're both in a Seinfeld mood. It we it just came out.

This is the timing's unbelievable on this.

Man. So, Justin Jackson, what a guy.

What a guy.

Had to had to have spent hours clipping that together. Right?

Hours and hours and hours. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. If you haven't seen, we'll post it up and everything, but Justin Jackson, friend of the show, Friend of mine for many years, did a supercut of the podcast with Seinfeld, and it's It is

It's uncanny.

It's uncanny. I was in tears laughing. Bayless. It's so funny. Dying laughing. So good. It's so well done. It's just spot on. So, yeah. Thank you, Justin, for that. But, yeah, just Wow. Blew me away.

I just I I just walked into the living room where, my wife and my mom and the au pair were And I was like, hey. Can I put this thing on the TV and show you this this video? And they're like, what's going on? Like, what is this? So Freaking funny.

It is. And, I mean, we've talked about that that it is kinda like that, but then when you see it

When you see it side by side. Yeah.

And I even posted this to Justin. I was like, now it, now I'm questioning if I even have any original thoughts. Like, maybe maybe we're just channeling, you know, Millions of hours of Seinfeld into Yeah. Into the show here. I don't know.

Yeah. My I after I showed my mom, she was explaining Seinfeld to our au pair, and My mom was saying that, like, we grew up on that, like our whole family, you know, me and my brother grew up watching so much Seinfeld, and I think it is like, It's just been internalized.

Yeah. That's that's great. And it's funny because, like, you're probably a little young to have seen it live. Right? Or were you guys watching it the end of it I don't

know if I was watching it live. What was the last season?

Oh, jeez. I think it was, like, 99?

I think that's right. I think it was 98 or 9. Friends and Side Club ended pretty close, but I think it was 98 or 9. Yeah. And I would have been, I think 10 in in 99. So Yeah. I don't think we are watching it live, but I think we I think my brother and I watched, the reruns Over and over and over.

He runs, man. That's where, like, it just got into my brain from the room. Cause like 11. So before it was streaming and all that, like 11 PM on WPIX in New York here anyway. Like, it would just be on every night and just obviously a random rerun, and it's like, I just watched that every night, Just Yep. Every single night. So good.

Yep. Somebody once asked on Twitter, like, how do I get better they weren't asking me. They're just asking the void. And the question was, like, how do I get better at, like, low stakes casual small talk? And my, like, unironic answer was watch Seinfeld straight through. Like, watch it fully straight through, and you will start to internalize, like, the you can basically make a conversation out of anything.

Out of just a few words.

Yes. Exactly.

So You're a big straight through guy. This is a thief. This is one of your thieves.

For sure.

Straight through.

Very much very much a completionist.

Yeah. Us.

Big time. Yep. Love love to have love to have the full set. Love to love to know the full canon. No.

Yeah. It's Seinfeld especially, I think is really good and that it pays off a lot. Like, a lot of sitcoms, you know, they're just, like, They're really isolated, like, every episode or maybe there's an arc of a couple episodes, but that's it. But, like, especially from midpoint on, like, Seinfeld, like, each season would have an arc, And then, like, there would be arcs that cut across even multiple seasons to some, you know, not full arcs, but, like, people would return and whatever. There would be things they go back to and re reference.

Yeah. It it does compound because then you start to get a catalog of, like, The close talker, the low talker, the loud talker. You get all like, oh, they're doing a they're doing a running bit here. And and, honestly, the The learning how to do a good callback joke, I feel like I learned a lot from Seinfeld. Yep. Like, how do you make the joke, and then, you know, 21 minutes later at the end of the episode, how do you make the joke again as a callback and

yeah. And their character like, they stayed in character so well. I feel like that's, like, That's the only thing people can pick up on. Yeah. Whether it's on Twitter or a podcast or whatever. There is, like, this element of entertainment that you're doing, and it's like, Seinfeld's just the master of that. Like, they're just so those characters are just so fully realized. I feel like that they really

And one of their tenants one of their Jerry's core tenants on the show was no growth, no learning. And so that helps.

Like It does help. Right? There's just a lot of the same people.

Right? Not becoming a better person. Right. The last, You know, the last argument or the last observation of the series is the 1st observation of the series about the button getting too high. Yep. It's like, No. No growth. We're just who we are the for 9 seasons straight. It's like, well, yeah, that that worked pretty well.

That that that did. You when you got something that works, stick with it. Right?

Yep. Don't mess it up. Oh, man. Thank you, Justin. Incredible, incredible work. I laughed so hard.

Wow. I was that. It's just, like, almost scary now. It's like, oh, man. I don't it's like a pressure. I'm like, I feel pressure. It's like, wow. Seinfeld. You're very disseinfeld.

Out of our minds.

But Yeah. We gotta clear it for a sec.

You're a little you're a little bit on the male body being grotesque. I it just made me laugh so hard again when watching it.

It's true, though. I definitely must have got that from Seinfeld. Like, that just

he just had that word for word. Yeah.

Was word for word. Like, he was just like, oh, here's the Seinfeld version of it. It's like, oh, the exact thing. Just Me having watched that episode a 1000 times. Yeah. I mean, I I think I believe it too, but who knows? Maybe I don't

know. At this point. Yeah.

Who doesn't know? I just might be regurgitating Elaine. Yep. Alright. We got a couple more updates.

Man, I remember remember the mail. That was that was big for a while.

They're still going. They're still out there.

That's amazing.

Doing the to do list, and then a very small update on slippers. So I said only my middle kid was into the slippers and me and my wife were in slippers. All of a sudden, just like it must be in the air, they come home from they had to go to the mall for something, and my daughter has nice LOB and slippers. No. So 4 of the 5 of us are on the slipper bandwagon now.

Wow. Okay. It's going around.

Yeah. So we gotta get you on.

Yeah. It seems it seems like that is my least popular opinion.

Yeah. People didn't didn't care for your opinion there. I was kinda surprised. I thought there would be a lot more pushback, on people who are like, no way. Shoes in the house were all about it. I was I was pretty surprised. It was quite universal on the no shoes in the house for the most part.

Couple of people part, except for boss Holly, my boss at PlanetScale.

Yes. Your boss. Yes. Oh, you think, you think she's being honest there? Maybe she just she wants maybe she just wants to stand with you. Is there any chance of that? She's just

being loyal? No. Because she has all the hour. She doesn't you know?

