11: We’re not paying $40K for a domain

Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.

Hi. I'm Gavin Ty, sales and marketing. Welcome to our b to b SaaS journey. Very good. What are we doing? What this podcast about?

We're building 6Sides.co. It's an events platform. It helps you build a stronger community through events. This is our b to b SaaS journey. And today, we've got a special guest. We've got in the in the livestream, rather, we've got Michael. He won't be joining us on the show, but we've got our first live viewer. And I'm very curious how this came about because I haven't sent anybody the link.

So I'm wondering if this was you. Well, good powers of deduction, mate. I thought this was gonna be

I'm a genius.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you can't put one past you. Oh, no. Me and Michael connected on LinkedIn this morning. Actually, we're just chatting backwards and forwards, and he was talking about Apollo and how he has feels a great sense of power because he has access to those people he couldn't get to before, and I just invited him along before wasn't doing anything. So Yeah.

Awesome. Yep. Excellent. Well, you've you've converted him because he when I was talking with him about this, I think I mentioned last week, he it was a bit of, like, dark magic or something. It felt a bit a bit sus, so that's good. It's it's very powerful, Apollo. Awesome. Mate, well, what do we wanna get into today?

Reviews. Right? We got a few more reviews from last week.

We do.

I don't think you reviewed us yet, Michael. So, hopefully, at the end of today, you might review us. But, yeah, we got a few. Do you wanna read them out? You've got a good one from Justin Jackson from Transistor.

I did. Yeah. So this I I gotta apologize, Justin, because you commented this back in March when we first kicked off the show. But because of the way that the Apple Podcast works in the app, it only shows us reviews from where you're viewing it from, so from Australia for us. So I hadn't even seen that you'd done this.

That's excellent. Thanks hon.

And then we do have a bunch more. So there's one I'll call out from Roman at Wreck It who said, great to hear real stories as they happen and that we're building in public and that he's loving it. I have a bunch from some of my friends here as well. I've got Jake, Dylan, and I don't actually know who this is, Cheese and Beans. So whoever they are, thank you very much.

Alright. So, Mitch, if people wanna ask us a question or or get in contact with us just at the beginning of the show, how can I do that?

Yep. So we have an email which got its first use this week, which is great. So the email is journey@6sides.co. There'll be a link in the show notes. And we got an email from someone named Gavin Ty. It's a great great guy. I've I've seen him before. He sent us an email about AI agents, which we might be able to get into Interesting. Today. Yeah. So if, again, if you're out there and you want us to talk about anything, shoot us an email. That might be a good way to to get in front of us.

Cool. Awesome. Alright. So let's where do wanna begin, mate? How was your week last week? How about we do that week and review?

Yeah. Sure. Well, this last week has been awesome because we got the marketing website up. So if you head to 6sides.co now, it used to just be kind of a, like, coming soon and had, like, a little bit of information about the LariCon Australia app that we did last year. But now if you go to it, it's got a lot more information.

Squarespace, mate. Well, it's

that's true. We could have. That's the thing. Like and no shitting on people that do. Like, there are plenty of good sites out there that are like that, but that's not what I want

to do. It's like a chef using, like, frozen meals. Right? Like Yeah. Not a chance. Yep.

Yes. Exactly. So no shade if you are using a Wix or a Squarespace or whatever. That's fine. But, yeah, that wasn't for us. That was me.

Our civilians have no choice, mate, because I there's no way I could do what you do. So

Yeah. Oh, I don't know. You've been showing me some crazy stuff that you were doing off that that idea you had last week. Lovable. Yeah.

Yep. Okay. Cool. Well, my week in review, I started, doing lead gen. Right? So at the moment, I'm doing cold email, just going out to a small subset of a type of businesses. But it's a funny thing, like, it and it's not doing too much. Right? Because we've gotta ramp up. We don't wanna ruin our domain, all that kind of stuff.

Well, I know that on that, like, you had asked me, hey. Can you check out our

DKIM and

DMARC? Yeah. SPF and or whatever it is yeah the DKIM and DMARC and all of those things that you have to have in place for sending emails and I did it took a little bit of time because it's a bit confusing to be honest with you what you have to do and you don't want to get it wrong but all of the tools that I then tested with where it's like hey send us an email and we'll tell you if all your stuff's aligned properly all of those said that it was fine so is is HubSpot still saying that it's not?

That's not HubSpot. It's Apollo. So

Oh, okay.

