19: Burnout and reducing stress, while building to committed customer deadlines

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

Good day, Mitchell. I'm Gavin Tye, sales and marketing, the other cofounder of Six Sides, and welcome to our b to b SaaS journey.

Excellent. Okay. New intro today. I like it. How are going?

I'm very well, mate. How are you?

Yeah. I'm good. I'm good. We'll we'll get into how I'm going in a in a minute, but first, a couple shout outs. So we've been looking at all the numbers, all the metrics. We've got all the analytics in Transistar, and we wanna give a shout out to some of our regular listeners in Taiwan, Missouri in The US, The Netherlands, Portugal, Macedonia, and Spain. So that's that's a pretty good, like, global reach for two idiots out of Australia. Right? So Yep. It's not bad.

Yeah. We're starting to get, you know, get our name out there a little bit. It's a slow burn run. So

It is. But it's fun, though. It's a fun slow burn. So, we appreciate you being along for the journey. Yep. Then Yep. Also, I'd like to give a shout out to Michael Drinder from, Laricon Australia for two things. He gave me some feedback on using Expo. So, clearly, he's been listening, which is great. And then he also, off the back of last week's episode where we sent a Slack connect invite to, the guys over at Laravel Live Denmark, who are one of our first customers.

I haven't got one.

Yep. Well, maybe Michael could send you one after this episode comes out. I won't say anything. How about that? Let's see if you you end up getting an invite.

Come on, Michael. Yep. There's there's Mitch is a cofounder, not the founder.

That's right. Well, he's kinda got the inside track. He was he was there all along. Right? So maybe it's on purpose.

And I was speaking to Hirilee, if anyone's listened back, I think episode three right at the beginning.

Yeah. It's early days.

Very far back. He was, he was saying he listens to it every week as well, and he is trying to be consistent in his follow-up and tenacious with sales. He's like, I just listened to what Mitch says. Apparently, you're pretty good. I don't agree with that. But, he said agree with that. That I'm good. I'm just a normal salesperson. Please. Yeah.

Shout out to Rollie. Excellent. So, Gav, have you got any sales updates, progress updates for us?

Yeah. I do actually. So last week, we briefly spoke about the change in strategy instead of trying to sell, go and make an observation at an event and then make a recommendation. So I've actually implemented that on I think I had three meetings last week. Every one of them are very receptive to it.

This is

big deal stuff. So, yeah, it feels like the universe I'm always looking out for signs when it comes to, sales, especially b to b enterprise sales or or high like, big ticket sales. Because a sale doesn't just happen in that instance, but what you will get is feedback from the market that's a indicator of you're on the right track. Like, you will get signs, signals that it is the right thing. And since we started doing this, since I that proposal, just even with all these meetings, everyone said yes to that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. The all the indications that I've seen are really strong that we've got something good here.

Yep.

So, man, bring that on when we finally got that ready and you can start showing that and we can kill off the all the old infrastructure and everything that we've got, I bring on that as well. So

Yep. Yep. And I and I have a I've been working on something in my other businesses like this AI b to b coach, sales coach called Deal Buddy. So a next step for me this week and next week is to run six sides through that process to get up and running because it needs to be configured to a business. And then I'm gonna use it as a salesperson, not as a founder, but to approach companies.

Yeah. Yep. Hey. Bring it on. That's really exciting. So looking forward to seeing that because I've seen with Deal Buddy specifically, I've seen, like, early things that your develop early, like, UI and implementation that your developers were working on. So really keen to actually see it in action. Yep. And and So I'll have a link to that in the show notes if you're curious. Check it out. Deal buddy with an I at the end.

Yeah. And and anda.com.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yes. It's not yeah. Not a .jealous.

Yeah. No. So that brings us to, you know, getting this interest. But at the end of the day, you've gotta deliver it. You've gotta build it. Right? So and you're you're starting to feel a pinch.