She doesn't need to do that. But

Yeah. Unless she's reaching down to the little man. I don't I think she really does she really does wear shoes in the house, I think.

I think they're out there.

Out in the country. She lives, you know, who knows where, like, out in the country, and she probably has, like, scorpions in her house or something. And so she doesn't wanna I wanna be taking her shoes off all day long. You know?

Yeah. And then the things get into the shoes. If she's on all the time, you don't have to worry about stuff living in there.

Yeah. And then I saw I saw, I saw people wearing their slippers outside on Twitter, and I'm like, you just that's just shoes. That's just true. That's true. That's

worse shoes. So I will wear the slippers, like, onto the driveway, but I try not to leave the driveway with the slippers. Definitely not leaving the house zone with the slippers ever for sure.

Yeah. And walking outside with slippers on, you're just doing the same thing but in reverse.

But I do think you do want the slippers to have, like, some grip and the and the actual bottom. So they are very shoe sneaker like. Yeah. You don't want those, like, It's just a cloth bottom. Those things are then you're

You know what I could

you know what

I could be sold on? And this may this may be, like, This may be a terminology you may think I'm insane. I could be sold on house shoes.

Oh, yeah. Be

sold on that. Yeah. Like, a pair of maybe maybe they're Not slippers, and maybe they are just shoes, but a pair of shoes that you wear in the house only.

Dedicated to the house.

Yeah. I could I could be sold on that.

See, I feel like if you're gonna go that route, then I wouldn't go sneakers. I would go, like, UGGs or, like, something like Yeah. Something like that that's got a little slipperiness, but isn't all the way down to a slipper perhaps.

You know, we don't need to retread the whole thing, but it just feels a little bit like giving up to Put on some hugs and, like, toot around the house. You know? I just I can't I don't think I can get there.

There yet? You got old though? I don't

think I can get there. No.

Gotta clear 40. Maybe when you hit 40?

Yeah. When I when I hit 40 and I have, you know

All your best days are behind. Just

Yeah. Exactly. It's all that helps. Understand. Yep. Maybe I'll maybe I'll give up, but until then, I'm gonna I'm gonna fight the good fight.

Alright. I'm with you. Alright. Alright.

Alright. Topic.

So I guess we'll do the big one first is the the Laravel people crew released pulse, And you have been pulse. Deep into it, so once you take us through.

Pulse is very good. Yeah. Pulse is very, very good.

So Love the idea.

They released Pulse first party package, it is it is interesting how it's being pitched and how it could be used, so it's being pitched as, you know, lightweight APM, basically, vital signs in real time is is the h 1 on olst.laravel.com, and there's, you know, an image of, users making requests, queue backlog, cache hits, slow queries, etcetera. Right? So that's how it's being billed as is, like, keep an eye keep an eye on your server at a high level, whatever, whatever. It's all written in LiveWire, Very dashboard. Yeah, I know the year of LiveWire continues.

of LiveWire.

Very, very dashboard centric. Yeah. And their customization story is Pretty good, in that you can create your own cards. And so I've dug in I've dug in quite a bit in, you know, 30 minute hour increments that I have. I've dug in quite a bit to look at how it works, and it's basically a dashboard framework.

Like that.

More of like a more of like a social or business dashboard than a server dashboard. And it's kind of cool the way they've done it. They've separated it into, like, recorders and displays, so, like, you have one thing that's responsible for recording data and the other thing that's and the infrastructure for recording the data is really robust, in that you can record time series data as aggregates only without storing all of the entries.

Right. The underline.

Got, you know, 5,000,000 requests An hour or whatever, you can just store that as, like, you know, 4 or 6 different rows instead of 5,000,000, And Pulse handles all of that, like, it abstracts all of that away from you. So if you dig in deep enough and look at it, and I need to do some videos and write about it because I don't think anybody's gonna dig in that far. But if you dig in deep enough, the way that they're doing automatic roll ups and aggregations is very, very good. So lot of potential here, and I think it's gonna be a little bit of, like, a a land grab to to build out some of these cards.

Well, I I mean, I've always wanted a dashboard like thing, and it's like I've tried some of those services, but Mhmm. I don't know. It's just never really stuck, and I just feel like, oh, you have. It's just, like, in your Laravel app already, and you're already using pulse for, you know, what it's meant for, but then you can also If it's all abstracted nicely, which it sounds like, you know, I'm sure there'll be more stuff to do there, but that it already is at a pretty good level for, being able to customize. And and the thing that I think I saw from you is that you can multiple dashboards, so that really opens it up.

So I so out of the box, You cannot have that with Pulse Okay. But I have created a way

Hacked it.

I've hacked it. And I'm gonna put that out as a package itself because I think I think, like And I don't know if it was a strategic decision for them to not say, like, universal dashboard builder, you know, because it's like,

who cares?

Well, I don't even know what that means. But I think that's what it's going to turn into. I think this is going to sit a little bit in the middle of or on one side or the other of A filament or a nova, honestly.

It does have those vibes.

Yeah. To the extent that it's monitoring and not necessarily fully wired crud, Pulse makes way more sense than setting up one of those 2 things, I think.

Right. Yeah. If you don't need the forms and everything and you just want the display, like, yeah, this is gonna be a much nicer, cleaner way to do it, it seems like.

Yep. And I'll I'll scoop myself because this probably won't come out until tomorrow, and I can probably get some of these done before tomorrow, but Having cards for Fathom Analytics, for Transistor, for Lemon Squeezy, for Stripe, for YouTube, having cards to, like, monitor all of that, that's what I'm going for, because I want, like, my own personal dashboard of Alright. What's going on in the business of, you know, the Aaron empire? And having those things would be great, and so I'm, like, working furiously to get those things finished enough because I think I have a really good handle on the data storage layer underneath, because I worked with Jess a little bit before they transformed it into what it is now. She went away and just, like, drank a bunch of coffee.

Yeah. That to me, that definitely the in the thing I thought of instantly. I think you're totally on the right track there, and people are gonna really love that, Yeah. And and use that a lot. Hopefully, things like the multi dashboard can just get absorbed in.