Saying that there is. I'm just having a look at it now.

It's saying that it's got a problem?

Let me run it. It's still saying there's a problem. I'll just refresh it. Yeah. It's still saying the demark is not right. So that's probably what's going on. Okay. It's a bit of a walk. Yeah.

I'm glad you've only tried to 25 then.

Oh, well, I just don't do that. We don't need a thousand. Yeah. So I would say something like that's happening, but we can talk about it later on how to maybe fix it.

So Yeah. Sure. Okay. Something for us to look at.

But a funny thing happens when you do put effort out, Certain things come it's always happened to me, and it feels a little bit, la la la, whatever the word is. But as soon as you put effort out and you do stuff, things come in. So we had a really interesting, I got invited to do something. Like, I don't even know why I'm bringing it up because I can't give too much information away. But it's a really good opportunity that we think could actually help send us on, like, send us on our way in a really innovative way.

Yeah. It's just exciting that there's things happening. You know? So we'll reveal more as we can Yep. And and where it makes sense. Yeah. Cool. What else have we had happen? We had a meeting with our WA client, and that went really well. We showed them what we're thinking for the Six Sides app so not building individual apps for different events and similar feedback to what Michael gave me when I showed him last week our ideas and the feedback was great.

Yeah. Absolutely. Two for two. Yeah. Yep.

They're gonna have a really great time for one. It's a really good bunch of people. Michael puts on a great conference. He selects great talks. You'll hear a lot of interesting stuff about Laravel, about technology in general, and you will get to use the new Six Sides app so you'll get to actually see for yourself what the heck we're talking about if you go attend LaraCon and if you do I'd love to meet you because I'll definitely be there so very excited.

So is it for people who are thinking about getting into Laravel or people who use it, the PHP framework? Did I say that right? You

did. Absolutely. Yeah. So Laravel is a PHP framework. Yes.

Is it for people thinking about getting into development, or is it for

people who

are established? What what's the

It's both for for for everyone. So all different skill levels or familiarity levels I guess absolutely it's it's for everyone so there'll be different talks that target different levels of skill within Laravel but again there's talks that kind of cover you don't have to be a developer a Laravel developer I mean obviously it's probably beneficial but there'll be talks there that cover a wide range of technologies last year there were talks on design which is great. There'll be potentially business talks. Potentially there'll be Yep.

Is there any sales strategy talk there about people thinking about taking your product to market? I don't know.

There might be. I don't know.

I don't know. Is there? There there there might be.

There could be. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Michael's talking it here.

It definitely makes sense.

Yep. Yeah. That's right. So Michael's right. Not just developers, and he said here in the chat, try to cover the gamut for people writing but also using it.

Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Okay. Alright. So there's a few things on this list today, Mitch. Where do we want to oh, give us an update on the I'm been looking forward this week. Give us an update on the.com.

Yeah. You you're ready, though.

Air shaped.

Yes. So my god. So if you're following along, we have engaged with GoDaddy. They have this broker service where they kind of reach out to the current owner. Right?

US?

Yeah. US. Yep. You know what?

He's probably got inquiries from that and then this now, and he's like, oh, there's a market for it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's yeah. Anyway, so that is definitely beyond our budget for now. So we we're not interested at at that rate, but the the broker is still working on it. Their own tools seem to place it at like 3 and a half grand or something like that. So the broker thinks that this is way overvalued and and this guy's just being sentimental about it. Apparently, he's had it for a very long time and thinks he's really got something there. And, I mean, we do as well.

I think there's just other things for us to worry about. I think for another letter, like, people will come to the website, they'll bookmark it, or they'll know it, and it'll be fine. I I

said Yeah.

I think we're we're okay. And then your the reasoning for having just one app to upload or to update is we're just gonna have one app now, so it's gonna be easier for that. I think it'll be okay, mate. So yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah. Sorry. Didn't work out. I know it meant a lot to you, but I will buy you a letter m somewhere along the line and give it to you.

Get me one like one of those neon ones to put in the background there.

Oh, yeah.

Just the letter m. Yeah. There are people coming to my office. They'll be like, what the fuck are you doing? What's this

m? Yeah.

Anyway, that's alright. Yeah. Alright. What what to next?