I am feeling the burn. So, yes, I have been working really, really hard to get this over the line because we have a self imposed deadline of today, later today basically to have the first version of the app up and available in TestFlight, which is Apple's kind of built in testing program where you can get early access to apps basically. So we had planned with two of our early customers to give them access on this date, which is the July 7, to give them access to this early version of the app. And we're on track for that. It's not as far along as in terms of being, like, fully developed as I would have liked, but I've been working my butt off to try and get this thing done, like, the last few weekends aside from some social events and stuff with family and things, like, just spending every waking minute that I can to just try and get this done.

Sure.

That, man, I've really been grinding away at this for, like, a good month now, and it's starting to get to be a bit much.

Yep. Okay. Can we talk her through that a little more?

Yeah. 100%.

So I guess well, one, you're going through a learning phase because when we first started talking, you you did say, hey. I've kind this is uncharted territory for you. Although you have many, many years developing experience, building something that is that we want to scale and then this capacity around different geographies, this is all new for you. Like, a lot of it's new for Not not new for you, but a lot of it's

new All the all the infrastructure, putting servers, databases, whatever overseas, specifically all this usage of Cloudflare, all of that's new to me. Yeah. So it has been a huge task to learn all of that.

Yep. And so well, when I first and foremost, I think you're doing an amazing job.

Thank you.

I don't know how development works, but I'm getting an insight into that. I've always suspected that it's a way bigger job than your than your maybe ready to admit. I don't know if that's the right word because I know that you've said, oh, it should be pretty straightforward. And I'm like, I don't know development, but I know it is way harder than what you're letting on. And you don't know until you you start getting into it. Right?

And Yeah.

And it's like, well, I'm fucking in it now. I can't get out of it. I've gotta keep going forward. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right. And look, some of that is also trying to like, if I say, oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, like, this might take a day to do. Yep. Some of that is it's always a a bet. There's no, like, oh, if someone comes to you and they want this task done, it's gonna take you exactly thirty seven minutes. Like, that's not life doesn't work like that. Right?

Yeah. Sure. You're also my observation is you're a perfectionist. You it has to be per like, it has to be perfect. I'm not saying it shouldn't be perfect, but you I think it feels like you're building you're trying to build out a lot of the functionality while you're going so you don't have to come back and do it again at a later stage.

Yeah.

But I do think that if we think about your mental state or anyone's mental state, bro, yours, mine, because I was down a couple of weeks ago, that there's only a certain amount of capacity we have to use before we start draining and we we get into the red, which is where you're you're approaching the red now. It's like, okay. How do I do I how do I stay on and, like, stay on task and not get distracted by the cool the cool things? And and you know what I mean?

Yeah. It's funny you bring that up. So I talked about this with Nicole, my fiancee, and I was like I told her that I I did sorry. Set the stage for this emoji thing. I was thinking it might be cool to have a way for people to while they're sitting there in the crowd at a talk to quickly, like, have a shared sense of how's the crowd feeling about this.

Google Meet's do it. Like, he he's yeah.

Oh, Google Meet is yeah. Cool. So it's like it's a thing. Right? If you're watching a live video or you're on a call or whatever, you get the option to, like, spam an emoji or something like that and it appears on the screen and whatever. So something like that, I thought, okay. That'll be pretty cool. And then I put together just a screenshot. I didn't make it work yet at that point. I put together a screenshot, and I sent it over to you of, hey.

Okay. So okay. So I think there's a one I think there's an opportunity cost. Right? Like, the of doing something that does take some headspace, but it is what it is.

Yeah. Look. I I know that the burnout that I'm feeling is temporary. I've dealt with this before.

I've talked yeah.

Yeah. I had a huge amount of burnout right in the lead up to that talk at LariCon, and I didn't have the opportunity to just like, I can't say, oh, sorry, Michael. I'm just not gonna give the talk.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wasn't possible. Right? So this happens. I'm instantly, though, put back in that same place of, yeah. Wow. Okay. This is what it's like when you're overworked. So with all this being said, I'm going on a holiday a week from today when we do the recording. Right? So I'm going to Bali, which is just a short flight couple hours north of here, which is awesome.