They also have an interesting intermediate layer Between so on the recording side, you can decide to record everything in a separate database. You can also Send all of your, like, to be written events through an ingest engine, so, like, you can just dump them into Redis, and then run a command to more slowly or more methodically put them into whatever database you choose. And so if you're like, I don't really want any of my pulse stuff to be, you know, blocking or in in a critical path, you can just dump it all into Redis and then work it out Later, which is big, is pretty smart.

Yeah. That is. So, yeah, you can just have a log, and it'll then aggregate from the log.

Yeah. I think it drains out the events from Redis in a in a command. It's like if you get a huge burst of requests, you're not trying to insert all of those into the Pulse database. You just put them in the Redis storage locker, and then it'll put them into the database in a little bit.

Yep. So Seems like a dynamo DB ish type of use case too.

I'm sure they'll be Don't bring that

around here.

All those things. Wonder I do wonder the, the engine is pluggable, so you could write a Dynamo engine. Right. Still have, like, your redis ingest, You know, buffer, but then go into Dynamo. And I wonder so I I bet somebody I bet somebody will will write that.

I would think there's all kinds of also, like, dedicated tools that people may already be dumping stuff into that then they wanna, dump more stuff into, but then use that so you don't have a whole separate setup for that. So yeah. I think people I mean, it'll be interesting to see, because I think people are gonna really push this, like, How it how it performs when someone drops it in on, you know, one of these huge sites that's Yeah. Getting a lot of traffic and and all that, and Mhmm. That was my pitch to Jess.

It's crazy.

Well, there's lots of use cases for that. Like, I mean, in my own products, obviously, being fully selfish here. We have all kinds of reporting and stuff where we do of what I wanna do in new, version of things is to do more along these lines where you're not always especially for, like, really heavy things, like, Trying to query the database in real time through millions and millions of rows, and that's always slow and so on. It's like yeah. You could just aggregate Whatever helped us tickets.

of All I've heard is public information, but he has sounded It's so laissez faire about it on Right. On their podcast. She's like, yeah. You know, I wrote a few paragraphs to the initial pitch, and then Tim and Jess went off and build it. And, And it just yeah.

Yeah. I think that's, what's going to happen though. I think that's that use case, but I do agree. Like I think that having a, the set use case is sort of interesting. It's like, Oh no, this is like the APM. And then not just, like, what you can talk about, but then let everybody else then create the rest of that ecosystem without trying to do it all yourself or whatever. Whether they thought of it or not, it's like nice if that's fleshed out by the the community, I think.

Yeah. I think so.

Alright. Along those lines, Christophe works at Laravel now.

He does. Yeah. He's the new video guy at Laravel now.

Yeah. So that'll be cool. I've watched a few of his things. Seems like he's gonna be doing more there. So I believe it's hot.

It's hot this year, man. Video. Gotta be on video.

The video is so huge. Even, like, with the podcast, like, having this video, I feel like the video when you share audio snippets, it doesn't do anything. No. Video players. Don't watch the whole pod some people do watch the podcast as, like, hey. I'm watching an hour and a half of podcast. But Yep. Even just having the video as a resource to then chunk up into interesting snippets is just, I think, gigantic for the podcast.

Yes. I think so. I think it it unlocks A lot more shareability than just audio. I mean, even the thing that Justin just did, he wouldn't have done that if it was just audio.

Yeah. I don't so. Right? Like, it would just wouldn't hit the same way to, like No. Have the cuts, not to the actual Seinfeld videos and things. I think it just works so much better seeing that cut back and forth. So, Yeah. It opens up the virality, I guess. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's really smart of killer.

I'm not full time, Kristoff?

No. I think he's part time Gotcha. My understanding. Yeah.

I've seen they've started to do a little bit more of, like, what's new in Laravel, you know, 10 dot whatever.

Right. Formalizing some of that.

Yeah. That seems That seems good. It's just man, YouTube is just a distribution engine unto itself. You really like, if you can figure it out In your business, you gotta you gotta be on YouTube. And I feel like for for Laravel, you know, LLC, that just makes the most sense in the world to have a dedicated person working on that stuff.

I've been trying to figure this out for the help spot end of things, and I can't really, like it's so hard. Like, it doesn't have the, like, plan scale had this nice, yeah, I can people about the database, like, and that's a thing people are confused by or whatever. And, like, we could do soft things like that, like, whatever, be a better help agent or whatever, but it just feels, like, generic. Yeah. You know?

to sell. Because you gotta be, like it's gotta be entertaining. I mean Right. Even to the extent that you're teaching, it has to be, like, Entertaining. And so and I don't know how many, you know, developers hang out on YouTube, but do a lot of either people who buy help desk software or help desk People themselves hang out on YouTube.

Right. Well and the thing is that I'm sure they do. Right? But it's that they aren't looking for things in the same way that The good developers on there being, like, what the hell is a foreign key? Right? And, like, then they might look on YouTube for that, and then they're gonna find your thing about foreign keys or whatever. Right? And But they're not going home from their job. Like, so devs are doing that. Like, they go home from their job, and then they're, like, hey.

looking at, like, hydroponic farming or mister beast buddy.

So they're on YouTube. Yeah. They're on there as humans, but they're not necessarily looking for stuff for their job. Mhmm. So I think that's a little bit trickier, but

Must be nice. Sounds healthy to, like, just go home and watch videos about other stuff.

Not too your Yeah. Do 4 more hours of your job. Yeah. So

you're telling me I can just log off? That's an option?

Just go That's interesting. A hobby?

Do do

something else? Never heard of my hobby. My job also.

Makes makes no sense to me.

Yeah. So

Yeah. I don't know what your strategy would be.

Yeah. I don't know. If you think of anything, let me know. If anybody out there has any ideas, I'm open to suggestions. But,

yeah,

This is where, like, the SEO has always been pretty good for us because it's like, people are just directly searching, like, best help desk software or whatever. You know, like, they're like, I'm buying right now. This is the thing I'm I need this tool. It's not like a sexy tool. I'm not, like, super excited about it necessarily, but I'm searching for it right now, And that's not the way people really use YouTube as much.

Making it work. Yeah. Let's see what the numbers are right now. So PlanetScale has officially hit switching accounts to PlanetScale 27 1,372 subscribers.