K. So we're in week eleven. Right? As we've gone on, we're trying to keep this streamlined. Where are we with software?

Sure. So I'm using for development the services that I pay for PHP Storm, which is the editor of choice that I use. I have used that for many years now and love it. A recent addition has been Cursor which is another editor that we've talked about over the last couple weeks but that's an AI powered editor which has been very helpful so you can go back and listen to past episodes about that. What else am I using?

Interesting for some people. You just Imagine LaraCon AU in November, god.

Imagine if every time you bought up something sales y, I was like, yeah. Boring. This sucks. Boo. Yeah. Imagine how you would feel.

Well, you do well, you don't say that, but you go, yeah. I'll do that, and then you don't. It's the same thing.

Sometimes. Sometimes. Anyway, so, yeah, we are using AWS currently for everything that we do. So we're hosting databases and we use serverless functions, Lambda using Laravel Vapor for those in the know, and that's all going quite well, but it is expensive. All of the serverless choices is is expensive.

Sure.

To host What would you

say the software costs on your side would be? We don't keep track we're not keeping track of that at moment.

No. I think we we still gotta go through and square up and figure out like, what cost did we each incur before we started the bank account now have like a card that we can use to pay for stuff. We gotta go through that. I mean, that's probably gonna help tell us what we're actually spending money on.

Hang sorry. Hey. Can

you say

hello to Mitch?

Hello.

Alright. I'm doing a podcast, buddy, and people are

gonna be listening to you.

So I'm gonna have to let you go. K? Give me a kiss.

Did you have fun? No.

Yeah? Say hi, Mitch. Hi. Say bye, Mitch. Hi, Mitch. Remember we had dinner

with me

and Nicole? Yep. Alright. Sorry, mate. Hang on.

No worries.

I should go, mate. I'm having a podcast. Livestream podcast.

Yeah. Very cute. Yep.

Yeah. Sorry, mate.

No. No worries. Well, eventually, I'll get all of your family in as, like, guests on the podcast.

Yeah. Yeah.

At some point, I'll have to get Nicole in as well. Maybe we can get our dogs. I can record them barking or something.

We'll see. Absolutely. Yeah. So

I don't know what that number is. I know our our hosting costs, like, $500 a month at the moment, which is insane when, you know, we've only run one event on the platform. So that's why we're really looking at, okay, what other options have we got? But beyond that, I don't know. It's probably maybe $200 a month or something like that that we're spending across everything else. Sure. Pretty lean at the moment. What about you?

So on on my side, I I use Apollo, which is a cold outreach platform, which is about maybe $30 a month. I actually don't know the cost. I I I can't remember. Yep. But then we're using Reloom to design the website and and collaborate.

It's been really impressive, the stuff you sent me through, honestly.

Oh, mate, I'm having trouble connecting, OpenAPI's, Whisper API to the platform, which is

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is love to work through it. Yep. So and that's it. Like, that's basically I try to keep it really lean. Like, we're using a free version of HubSpot, which we we don't have a lot of opportunities at the moment. We're not really going out to people for that. So it's that's really that's really it. So Yeah.

We got two more visitors.

No. No. Just open the door, say goodbye, and shut the door again.

That's Definitely going in the in the guest list for sure.

Oh, we we use Riverside for this, and then we probably use Transistor as well.

Definitely use Transistor. Yeah. That's right. So we do use both. We looked at some other recording tools, but the editing story wasn't quite as good as Riverside. Like, I can get this we'll record for an hour. I can get it edited and and post it ready to go in about twenty minutes now. So very quick.

May maybe we can do that once a month here is just list our costs, like what we're using and if it changes because it's gonna change. It's gonna increase. Right?

Yeah. Maybe we'll list it if it changes. Once we kind of hit a steady state, I don't think it will change all that much. Yeah. But, yeah, for for sure, we can we can start listing it.

I think we'd probably start bringing in services. Right? Like, we've used the Upwork to do our some of our overview docs and all that kind of stuff. So yeah. Yeah. But but I think we've gotta keep it lean because we're not going for volume. Right? We just wanna cover our costs for now. We're in a learning phase as well. Yeah.

Right? And it's Well, I'm really excited, like, genuinely to share some more of what we're doing, but I just I don't have it ready yet. I've experimented with some different things. I showed you a little demo yesterday of something cool that we're doing that I think will really help cut costs. And Michael in the chat has said, get rid of the serverless nonsense.

