23: We’re bootstrapped and feeling every dollar

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

Good day. I'm Gavin Tye, founder, cofounder, sales and marketing from Six Eyes. Welcome. You

really gotta work on that. Oh, we didn't do our thirty second pitch. I work on That's okay. Next time.

We'll try. Let's do it. We'll do it later. What are we doing the podcast for, mate? This is awful. Like, delivery. No. Why?

It's pandemonium.

It's it's fine. When you put the background music in, it sounds sweet, but this is all that's part of our charm. I do have to say, before the show started, you had an alcoholic drink just to get you through. Yeah.

9AM. 09:08AM on a Monday, and I'm I'm chugging I'm chugging if you must know. Alright. Look.

Technically, it's a yes. Right?

Technically, it's dichlorobenzyl alcohol. Alright? Five hundred and eighty nanograms per spray, and I had two of them. So, you know, for those that aren't on YouTube, this is a Strepsils throat spray thing because I've been a little under the weather, and Gavin caught me, yeah, chugging something.

Potato potato, mate. Still alcohol. I think we will need to set this up, set up a intervention. I'll get the call on the call, and we'll have a,

yeah, we'll see now. Need to next time. Anyway, look, after this enormously chaotic intro, we are building Six Sides, and it's an event platform to help you grow your community. It's a mobile app. It's a website. What is in it at this point?

Doesn't cook your dinner.

Well, maybe next week. Yeah. I'm working on it. Trust me. Mate, how are you going?

Good. Good. We've had a couple of well, we've had two big milestones we hit this week. One for me, one for you. Oh, yeah. Anyone who's been following along, we submitted the grant submission last week. It was really good. I actually put

it in the hopeful 100 k of funding.

Yeah. Yep. Yep.

It's a big deal if we get this.

I put in a I asked chat GPT to assess it, and it gave it a nine out of 10 quality score, which is pretty good. Right?

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So we said it was very good. I said a lot more than that. Actually, it was strong, compelling application that ticks nearly all the boxes for a successful Ignite Ideas fund submission. So, you know, we've put our best foot forward. I think we have. And, you know, if if we're lucky enough, fantastic. If not, we'll survive.

Yeah. Will survive. Yep. That's right. We'll see. So, apparently, we weren't here until you're saying December?

Yeah. Something like that. Well, they said they're gonna release it in December. There was a timeline somewhere I need to have a look at, but it it definitely won't be for a couple of months.

Yeah. Cool.

They are not fast. Right? It's not gonna it's not a grant to help you survive. Right?

No. It's it's not a natural disaster. Don't wanna fund those businesses that are right on the brink either. No. No. So no. So that's right. But, yeah, we'll we'll keep you posted. So that was huge. You did really well, and And you made excited.

What's you? What's your big big news?

Big news is we have put the app up for review. So the final production build of the app is now it's not final. There will be a million more releases of this over the next few years, but the version that we are shipping to Laravel Live Denmark has now gone up for review in the App Store. So I will be submitting the Android version to the Play Store today, but we've officially got the iOS version up in the hands of the reviewers. So hopefully that will go through pretty soon And then anyone that's out there that's going to attend Laravel Live Denmark, if you happen to be listening to this as well, you'll be able to get in and and download the app and get your profile set up and get yourself all ready.

Congratulations, mate. Well done. That I know that was stressful. Yeah. Yeah. And you, yeah, you got it done, which was amazing, an amazing feat. So I think this I don't know if this will come through. This deserves a bit of the Do go to? Do. Do. Excellent. Yep. We might get flagged for copyright there because we have such a massive listener base.

That's worth it, though.

Yeah. It is.

Funny you bring that up. We'll get back to the affidavit, but literally have you seen the movie Speed with Keanu and Of course.

Who hasn't? Yeah. It's

a it's a classic. Right? Yep. And so I was Nicole and I were, like, looking for movies to watch last night while we're having dinner. And then I had in the back of my head, I was like, oh, we should watch speed. We found it on Disney, I think it is. Okay. We watched it. It's a classic. I it's what a great movie.

Gone in sixty seconds.

Gone in sixty seconds. And I was like, Nicole, this is probably one of my favorite movies ever. It just holds, like, a real spot in my heart. So I was like, we're watching this tonight.

And she hasn't seen it. She hasn't seen Gone in

sixty seconds. Seen it? No. Yeah. I know. So, anyway, we're gonna correct that tonight. Wow.

So Yeah.

Right. Report back. Just funny timing. But thank you. I I look. I appreciate it, and I will relive that great movie experience tonight when I watch Yeah. Watch the the full thing. So

Yep. You're proud, mate, because I know you've been stressed.

Yes.

You know, this is hard. What I keep going back to when we almost promised an app for another event month a couple months ago, I'm glad that didn't come off because I don't know what would have happened there.

Oh, it would have been awful. So, yes, I'm I'm really pleased with where we've got the app to, it delivers on everything that Denmark is expecting. There were some things that were kind of in like a nice to have bucket, which I wasn't able to get in in time, and and that's okay. We've met all of our commitments to to Denmark, and I know that we'll continue to evolve it. Like, I'm I'm already thinking about, okay, can we release further updates between now and then?