So not I'm sorry.

Yeah. And and to be clear, I'm okay with that, but I think it will really help to have, like, some other stuff to focus on because it is kind of it's getting to be a lot at the moment.

Okay. So last week, we had last week, we had, Chris do some work. One of your other employees do some work in business, and that seemed like we got a shit ton done on that side of the back end. Right? Yeah. Is there any capacity for us to to use him again in the stuff that you're working on now? Like, has he got the ability to do

that? Potentially. Yeah. He's not as strong suited, and he would be the first to say this, so I'm not throwing him under the bus. He's not as strong suited for front end, which the the mobile app is all front end. So, he does not feel strong in terms of design and, like, making decisions on where things should live on a page and stuff like that. He's amazing with dealing with data and the back end side of things. Mhmm. But, yeah, the front end is in his strength. So it's a little tricky.

So what what what about utilizing him again for doing what he was doing more with the dashboards and stuff? Eventually, you're gonna get to that point you need to pay attention to. So I understand peaks and troughs. You know, we're not gonna get out of that. But to try to smooth out in a few you know, it's not gonna help next week or, like, it one, I don't ideally, don't do any work while you're away, but I understand that you may have to do a couple of hours.

your best friend. Yeah. I won't be spending a lot of time at the beach.

Surprise. Nicole, I have to go do some work.

You just really wanna get out of sun. She knows. Yeah.

But at least trying to smooth out some of that work, like, that you're gonna have to get to. I'm I'm completely open for it.

Yeah. It the so the tricky thing with that is that with the phase that we're in now, it's really hard to design the back end APIs in isolation. So you kind of need to know, okay, what does the app need?

Right. Okay.

So that you can then provide it from the back end. Right? Yeah. Okay. Gotcha.

Yeah. Okay.

Man, it'd be really great to know, you know, this person's last name here or something like that. So it's tricky. You really have to at at the phase that we're in now when it's such an early product you really need to be across both sides and that's just Okay. I can try, I can talk with Chris about it and just see okay is there some way that we could help but my honest thinking is this will have to be me Sure. Who builds this out for now.

Yeah. Okay.

Chris has made a ton of progress with the dashboard. Maybe we can cover that because we do now have a dashboard. So a web dashboard that our customers can log in, configure their events, and do things like that. It's it's certainly early days on that as well, but that's something that Chris took from start to finish or start to slightly further than the start. Again, we're not we're not finished, but you can now log in.

So how do we what do we do about well, one well, first and foremost, great that you've said, hey. I'm starting to feel it because we don't we don't see each other. Right? So in person Yeah. How do we protect against it? What's the what's the way that it re that works for you to relieve it?

Well, there's only so many things I can say on the podcast.

Go for it.

No. I think the best way is to not have a huge amount of work that needs to get done, before a given deadline ever again, right, which isn't gonna happen. The reason this is happening now is because okay we have to go from zero to one. We have to go from not having a working new Six Hides app to a working Six Hides app and that this unless we don't know. Unless something really significant changes in the future, this should be the biggest block of continuous work that needs to happen in the life of this business.

yeah. Have we got a product road map? We don't have a documented one, do we?

I don't think so.

No. Okay. Well, maybe we should do something like that, like, least understanding what the like, what we need to do, what you need to do, and what we need to do. And then we can put in, I was talking to Rolly about it. Sometimes they when they get ideas, they put it in there, then they figure out the priority of doing things.

Like, Linear, I mentioned last week, Linear is like a project management tool for development software development, and we use it on all well, almost all our client projects here at Atlas and works amazingly for this type of stuff. You can just add things to the backlog and put things in future cycles and stuff. So totally we could do that. I can't tell you how much I look forward to being able to just bite off a feature that's been, you know, in the queue for a couple of months and then I can turn around to you and it you know, and it's something that we both think will be valuable. Yep.