And when you start doing these videos, they had, like, 1,000 subscribers

or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. Something like that. Well, now.

Yeah. Wow. So it's been, you know, it's been let's see. I think Sam, the CEO, posted something, but, You know, it's been less fewer than 6 months that we've been doing these videos, and we're up, you know, 25,000 subscribers.

His post was I think was August or something. Right? It was, like Yeah. It's Yeah. So it's, like, 3 months or that's crazy.

It's crazy. Yeah. So, like

And how long have you worked there, though? You haven't you worked there a little longer than that. Right? Because didn't you

go to start with

that big prod okay. So you were doing other stuff first, or you were just working on that big Yeah. First or

I worked on the big course first. I did some other little stuff. Like, I was, you know, writing articles and Right. I built, like, a demo. I actually built it in LiveWire.

Right.

Like, what if I am solely responsible for growing, you know, the the top of the funnel through YouTube? She's like, great. Let's do it. And after that, it's off to the races.

Because the big course, the big MySQL course wasn't, on YouTube. Right? Like, that's just on the website or whatever. Right.

So so we get we get our, you know, whatever they're called, MQLs or marketing qualified leads. People come to the course. They, like, watch the videos, and we get their email, and then we follow-up with them. That Right.

Right. Right. So that's amazing. So 3 or 4 months to go to, you know, have 20, whatever, a 1000 I know. 25,000, New subscribers. They must be

that silver

plate, bud. Very happy. I They're very happy.

Yeah. They're very happy. We're all very happy.

Yeah. So what's your personal channel at, though? Is is Personal channel out almost stripping you?

Yeah. It is. Yeah. Because I'm able to put out more videos there.

Right.

Because, you know, The main thing is that PlanetScale pays me money. So That's a

that is motivating.

It is motivating. I think let's check the let's check the personal channel. I think So I'm at 14732. So from Okay. The beginning of this year, fewer than a100 to Wow. 15,000. That's pretty good.

Man. And I have in

the last 28 days, I've earned $186 off of YouTube. So You can see where why why PlanetScale gets more of the inner cheese.

You could make a okay salary or whatever. Yeah.

Making many tens of dollars

for all of my efforts.

But, yeah, this is growing this is growing very well, and I'm very happy about it.

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. They must be super happy. I mean, I don't know. I obviously can't Share super details, but I guess just like ultra high level, like it. Is it effective marketing? Like, do they feel like it's The the powers that be in the

Ultra high level, everyone is very happy. Okay.

Yeah. That's

great. We have a long term strategy of, like, How it's going to work.

Mhmm.

And we're in phase 1 of the strategy, and everyone is very happy with the results of phase 1.

Awesome. Yep. Cool.

Yeah. It's a good thing. It's a lot of fun. It's it's it's a whole lot of fun. And being on Steve the editor was a huge

Oh, yeah. That's great.

Huge unlock for me. Yep. Because 1, he's really, like, he's really talented. First of all, he just can make better stuff than I can, but, 2, like, It releases a lot of the pressure of me having to edit everything personally. And so is he he

can do, like, motion

graphics and everything? I think he's still contract, but I think he works for us pretty much exclusively. But, so Do

you have to give him a lot of notes, or how does that whole relationship work?

That's the thing that is shocking is he is a developer. So he's one of those that's like building a sass on the side, and, you know, is a view. I don't think he's Laravel, but he's a Vue developer

Mhmm.

And primarily has used Postgres historically, But he's also a video editor, and so when, you know, we were interviewing him, and he was, like, yeah. I edited videos for bodybuilding.com and, you know, helped grow their channel to 4,000,000. Also, I saw that you all use TablePlus in a lot of your videos. I use TablePlus. I'm, you know, developing my own SaaS, and I use TablePlus. And I'm like, You're a video editor for bodybuilding.com, and you know what Table Plus is?

Right.

How does it look like Table?

Yeah. Tired on the spot.

Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. So Wow. That's great. Yeah.

So no. I don't give him a lot of notes. He, like, knows.

Right.

He knows the content.

He gets what you'd wanna see there and whatever. Yeah.

It's It's doubly helpful because he's like a he's like an odd he's the avatar of the audience because he's not a database expert.

Right.

And so I can go to him and be like, hey. Is this, like, general topic interesting to you? And he's like, yeah. I would I would wanna know how that works, or, like, no. That's too in the weeds. I don't care about that. It's like, okay. Cool. So he's a, you know, a smart person, but kind of a database normie. And it's like, that's who I need to target.

Right. Those are the people we're after.

Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, it's working, man. Just got to keep

it going. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing. I mean, how has it been Since you've been out, and I don't think I've have the has there been a video since you've been away yet? Okay.

They haven't been. They've posted 2 since I've been out.

Okay. Because I know you had some in in there. So I guess I guess we haven't seen what it's like if you're not posting, really, but it's like Yeah. Once you reach a certain level, you will still gain followers even Mhmm. Without, obviously, new videos help, of course, but, once you're kinda in the algo and and the plants go ones are so you know, they're Long term valuable there.

They've posted it looks like they've posted 3 since I've been out. Oh, wow. And one of them has 97,000 views just looking you know, they're only revealing public information. You could go to PlanetScale page and see this, but it's Yeah. 97,000 views, 23,000, 37,000. So it's crazy. Those are big numbers.

Yeah. And those are all your those are all you?

Those are all 3 me.

Yeah. Yeah. And and then they have some more. Are you are you out of canned ones yet? Or they're still

No. No. No. They're still, There's still probably You

got it. You got it.

There's still probably 4 or 5 more

that Beautiful. They have in

the can. And I think Steve the edit Steve the editor is working on one that's, like, a Fully animated explainer video, which I think will be a really interesting, experiment, But I I don't, honestly, I don't even know what it is, so I'm excited to see it along

the road. I saw you I saw the boss Holly is also, Up in her video game, so just seems like get get into the YouTube streets a little bit

here at some point. I'm trying to, like, I'm trying to introduce more of the characters on YouTube. So I talk about Steve, the editor. I talk about boss Holly, and so that we can start bringing more people on the channel and it not be yeah. Kinda, like, maintain the consistency. And see,

this is really interesting though because, like, I feel like I don't know if you do know who Doug Demeros? It's like one of the biggest car YouTube channels. So it was just, you know, it was him doing YouTube videos about cars, new cars, old cars, whatever reviews. And, then he got, you know, really big. He has, like, millions of followers, blah blah blah. He started this website called Cars and Bids, Which is like

Oh, yeah. I know that.