Yeah. Yep. No. It's good. How and do you feel like a sense of relief? Like, what's the

Absolutely. Yeah. I feel really excited. I can't wait for these attendees to get in and use the app. I can't wait to see all the photos that get taken and, like, I'm just largely, I'm really looking forward to it getting used Yep.

Mhmm.

And knowing that, okay. This is I think Denmark has between two and three hundred people going to their conference. Hopefully, we'll get at least half of them. You know, if if LaraCon AU is anything you go by, we got I think we got 75% of all attendees downloaded the app Yep. And logged in. So, hopefully, we'll get some similar numbers. Like, it feels great to know, okay, just by virtue of the software, these people are going to use this. Yep. That feels really good. You know?

It's what it's easy like, in my experience, it's easy to to implement software. The hardest thing is to change management. Right? Mhmm. It's getting people to, you know, getting them to, like, building it. Obviously, it's been difficult to do. Sure. But the change management of forcing or or or directing people to that, like, is where we'll have to support Laravel, the team there to actually help them do that. Yeah. Because otherwise, people just default back to their natural way.

Yeah. Thank you. It's I'm just glad that this part is done, and then now move on to the next bit. You know? So

Yep. Yep.

Yeah. Anyway Alright.

That's good. Mate, it's your turn to surprise me this week. You know, last week when you're reading through the submission, you were saying that, oh, 75% to 25% in founder salary.

Salaries. Yeah. I think it was $20.80, actually. 20.

Yep. $80.20 $80.20 is probably what most people are are familiar with.

Well, 20 for me. 80 for you.

Yeah. Fair enough. But your turn surprised me during the week. I was looking through my email on on the weekend actually and had a look. I was like, oh, $6,000 invoice. What the fuck is that? And then I realized, obviously, your your side biz your other business is invoicing us for one of your employees. But I was surprised. I was like, holy shit. That goes 60 percent of what everything that you made. Right? Yep. Yep.

That's right. And so, yeah, I it's I wish that we didn't have to do that and that I was able to just get all of the work done myself and then, you know, there's no cost there, but, unfortunately, it just wasn't able to happen. And, yeah, it did feel a bit, like, funny, you know, of just like, okay. Wow. This is a pretty significant invoice at our scale, you know, for for this business.

I don't see that as our money anyway, to be honest, in the bank. I think that's just the cost of we just read it. We need it. We'll we will and and we'll redeploy that plus more when we need to. Right?

So Yeah.

I don't see us drawing a wage or taking any money from here for a long time. So Yeah. Yep. That that kinda at the moment for me, it's kinda feeling the pinch a little bit because, I've transitioning away well, I've I've built another platform, for my other business, Deal Buddy. Right?

is tricky.

I think you had this same problem not three months ago. Remember when you said you you're you're having a challenge and I was okay? And I was like, it's gonna inverse here. Don't worry about it. And it's, yeah, it's starting to inverse with us.

It's ebbs and flows for sure. Like, it would honestly, it would be great if six sides, if we were able to get some paint some more paying customers in Yep. You know, in the next few months, and then we are able to draw down even just a little bit from it. I know we, like, we the plan is to reinvest back most of the revenue that we make. Yeah.

Sure. That's a That's there's a couple of things that come into my mind right then is I think that is absolutely something we have not discussed about, hey. Let's aim for a because we haven't figured out our pricing. I think we're getting close to it now, like, honestly. I think we're getting, close to it.

because, I mean, certainly, that would help, you know, as far as mortgages and things. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Every every every $100 at the moment helps, right, per month. Yeah.

So we maybe we should think about are you still listening to the build your sass podcast?

I I am, but I haven't listened to it. I forgot. They I fell out of my habit. I forgot I have habits of what I listen to, and I forgot that I started listening to. So, yes, I'll go back to listen to them. Yep.

It it's to be clear, it's fine if you haven't. But No. No. No. You do continue, there's a part where they start talking about I'll have to do a little research to get all the right names and stuff, but basically, like, divvying up no matter how much revenue you're making at the moment, assigning, like, certain percentages.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have to support ourselves. Right? We are bootstrapping, so we haven't we're not taking on funding, so we have to be able to support. And if we're always so I've I've heard this somewhere before. If we're always worrying about money, then that will be our focus of our attention. But if we're comfortable, we don't have to be rich. Like, I don't have to be rich. I have a number every I have a number every month at to our breakeven point.

Well, Roman will love this if he if he ends up listening to this. Roman, our accountant, Roman Galakov. Yeah. I'll sit here talking about budgets and stuff like that, how much we're gonna assign Yeah. Of our our revenue. So, yeah, let's let's do that next week.

Yep. Sure. Alright.

Cool. I just like, I keep coming back to the thought that we are now so close to being ready to go for, like, general use. Right? So right now, like, I'm you know, the app's ready and hopefully that'll get approved today and be up in the App Store and whatever, but you're right. We need the dashboard side of things as well because we can't configure every event.