And the the complexity comes I think the there's there's slight complexity that happens here as well is we do we do one feature or one piece of functionality, then we've gotta look at the tweaks for all the other sides, and it goes from one to five or six. Right? And so that that's all. And I know doing that over and over again, how frustrating that could be. So I I get it.

So

one thing I have picked up, though, is I thought a developer was a developer. I knew there was back end and front end, but it's like a chef. There's many different types of chefs out there. Like and I most of us who are nontechnical go, dev's a dev. It's it's absolutely not a develop like, it's not the same thing.

And there's, like, diff yeah. There's whole different flavors of technologies even for front end and back end. There's, like, a million different programming languages. There's, I've talked about it before. There's, like, 20 different ways to build a mobile app.

Yep.

So, yeah, it's interesting you've you've picked up on that.

Yeah. And it's yes. It it's true. And I've been thinking I was just thinking about that then about stress levels. We're all gonna go through peaks and troughs, and that's okay.

Right? Yeah. For sure. I would like us to put more things in the calendar down the line of, okay. Hey. Let's check-in with how was that problem. You know? This podcast is a good way for us to kind of keep track of this because it forces us to get in a room and talk, you know, each week about this stuff. We could pretty easily put in, yeah, a month from now, two, three months, whatever, put something in the calendar from today's date and go, how are you feeling about this? You know?

I think if it's temporary and we know what's temporary. I can see when this would be relieved. Yeah. When we get to this this date, I I can see that's only existing because of a time a time period. But if it's there, like, I think there's a different stress of, say, we didn't get on anymore and it was we were in conflict about the direction of the business or Yeah.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. Yep.

Yeah. Gotcha.

Yep. We will get there. Okay. So, anyway, on the Slack connect stuff now to kind of just go back just for one minute, it went really well with the team at Laravel Live Denmark. So that's who we had in mind last week when we were about to send them an invite.

Yeah. I'm just having to look if there's a platform to, connect our Teams platform to bring in Slack.

And Otherwise, like, we might have to get set up with Teams or something like that because it it effectively is like like for yeah. See, I'm with you. I I also don't use Team, but maybe it's something that we have to do if this is a channel that we wanna pursue is offering support or creating a closer bond with these customers. Like, who knows? It might be something that we need to look at.

Yep. So there's a platform I can see called Myo, m I o I o, and it, connects Google and Microsoft Teams and Slack and Google and all that kind of stuff. Zoom. Yeah. So it looks like it might yeah.

Okay. We'll we'll see. Maybe we'll look at that over the next month or so in preparation to reach out to that other customer about. Sure. Anyway, cool. So we've got a couple more things on the list. So six weeks of SEO titles. This is the last one. Yep. The last one for now.

Yes. I'm gonna record with Roman Galakoff. He's the founder of Record Advisory. He's a an accountancy firm for startups, and, he's gonna talk about, you know, the options with bootstrapping over funding, some give like, first principles, accounting principles. Sorry.

Hope he brings it next week. You know, you put him on a pedestal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He's he's got an interesting backstory too. So Yeah. Hopefully, he will share that. He might not want to. So Yeah. I would just bring it on him.

See how we go.

But yeah. Look. And to be honest with the, you know, this SEO, Mitch, I don't know why we would go back.

Well, I yeah. You don't because this was your idea. Right? But I like the more loosey goosiness of it of just, okay.

Hey. I think you're just a bad loser, Mitch. Like, okay. We're in TV. No.

Maybe. So, anyway, where I was going with the with next week is you will then I think you're gonna get eight episodes that you will have complete creative control over the titles for. So maybe from episode 21, I might take it back for a little. And let's see if the numbers drop off or if they continue. We're we're gonna run the experiment. I'm not doing any cover art for this period, so that way we're not skewing the results there with trying to change two variables at once.

Oh, yeah.

But maybe I'll pick that back up in five, ten episodes from now. Might start playing with that. So, yeah. Anyway, we're having fun. It is working. And let us know if you found us through one of these SEO titles or what you think of the titles. If you think they're stupid, then let us know.