Our auction website. Yep. So okay. So that's his thing. Okay. And then he's gotten, you know, investment for that, and I think that that is profitable already anyway. And so it's all great, like the platform and blah blah, the the audience and everything, but then what he did recently is he likes so he got this investment of, like, a lot of money, like $100,000,000 or and so he added more people

to the To the content side?

To the content side.

Interesting.

And, Oh, man. It's really I feel like it's very much hurt the channel. Like, I don't know if it's I don't know if it's actually hurt the channel. Like, maybe it's fine. Right? The numbers might all be great. But for me as a viewer, like, I watch way less Doug Demerra because there's, like, all these mixed in ones now where, like, it's somebody else. And, like, I love Doug. I don't want this other person, and

they might be great.

I don't want that. I don't want that random person. That is a risk. You go through and balance.

Yeah. It's

a balance. I mean, I just heard Characters is one thing, but then when they, like, take over, I feel like that's a different thing. And it's like, well, obviously, it's a corporate channel, so it's even totally different there for, Like, a playing scale, but still, it is very interesting, the, like, personal relationship you get with the YouTuber and how that impacts what you can do and how it affects things.

Yeah. Somebody was talking recently about some of these creators that have, like, leveled up and gone pro and how the content has suffered because of it. And I'm curious. Like, I think Ali Abdaal was one that was mentioned. Like, it just became so, like, polished and Highbrow that people were just like, this isn't interesting anymore.

Right.

And it isn't it it seems like there's, like, some sort of life cycle or arc to this kind of stuff. And if you can retain if you can retain what originally was compelling but scale it up, That's the ticket, but I see it seems like that might be hard to do.

I do think it is tricky. I don't know. It's it's hard to say. I mean, there are obviously other channels where it works too where it is, like, a team or whatever Mhmm. Group of people, but it is an interesting challenge.

it, but Please don't put me on the spot.

Well, as a business owner, when I think about doing it, it's like, wow, if I hire somebody to do this, it's like yeah. Then and it's a huge success, like that's like a good problem, but it's It's a potentially tricky problem in many other ways and, you know, not whatever keeping them happy on one hand, and when they go on, at some point, just do it Something else, like, now you've lost, like, the face of your YouTube channel, which is a big thing, so, but I mean, it's all good. Much rather have that problem than not have that problem. Of course, it's like, oh, I've built this huge YouTube channel and whatever. If, like, I have to find a new face, then I could do that, like, that's a good problem, But, but still, it is it is very interesting in this world of social media to be have a corporate face be a person, in that way.

Many interesting questions, Ian.

Alright. What else would you like

to talk about?

So it's should we go? Should we go on to my sage advice with you, some sage advice?

Yeah. You've been mixing it up, man.

THH corner. Can we do THH corner?

You've been stoking you've been stoking the fires with some, With some reductive takes, I think. Reductive. Reductive. You're reducing it. So tell us tell us your hot take.

Alright. So DHH was on the interview, which I actually think was really good on this interview, and, I didn't watch the entire thing yet, but, I agree with actually quite a bit of what he says. But, yeah. But, you know, he's talking about the new ones.com thing, which we've covered on here before. In some ways, I don't even have that much to add. I feel like what we covered before is still my complete valid take. But, and

And this was DHH on Jason Calacanis' This Week in the Startups, and we'll put a a link in the show notes.

Yeah. We'll get that linked up, but, well, he basically just revealed that the first product is a Slack competitor. Okay. And then there was not like a lot of other details around it, But, you know, he implied that it's gonna be, like, I guess, just an actual one time fee. I mean, definitely, some of this thing asterisk

Based based on the domain, it seems like it's a it they're kinda leaning in on the one topping thing. So

And his example was, like, shop you know, he knows Toby of Shopify, and Shopify spends 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year on Slack, and that he they'll be able to replace that with The Slack competitor for $1,000 one time. And so I just think the whole thing is ridiculous. It's like that's just what it comes down to. Like, it's just ridiculous.

That's not an that's not an argument.

A lot. Okay. Here's the thing. So I have sold on premise software. 20 years. Yep. Know a lot about on premise software. Mhmm. Alright. We saw a cloud version, and I I think I tweeted this out, but, like, have had hundreds and hundreds of customers move from the on premise version to the cloud.

Or vapor or Larevel vapor.

I mean, they can use vapor, but it's gonna be a big vapor install and they're gonna pay AWS a lot of money. Oh, yeah. I think great use for vapor if, you know, if I don't know, vapor probably can't run the rails app or whatever. The idea being you're gonna have tons of costs and tons of responsibility, and you gotta secure it, and you gotta keep it from getting hacked, and all this stuff That nobody wants to do anymore. They don't wanna do it, and the people who want to do it are very particular use case people.

That's enough of the market. Okay. So here's

here's why. People Here's why. Those people don't want an unsupported version of Slack Either. They do 1 on 1 unsupported Slack. They do not.

I I don't know. Okay. So here's here's here's why it's reductive, I think. Alright. Because your tweet is something like I don't I don't even need to look it up. I'll make it up, and and it'll still be I'll make it up, and it'll still be right.

Make it up.

No. Nobody should run their own Slack to save $100 a year. That's Right. Basically your tweet. I could write it myself. Yeah.

That's your tweet. That's, like, amalgamation of 2 different tweets. Yes. That's the the core idea. That's the reduction of your reductive pace. So

I agree. I agree with that. Nobody should run their own Slack to save $100 a year. The people I think the people that this would target would be would be people that are paying 100 of 1,000 of dollars a year to Slack. And so I think the reason I think the reason why Slack is a good starter for them is because Slack does become prohibitively expensive for very, very large companies.

Yeah. But if it comes to the user or something, I mean

I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know the pricing, but so Take somebody take somebody like, Shopify, thousands of of users.

Right.

Potentially thousands of engineers. I don't know. I would imagine they've got at least several 100 engineers. And what is Shopify really good at? Running a freaking Rails app. And if this, like, if this Slack thing is a Rails app, which

it is I'm sure it is. Right? Yeah.