Well,

Michael actually also called out way earlier before we got started recording that I'm rocking the old merch, which is true. So way early on, and this impressed me about working with you, you were like, mate, we gotta get some shirts. We gotta do something. You you got us some some jumpers as well, which was interesting because it was like midsummer when we got them. So we're I'm currently rocking the the event kit logo shirt, which I put together in November maybe, I think.

I sure mate, I'm a hoarder of T shirts. I've had to I don't had to cull some T shirts. I think I got rid of one. I've got a couple more. They're still there. I've still got the jumper because I wear the jumper.

Yep.

But I've gotta we do need to get some more shirts and some jumpers because I've got this big hairy audacious plan that I think I'm gonna need a jumper for Mhmm. Which we'll find out on Monday. Yeah. Well, we'll start that process on Monday. So I will start ordering some, some more shirts. I won't go crazy. I won't put the .co on there because if it

goes No. Gonna be Just say Google. Yeah. Google six sites. Yeah. We don't know what our domain is yet, but yeah. That's No. No. It would be

.co. So, yeah, we'll start ordering some more shirts. I think once it becomes it's official, and then we'll just I'll just have a rack here depending on what I'm doing and what you're doing. You'd take your shirt off. Well, not at the moment. Like, you just change your your clothes.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm with that's what I do here before I have a meeting. Like, if I come in and I'm just in a basic T shirt or whatever and I wanna look a little more presentable, I've got, like, some some plain black T shirts here that I'll just swap into before a call.

Yep. Yep. Fair

enough. That's life. Cool. Cool. Well, we will get that sorted. I would like it might be an interesting strategy for us to send merch to customers as, like, an appreciation, you know, for them coming on board, especially while we're in this early part of our our journey. I've heard about people doing that before, and, I mean, Michael's here. Maybe we can send him something once we get some merch of our own sorted. Yeah. And then same for the the WA crew.

So

So I do that with

with sales market fit when people become a client. Like, I'll I've got a, like, a it's a a water bottle, metal water bottle, bladder, but also a metal coffee cup or a wine glass depending on the time of day. So I give them that as well. So, yeah, that does it's a appreciation thing.

Yeah. It's a nice nice little gift. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Cool. Okay. We'll sort that out. So I'm gonna move that topic over here. So we've got two other things on the list here. I know you wanted to keep this one a little shorter today. Yep. So you sent via email. I I talked about this earlier.

Jeremy another Gavin Ty in the world, just to let you know.

Yeah. Oh, okay.

When I had another job one so when I in my early life, when I was early twenties, I used to work for a carpet cleaning company, and they sent me to this guy's house called Gavin Ty. And I went there, and they thought it was they thought I was putting in a hoax. And I met him. He lives in Brisbane. He was then a prison guard. Then, yeah, it was like, wow, you're Gavin Ty.

So no

relation. Just But so it could have

been- When I was a bit younger, Yeah. I I I don't know why, but I went and searched on Facebook, and I found, like, eight other Mitchell Davises, and I just added them all. I thought it would be a bit of fun. And quite a few of them added me back. And then now every now and then, I'll just see, like, a random update from some other version of me out there in the world. It's been fun.

Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. Well, look.

You wanna get into what

Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. Sorry.

Oh, Michael just sent through there's another company to look at for some merch, which looks pretty cool. Have a look at it. Yep.

Okay. Alright. Yeah. We'll suss them out.

Apparently, I haven't read this email, but apparently it was from a Gavin Ty talking about AI agents. I thought, well, that's an interesting topic. So I started investigating AI agents.

Can you explain what that is?

Yeah. I don't to be honest, I'm still figuring that out. Right? I'm building an AI well, I'm calling it an AI agent in a thing called SalesBuddy, but essentially, I want it to be human assisted AI where it helps people do be like, learn and position their messaging better and and help them with clients and all that stuff. But that's what I'm doing with sales buddy.

What what sort of things are you thinking about being able to use an agent for to help us with?

It's easy for me to talk to this in sales market fit because it's more established. Right?

Sure.

So creating consistent mark or consistent content that resonates across different channels is a real challenge. So what I was thinking of there is I've got this white paper that talks about this philosophy of sales market fit, which is kinda like product market fit. And I was trying to build an AI agent to extract ideas out of the white paper to turn into content and do that. But I can do that now. Like, I can do that within ten minutes if I want to.

Sure. Yeah. Break it

down into smaller ones, then maybe they break down into blog posts, Then maybe they break down into tweets. Maybe they break down into something. But if we could do one piece of pillar, one pillar piece of content, and it breaks down into 10 or 20 others and can post it because the posting's the hardest part, is the most time consuming part and and writing the that's maybe that's a good place to start. Right?