Fair enough. Fair enough.

Cool. Alright. That's that one. So let's talk about the blog. So you are our head of sales and marketing, and you came to me last week, I think it was, and you asked me about getting set up with the blog. So do you wanna walk us through how all that went?

Mate, that was a shitty process, I'll be honest with you. You you were like, yeah. No worries. Download this command. Download whatever it was. I don't even know what you told me to do. You told me to download Heard.

You bluff it from your memory.

Yeah. I'm gonna go look at it because it was horrendous. For what is second nature to you and gets it's not second nature for other people who aren't familiar. Yeah. GitHub desktop and then heard. Mhmm. It was overwhelming to say the least. And then you were like, just just go into there, that command, and hit this, and then you can write in there. And I was like, this is not this is not something that could work. It was too hard.

Yes. So where we yes. There was a lot of setup. Where we got it to was that you needed to make a new markdown file for those in the know where writing the marketing website is written with Next. Js, and it's got this ability to do blog articles via markdown files.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's I'm just looking at it now. Completely forgot how to use it, so we'll have to figure out how to

We might have to have another call With that video or something. Yeah.

Oh, well, I'll actually write the article, then we'll put it up there. So we'll do that first. So Yeah.

But, yeah,

thanks for that. Like, it was a lot more intuitive. And

It's night and day. 100. So it it will lead to a way better editing experience for both of us plus anyone else that happens to come in and work on it in the future. So I I agree. This probably needed to happen. I just wasn't necessarily ready for it to happen yet, but it's done now, and I think we'll be all the better for it.

So

Yep. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Cool. Well, we've got a couple more topics left. We'll talk through a little bit more about TestFlight and and maybe on the dashboard to round things out, but you've got here Lean Startups. Did you wanna walk through that?

Yeah. I've just started listening to the Lean Startup again. So when I first started working in a startup a long time ago in 02/2015, my founder was saying, oh, read all these startup books or listen to these startup books because I listen to Audible. And it just wasn't the right thing for me to do at the time because my job was sales, and I had to be in a sales capacity, think about that stuff. But now that I'm we're going down this path, not only are we working in the business, like you're doing dev and, obviously, I'm doing sales and all that kind of stuff.

I haven't listened to any audiobooks, and I also haven't read any, like, actual books in

Okay.

Years. So I'm kinda divorced from the whole book scene. Sure. I listen to a lot of podcasts, though. Okay. So Okay. There's potential for some overlap there, but no. Sure.

So something that my wife and I did when we were thinking about getting married and we were planning on getting married and or what we could see this was a longer term relationship, like we were gonna be together, is that we started listening to couples marriage books, like marriage counseling and relationship books. And so what we would do is we would listen to a chapter each, and then we would review the chapter and see how it applied to us.

Okay.

So maybe because I it it won't necessarily make sense because I'm only one half of the business if I go and listen to a book and then go, oh, Mitch, that was great. And you're like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Yeah. Right?

Yep. Maybe it could be something that we look at is we just listen to a chap like, we figure out what a book is, like, book to listen to while we do that and then or a podcast, whatever. And then listen to it and then review and talk to each other about what what each of us took away from

Sure. The

from that chapter and how it might apply to us. Right? Because we are a team at the end of the day.

Yeah. I I like it. That sounds fun. As long as, like, the the topic or the subject is good, I'm sure it would be. You wouldn't recommend me to listen to anything garbage. Right? But Yep. Yeah. I mean, that sounds fun. It sounds like a book club type of vibe, but it's like a a startup club. It's a our business club. It's good.

Yeah. Look. And I think because if we don't, like, I can see what'll happen. If we don't, I'll end up listening to this stuff and wanna implement, then you won't know what I'm talking about. Then we might have different points of view or won't understand the context behind it, and they will be misaligned or something. And I just wanna be aligned. Even if you don't wanna you go, hey. I don't wanna do that. You implement it and go, okay. That's fine.