They have the operational expertise to, like Mhmm. You know, spin up a new Kubernetes cluster or whatever, and, like, that's pretty much They're bread and butter at this point, and so they could throw some other service on it. Maybe they do hire 1, you know, individual to babysit, You know, the once Slack or whatever, they could still come out several $1,000 ahead, and, presumably, this isn't just like a one to 1 clone. Maybe DHH and at al. Have some sort of, like, you know, special thing where you can customize it for your org, and then it's, like, that makes it really cool and that makes lot better, and you can have single sign on for not, you know, amputating an arm and a leg, and it's like, oh, maybe maybe this is better.

Right.

I don't know. It just feels like there is a company or a Size of company or some set of factors where it's like, this makes perfect sense to me.

I mean, I definitely think it makes sense for the, the free Slack communities where it's, like, free or semi free Slack cities, right, where it's like, yeah, you can't have over a thou whatever. There's all the limits Slack guys, I don't even know what they are, but, like, people have these big communities and they have to pay something and they can't obviously because it's like a free community or whatever. So, like, Instead of going to a forum or something like that, like, yes, here's this Slack thing that you pay him $1,000 one time or maybe it's less if it's that kind of use case and Totally makes sense. I think that's great. Works.

you're having 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars.

Right. So what what if so if I have a $500,000 Slack bill, that implies I have 100 of 1,000,000 Right. I can't really have a Slack bill that big without

a lot of revenue. Your headcount has to be pretty big. So Right.

It has to be huge, which means my which means my salary is right. Exactly. That just implies that. So so then the downside for me is I get fired when I move us to this unsupported $1,000 one time payment thing. Right?

And it goes down in the middle of the night...

Yeah. And somebody's like: "Why what the hell were we doing this when we could just be paying Slack and they manage the uptime and we don't have to think about it? We had to hire these 3 people to manage it, and now they're after 3 years, their salary has grown to where we're paying $750,000 for these three people to run this Slack thing that was supposed to save us money. Like, it's just... just don't know.

No. I don't think they're gonna do that. I don't think they're gonna do that.

I just don't know...

I don't know...

I feel like a lot of geeks... A lot of people are gonna buy it because everybody wants to see DHH's code. Nobody's seen DHH's code. I think they're gonna sell 10,000 copies on day one to people who wanna see a production DHH product. Boom.

Yep.

That's for sure. And they're gonna have fanboys. They're gonna have people who run their own stuff and are super into hosting it.

They're going to sell some; they're going to make money... Yeah, they're gonna make $10 million dollars off of this.

I'm not saying they're not gonna make money. I'm not saying they're not gonna sell any. They will sell some. They will make some money, But that's also because these have a huge audience and they have a very devoted fan base and all those things. But I just don't think these big companies are gonna be like, yeah, let's use this Slack replacement. Like, to me, if anything, it's gonna be more the small companies because they're like, whatever. I'm the owner, and I make the decision.

Yes, I think that is true.

I'm willing to take the risk. Right? Like, I don't if it goes down, it's on me. I said to use this thing, and we're gonna use it. I'm fine, but, you know, I don't know. Slack is just so much bigger than just messaging too. Like, I mean, it has hundreds of integrations, thousands of integrations. I don't know. A lot a lot of integrations.

I don't think the once The Once version of the of it will, and I think that's part of can't.

Right? Not day 1. Like, maybe it has a few core ones. Right? But it can't have 300 in integrations day 1. I think that's very unlikely. So...

No. I don't I don't think so. And I think part of, I feel like part of What you're saying is, like, it's gonna be so operationally complex to run, and I don't I don't know if that's gonna be the case. Like, is this the kind of thing that you could just, like, Push to Heroku and have a, you know, a Postgres database on Heroku, and it just, like, it works? If so

For Userscape, yes. But for Shopify? Not for Shopify.

Maybe not maybe not for Shopify. Right. But, again, Shopify has already got hundreds of engineers that know how to run and scale rails out. Right?

But they all have other things to be doing too. Like, they're not

Do they? Who does any? Like, what

they don't always nobody's doing they got 2 engineers. People are worse siloed in those big Now nobody's doing anything.

When you have that many people, everybody's got slack. They're, you know, down downtime. I mean, they're just hanging out.

Somebody's responsible when it goes down. You know? If it's down at 2 AM on Christmas, who who's in charge of that? I don't know. Like Yeah. Somebody's gotta be in charge of it.

I feel like there's they're simplifying my guess. My guess is they're gonna simplify the piece of software to where you don't have hundreds of integrations. Maybe you receive webhooks and everything else you gotta figure out, right? You don't have screen sharing, you don't have huddles, you don't have themes, you don't have all this Stuff that Slack continues to bloat up with. Mhmm. And it is, operationally ready for Heroku or Maersk, which I think is their deployment thing they've invented.

Oh, that's camel whatever thing

Yeah. Whatever. You can just presumably, You know, point it at a digital ocean box, and it'll self set up. That would be my guess. And I think

Not for Shopify.

Well, no. You're you're saying Shopify.

Availability. You have some you have some you have some you have some you have some you have some stuff to it.

Let's talk small SMBs then. So you're talking 50 people...

Alright, fine.

You're talking 50 people, and you throw it up on Heroku, and suddenly you own all of your data, which who cares about that? I don't care about that. You own all of your data and you're not paying Slack these exorbitant fees. Now I think the problem with doing Slack first is everybody's going to have Slack open anyway. So now my company my company Slack is in, like, this once .com thing, and all my other Slacks are over in this other thing.

You mean if, what do you mean?

I mean, as a user, I'm logged into, like, My friends Slack and my open source Slack, and then I have switch over.

Networky aspect to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big a big thing for sure. I mean, I don't know. The thing is a small, medium business, like, alright, 50 users at $12 a user a month on the top. Is that what it is?

Do we have do we have real numbers Yeah.

I just looked at this the other day. I mean, there is like then an enterprise one that adds like really enterprise y enterprise y stuff, but that presumably if you're 20, 30, 50 users, you don't need that upper tier. So that one's a call me price, but the the highest 1250 month. Tier is 1250 business. So how do you get that $600 a month? I mean

When paying once a year, so that's how that gets you. So it's $15 a month, Month to month.