Okay. Right. Yeah. Okay. So this is all specifically around content and marketing and not like automating any other processes within our business. Right? This is this is the first cab off the ring.

I think I think so. We gotta get our message out there. We're still refine we I think we're onto our value prop.

Like, it

feels like that we we kinda know what our ideal client profile is and our ideal market segment. There's some stuff I've gotta do on my side. But I think the agent there like, let's not get too complicated. Like, that's where I that's what I was trying to be. I was trying to be too complicated, I think, the other day, and I got stuck.

Yeah. Yep. Well Yep. It it's interesting because Michael actually Michael Dorinda also cohosts North Meets South Web Audio podcast, Michael. I think I've got that. I'll leave a link because he was talking about this with his cohost Jake, and I was just listening to it this morning about feeding a video into one of these AI tools

K.

And then it being able to generate blog posts and other articles, things like that from a video. And I thought that was really interesting. And just so it turns out, I think this applies to a bit to what you're talking about. So Yeah. Yeah.

So so what I what I did then is because I was trying to use AI to do something instead of figuring and then I thought, hang on a sec. Go back up. What's the process I wanna create then get AI to help to help achieve that as opposed to using AI to do create something, which is, I think, it felt like it was the wrong wrong way around. Right? So Yep.

Oh, I I agree. And you you have really opened my eyes to what's possible. So, props to you. I think your your strategy is working of human assisted.

Yep. Right?

AI. That's what you're calling.

Anyone has yes. That's right. If anyone has any feedback or any or, like, on how to do this, please send us a email on journey at six sides, or you can reach out to us on Twitter. We've got a Twitter account, six sides, and also well, actually, it's a different name, a six sides app with events, I think.

Six sides events. It it's in the show notes. I've already started including that.

I'd love to get some feedback on on on it as well.

Yeah. Something else I'd like feedback on is I changed it up for episode 10, and I think moving forward, I changed up the intro music. We used to have this, like, sitar thing, and I was like, yeah. This is kinda cool, but it then just felt like a bit of a drop off from this super high energy, like, five seconds that then drop off into, hey. How's it going?

It was good. Yeah. I listened to it a little bit the other day. It's feels kinda weird listening to your own thing, but, yeah, it was That's alright.

Started doing that. I went back and listened to, like, some of our week three and four, which is now, like, two months ago. And, yeah, it's really interesting. Like, you were just recovering from the cyclone two months ago. Mhmm.

No. No. What what what's what are you working on next week, mate?

So we I'm back to working on the mobile app now, which is awesome. Marketing site has been fun, but I I mentioned to you yesterday we spoke on the phone and I just said like I'm it's taking a lot of my time doing the marketing side. And it feels like a bit of a a black hole that you can just, like, keep working away on this thing and never I can never be a % happy with it that it's fully covered everything that I wanted it to do. Yep. And finding, like, photos or updating content and just tweaking it, it's like it's a never ending story.

That's it. That's how

Won't be holding my breath.

They they yeah. That's right. It's I think it's safe to say they were really impressed. I could see Holly, she said, you should see all the page of notes that I had of how we could use this to drive engagement and all this other stuff. We're even thinking about, which might be something for you to consider, Michael, an artistic photo competition and then have people vote on it so they can get marketing content for next year at no cost.

Yeah.

But where which could help us get our name out there and, and also support a very important cause here in Australia. Yeah. Lots of fun things.

Yeah. Well, hopefully, we can talk more on that later. Alright, mate. Well, I guess we'll we'll wrap it up there. So if you would like to if you would be so kind as to leave us a rating and a review, we would love to read that out next week. Send us an email, journey@6sides.co. Let us know what you think of the show. And, Gavin, where can people find you?

On LinkedIn is the easiest place. Gavin Ty, t y e. Find me on LinkedIn, or you can reply to Journey@6Sides.co, and, yeah, get that email as well.

Yeah. Awesome. And I'm Mitch Dav on basically everything. Links to everything in the show notes. Thank you, Michael, for being our first live viewer.

Hanging out the whole time. I thought you would've jumped off. I would've ages ago.

Five minutes. Yeah. These guys are idiots. I don't know what they're doing, But that's alright. Thank you for persevering, and we will catch you all next time.

Alright.