Well, I mean, I'm about to be on a plane to Bali and then back. I mean, that's like, what, five, six hours each way, something like that. So I will have some time if and, you know, there'll be downtime while I'm on the holiday. So Sure. If there's something that you want me to listen to, I'd be more than happy to.

Yeah. Okay. Alright. We'll we'll talk about that, and and we'll come back. Maybe keep that keep that updated as we go.

Book club. Alright. We'll put that in for two weeks from now, see how we went.

I'm gonna check the Oprah list, see what she has.

Read the color purple or something. That would be fun. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Sweet. Is that everything then on the it it's The Lean Startup, is it?

The Lean Startup. Yep.

That's a podcast?

No. It's a book.

It's book. It's a book. Oh, man. Okay. Alright.

Oh, man. You're already saying oh, man.

No. Just like I thought that you had said earlier that it was a it was a podcast. But

I'm sure there is a podcast on it, but, no, it's a, yeah, it's a link startup by Eric Rise.

Gotcha. Okay. Cool. No worries. Well, I guess final kind of things to round out. So we do have the dashboard now. It's gone really well. It's a Laravel and Vue JS web app. We're doing some fun stuff where or some interesting stuff that I hadn't done before where we're hosting it on two different regions at the moment, so in Sydney and in Frankfurt on AWS, and we're using a Cloudflare worker to sit in front of that and kind of act like a load balancer. It picks up like, oh, okay.

What's a load balancer, mate?

A load balancer is where, it's a server that receives, web requests. So, like, when you go in the browser, you go to a website or whatever, receives that request and then decides, okay. Where where do I send this to? So it then needs to send it to another server to go and process it. So maybe some other server in Sydney or somewhere in America or whatever, and its job is to try and pick like, okay, which server is best positioned to accept this request.

Okay.

That's like a challenge that I've never had to deal with before because I've always been close to whatever it was that I'm hosting. Right? I can tell if it's slow. So Yeah. Yeah. There's there's a challenge there.

So where does that sit in relation to if you're storing data here in an overseas, where does that sit in relation to data privacy laws and all that kind of stuff?

So yeah. So as far as the data sovereignty, it is tricky to we we have to try and thread the needle carefully to just store the relevant information in each part of the the world. Right? So with Cloudflare, they kind of have region Earth, they call it, where all their stuff is kind of shared all over the globe. That kinda makes a little trickier to do some of this stuff of only store certain bits of information in a certain country.

So Okay. So is is there, like, platforms around that if you say, hey. I've gotta adhere to the Australian data sovereignty laws, but I'm also operating it overseas, that it can actually tell you if you are or you aren't compliant, or you just have to

There might be I'm sure there are, like, auditors out there that will help with that stuff, but we are not in a position to afford anyone that calls himself an auditor.

No. No. I mean automation. I mean a software that can just let you know. But Maybe.

To be honest, it's never something that I've had to deal with before because I've only deployed stuff to the one region. It's always been in Australia, so that's been taken care of for me. Right? So Yep. Yeah. The last time I put anything overseas was, like, twelve years ago. I had a server in Japan running on Linode because that was the closest one to Sydney at the time. So that was a long time ago. Right? So Yep.

They can find me on LinkedIn. Gavin Ty. That's easy enough to find.

Excellent. It'll be in the show notes. I'm Mitch Dav everywhere. I won't see you next week, but you'll see Gavin with Roman, and I'll be in Bali. So bring that on.

Awesome, mate. I look forward to seeing you with your tan.

Yeah. Yeah. You'll be waiting a while. Think it'll be sunburn. I'm sure I'll have sunburn. I doubt I'll have a tan.

So I've I've seen your blue your blue legs, mate, so you definitely need some

Blue legs? They're very wide. I don't know about blue. That's a bit

White white blue.

Yep. Yeah. Sure. Yep. Alright. Cool. We will I'll catch you all in two weeks. Gavin will catch you next week. Thanks. See you, mate. Bye.