It's not expensive. I mean, I pay 8 a h refs $100 a month, so I can go in there once a month if that and poke on our s c like, I have I have literally 20 apps I pay $100 a month, and half of them I don't even use. So I don't know. And we're not that big, so I just think that's not a lot of money. I don't know. But everybody was like, it's so much money. It's not it's not much money.

$15 a month times 12 months in a year. I knew that one. That one I had memories times Fifty employees, $9,000 Yeah.

A year. Even $10. I'm paying $10

to Percona much money.

3 days to fix our database server. Like, this is, like, for 50 users all year long to use Slack, and I never have to worry about it down. I never have to back it up.

A 100 users. 18,000. Wow. That cut. It doubled. Yeah. That's not that much money.

It's just not that much money. Everybody's salary's $100,000 plus And but this thing that is that everybody uses all day long cost me $18,000 a year if I have a 100 people. That's not even 1 person's healthcare. What? So I'm just not making big biggest business decisions like this to save 1 person's health care.

They have gov slack at the very bottom if you're a government person.

There you go. Exactly. So but fine. Whatever. You're you have a culture in house of of security and wanting things done your way. There are definitely those people out there, But, you know, this is a very edge case type thing. On premise is now an edge case situation.

And So what is the main what is your main What's your main argument? Other people shouldn't pursue this as a business strategy, or this isn't going to work?

I mean, I don't think it's you know, again, this is so, like, because everybody's gonna be like, oh, you're an idiot. Look, DHA just said they sold 10,000 copies. And I don't I don't was what I was

I had that in my show notes for the next show. I'm ready to say that to you.

Yeah. They're gonna sell 10,000 copies or a 100,000. Whatever. They're gonna sell plenty. I'm not even saying they won't sell it because they are them. Right?

But Yes.

I just don't think you're going what he is portraying it as, what the ones.com website says And what he is portraying it as, I don't think is what's going to happen. And maybe they'll be able to roll out a few companies, then, hey. Look. Shopify uses it. Fine. Whatever. I do not think You

don't think the industry is swinging or think this has no effect at

all. Swing. I think that Slack is not even gonna notice this thing. I mean, some sales rep inside is gonna be annoyed that, like, they lost the Shopify account, fine, whatever, but I don't think that it's gonna be, like, you're gonna see Slack, I don't know. Even I mean, Slack, even if they did, like, Slack could crush them in a second and just be like, we're gonna have Slack on premise, and people will pay half $1,000,000 a year for that For those very edge case uses where people want some, for whatever reason, need it to be actually internal, but Yeah.

to do something. Money.

That's, hey, I don't know. That came up on the Twitter thread too. I wonder I think you're curious about how much, hey, actually,

they pay. Makes a lot of money.

I think it does. What we would consider a lot of money, but I don't think it's, like, a tiny percentage of base camp.

I think everything is 10% of of base camp.

Yeah. So by the way, take

a look at stuff

in the morning.

What does it make? A $100,000,000 a year?

Yeah. More. I think more. 100 of millions a year. So

it's project management.

I know. So I mean, they're just doing a cool thing they want to do. It's kind of like Laravel released pulse, right? Like, I mean, I think I would be cool for them to do is just, like, release it free. I mean, they're kind of doing that.

Yeah. That's that's funny. They're basically doing Open source, but not calling it open source. Right? I mean, what does the $1,000 mean to them?

Right. Nothing. Yeah.

But it's no support. It's source available. It's yeah. Right. That's interesting.

I think that I think the, It's flipped a little bit here in the open source framework world. I feel like the Laravel is the big dog and Rails is having to catch up a little bit, and this is kind of that, part of that part of that, I guess. It's like, here's a here's a way we can ship our production app. Yeah. You know, all all that kind of stuff. So Honestly help desk eventually. We'll see that once help

desk if you're listening, and if if you're not listening, Ian, you should tell Taylor this when you guys hang out next. You, Taylor, should do this. You should make production apps.

Right.

And then not not just not just sell the code. Just be like, yeah.

Just the code. Yeah. I mean, Taylor could definitely do the same thing. Right? We would love to see a Taylor Otwell Yes. Production app. Like, they would love to Yes. Go through that code with a fine tooth comb and, see how he does things and everything. And so

supposed to be that? Wasn't that a thing at

some point? He he built it. It was, like, built up built it. It was, like, built up built it. It was, like, Fully built. Yeah. But he didn't release it. But it was a I don't know. I don't think it was a was it gonna be self hosted?

I thought it was, like, a SaaS app that he was not gonna, like, was not gonna host and host it as assassin. He's basically just gonna, like, use it as a, yeah, as a reference material.

Right. I think you're right. Yeah. They could I mean, there is, like, a cost you

Can you imagine how much people would freak out if Taylor's sold code?

People will

be like, what are this? What are you doing? You're supposed to be open source ethos. Like, it's against the spirit.

While they took out their credit card and paid them for it? While the while

the rest of us are, like, oh, this is really cool. I'm gonna buy this today.

Right. I wanna see what he's doing. Yeah. I wanna see all the little helpers and little Yeah. Exactly. Built in. Although, I don't think I think Taylor's thing the thing with Taylor is I I think a lot of his stuff, it it really is just, like, very pure Laravel. Like, I mean, I'm sure he has his little things or whatever, but a lot of those little things just make their way into So, like Yeah. Like, yeah, I I had to do this thing, so I put it in the Laravel.

But what if he made, like, a Slack plug and sold it?

Right. Man, that was an idea.

The one if you made a Slack clone that had a back end, it had a native PHP, you know, desktop front end, and he was like, hey, man. I just you know, I made this $1,000.

I like it.

That'd be awesome.

Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know, man. Are you gonna use this thing on any projects? How about that?

Am I gonna use what?

1 the ones.com/ I

don't know anything about Rails. I'm not gonna sign up to host that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Not that excited about it. Not gonna do that.

That excited not that excited about it. I am excited I am excited to see how it does. I'm excited I'm excited to see, you know, rejuvenation in the Rails ecosystem. I'm excited to see a return to simplicity. I feel like that is for all of his faults and foibles, DHH is very much like, y'all are making this too complicated.

That, but yeah.

But he did say, like, I used to be IDHH used to be a hardcore Cynic and fighter, and I would just argue with everyone about everything. And I've just realized that's not what I wanna do with my life. I'm like, hey. Cool.

Good good for you, man.

So

I I'm I'm here for the the He's on the comeback trail?

Yeah. I'm here for the Rehabilitation of DHH. I think that's great. But now I'm not gonna use it.

Character. Yeah. Yeah. I can't Can't. Yeah. I can't. Just the rails part of it, obviously. Like, every time I ever try to do anything with rails, I'm like, yeah, this whole, like, getting it going stories

Getting it going. Maybe it's tough.

Now, but Yeah. I never like the getting it going story. It's like No.

They don't have a clean onboarding story.

Yeah. Yeah. When are they gonna get their herd? You know herd herd for rails is coming at some point here.

It's got to. Man, I have said so many times, if I knew the first thing about Rails or wanted to, you know, find a niche in the in the industry, I would just copy everything that Laravel has done for rails. I really would.

I feel like that's a that's a solid game plan.

Like, 4 or 5 friends together and start a little agency and be like, alright. What do we do? Pulse? They came out with something called Pulse. What is it? We're doing it.

Like, you

don't even have you don't even have to have an original thought.

No. It's so fun. Like, that's the way businesses work Forever, really. Right? Like, people would go overseas and, like, oh, we discovered this thing in Europe, and we brought it back here. Now we do it here, like, And nobody knows what

that is. But smaller, and we call it espresso. It's like, oh, that's a great idea.

Exactly. Like, we'll just bring it here and make it a thing and brand it with a cool brand name. Now, like, people are all about it and mix it with whatever, and it's, like yeah. Like, just take I mean, this is a whole other conversation, but, like, repurposing ideas and Remixing ideas, like, this is the way you do things. Like, if you're out there trying to start a business, that's how you start a business.

That restaurant down the street, it makes a lot of money. Maybe I'll make 1 I'll make a restaurant.

Over and over. It's like Right. That's kinda hard. Right. And it's like, we'll find recipes, but

What do we have? We've got Horizon, Pulse, Nova, Envoyeur even. Like, if you wanna do full on SaaS, you could do something like Envoyeur. There's just so many things, HEARD, native, PHP. There's so many things that we have that Rails just does simply. Yeah.

Shit, I think. I mean, shift for rails. Like, that would be

something that

I think. I mean, maybe some of those stuff exists. But

Yeah. Like, Passport, Socialite, all of that stuff. You know, there's there's a question of, like, how do you get rich doing it? And I think, You know, reinventing Socialite feels like a lot of work for just like an open source product. Yeah.

But if

you were to reinvent Pulse in Rails, You can see a hybrid model there for sure.

Yeah. For sure.

You do the open source thing, and you also have a hosted version where people can add cards and stuff like that. Like

Yeah. Or there's, like, ultra premium cards or something. Like, one of the more complicated ones are are paid add ons or something like that. Like Yeah. I don't know. I I you don't see that as much as I would think you should for sure. I don't know why that is. Even like a Laracast. Like, I mean, there's lots of Ruby on Rails video courses and things, but I don't think there's, like, a Laracast that's like

There's a a

facto standard.

There's Chris Oliver's thing. Yeah. Railscasts. Railscasts. Him?

Maybe it is.

Is that him or no?

I haven't looked at rails in so long. I I honestly don't know what's going there in the last, like

Go Rails.

Tell me.

Go Rails.

Okay. Yeah. So that's at least out there. But, yeah. I I don't know. It does seem like you're You're you're always ahead when you start with an idea you know works and then build off that versus, like, trying to invent an idea that you don't know if it'll work. Then if you wanna do that, then that's when you definitely gotta have, like, VC money and all that. That's when you

For sure.

You need to risk other people's money, but those ideas you don't know are gonna work, and Yeah. You give up the equity. Yeah.

So if you're listening and you know Rails, everything we talk about, just steal it and Just steal it.

Steal it from Laravel. All this goes well. Don't go to this list. This is the

first time. Dot com, and just, like that. Just start copy and pasting. Speed it into chat g p t and say turn this from Ruby to or from PHP to Ruby.

The next thing I want to take over in PHP slash Laravel land is it's super annoying to me that like all this AI stuff, I don't know if you've how much you've dug into account the AI ecosystem, but and a lot of other areas too. Like, it's all Python. Yeah. Oh, man. I want Hate to see that. I want PHP to be the default. Like, I gotta be Python. I don't wanna Nobody wants Python.

Nobody likes Python.

Python actually is yeah. They've I have a whole Python story. But, anyway, yes. I don't I'd, I want PHP to be or, like and tons of these sites also, like, they don't, Like, I have all these SDKs. They don't have PHP. I'm the,

I don't

know, PHP.

I know

why you have all this esoteric language. We didn't talk to this before, but Anyway. Alright. What else is up there? I don't think there's everybody should just go back and watch the original take if you want more on that because I feel like it's all the same. Like, the ones It's

all the same. Is I think I think it's gonna

work everything and

fabulously well for them. And Yeah.

I think they'll sell a lot because they're gonna

sell a lot and

That's what I saw on Twitter. He could do if you if there was a 37 signals toaster, People would buy that toaster. It's so out of the toaster. People would be very excited about the toaster because it's the h h, and he put his thumb on a toaster, and, you know, it would have some Cool button that did something or is a weird shape or whatever. And, you know, and it'd be awesome, and people would buy a buck.

Meta takeaway there. You gotta

get a big audience. You can

sell anything.

Audience. Yes. You could sell. You only need a few percent of a large audience to make it the dollars add up to a large number.

Yep.

So, Yeah. I don't know. We've had we're what is that? 105. I know. We have 1 other card that we haven't got to. You wanna should we touch on this one quick?

Oh, no. That's a long one.

That's a long one. I feel I feel like that's a yeah.

That's a ranty one. We can't go

there yet. Alright. We'll keep this a nice short. We're giving the people a long ones. Next week's probably gonna be a long one. So, we will wrap it. Thanks everybody for Joining us, definitely make sure you check out Justin's, video. He's super good. We'll have it linked below, but definitely check that out. Follow us on the Twitter, Mostly Tech Pod, most technical.com and, email us at mostly technical podcast at Gmail. Talk to you next week.