But that doesn't yeah. That's great. But if we wanna help people run Meetup, we can't be spending an hour on many different Meetups. Right? We have to be able to facilitate that.

Exactly. Yeah. The the the work has to be done to be able to Yep. Have people self-service Sure. Create their own events and things like that. Yes. Yep. That work has to be done.

But Sure.

It doesn't have to be done for us to have an event tomorrow, you know, if if we needed to. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, I've just it's like it's a bit of a, like, wow. Okay. We're we're there. Like Yep. Know? This is this has been almost well, when was LariCom was in November, and I probably started working on the early version in, like, July or August, so it's been a full twelve months. Yep. And now this is finally ready

to go for any For no money. For for no money.

Right? So No. Not for no money. No.

No. You haven't been paid for it.

Oh, yes. Yes. That's that's right.

Yeah. So So that that that's an interesting thing because now we're starting to move into not far away from moving into the business development phase. Right? Yeah. So, one of the things that I've done, been thinking about, especially from my other business, but also here it applies to here is what is our vision, mission, and values? Because I think that's really important. I think we I think we have a set of we have an unstated

Just needed to top up, man.

Yeah.

I guess I better keep that long winded intro in or otherwise Yeah. Doesn't make any sense. I just I took another another shot of dichrome or alcohol or whatever.

Meth metho as it's known

in some

some circle. Yeah. So I think we have we I think we currently we are aligned on our vision and our mission and our values. Yes. I think we have slightly different values on what's important, but they're not stated.

Yeah. But it's that's We talked about this, though, that, like, you were feeling I forget exactly the context, but it wasn't that long ago that you were feeling, like, really spread thin across a bunch of different things and that, like, you just have to focus sometimes on just one thing and ignore everything else. Right?

I do. I do.

That's that's to the extent that I like, I I'm not sure I agree that I would, like, ignore a customer.

No. No. I don't think I don't think you do. That's not what I mean. But Right. Anyway, whatever that is, we just have to get more I think we should work on our mission, vision, mission, and values just so we're aligned. And so when we're talking to people, they know exactly what it is for us so we we can align. Because I did it for Deal Buddy the other day, and I was like, oh, that I'm gonna use that. That makes sense to use that in every conversation. Right?

Yeah. A 100%. We we should have that ready to go. So, yeah, you and I should sit down and and document that together. Yep. So we won't do that in in a recording, but we'll we can sit down and maybe by the end of the week. Do you reckon we could have that done? Maybe we can report back when we record on Friday.

Yep. Yep. Sure. Yeah. Cool.

Let's do it. No time like the present, mate.

Yep. And so, mate, where are where is your head on, you know My shoulders. Drunk. Sustained, like, obviously, growing the business, and we can see that things are gonna start, you know, it's always gonna be developing six sides. So, you know Yep. I've read a lot about using offshore workers and, you know, things like that to reduce the, you know, the cost of you know, development costs here in Australia. Like, wages are huge. Right? Where's your head on that? Where's your head around that?

So it's funny you bring this up. I promise this wasn't coordinated or prearranged. But in one of my other businesses, we are I have been researching, and we will soon be hiring someone from The Philippines full time to work on this project. Now the project the reason we're doing this, like, the project does not or that business does not generate nearly enough revenue at the moment to afford hiring someone onshore in any capacity, like, even a a junior the most junior of juniors we could not afford at the moment in that business. Okay.

And how did you go through that process?

So, typically, it is in the still planning stages. Okay. So we have not reached out to anybody yet. Sure. We have not interviewed. We haven't actually hired all of that. So it could all go to shit and be really hard and awful and we hate it and we just scrap the whole thing. Right? That could still happen. But the work that has happened so far to plan out was talking with ChatGPT of, okay.

Girl, learn.

So, yeah, sat down, talked with it for a while, put in some numbers, got some feedback, and then it suggested, okay. Why don't you look at this particular site? I think it was called onlinejobs.ph.k. And so I looked at that, ran a bunch of searches in this other business. We're also using Laravel and Vue JS, and so I punched in those, and then it brought me up, you know, there were fifty hundred candidates or something like that that all might have been suitable, lots of different filters, things like that that you can put in.

What biz is that through Atlas, or is it through

No. It's a separate one that I don't really wanna talk about. We don't need to get into it on the show, but it's just it's not Atlas at all. It's a completely separate site business. And and I say all of this knowing, like, it's it's quite interesting and maybe a little hypocritical that, like, I run a software development agency within Australia.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah. There's there's not enough revenue for it. There's no budget for it, etcetera. So this is an alternative model that I'm pursuing in another of my businesses.

Sure.

It is potentially something that we might wanna think about for six sides. Right? And we have kind of talked off and on a little about this over the last, like, probably six weeks or so of episodes of wanting to have a chat about this. It might make sense for us in this really early stage where, you know, again, we can't like, paying to have someone do some work onshore for, you know, a week and a half or something like that took half of our war chest.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We can't afford to spend a lot on development, and we are bootstrapping. And so it's not like you and I each have a $100 that we can drop into this thing. At least I certainly don't. So, you know, that might be something that we look to do. And if this goes well in this other business, then potentially that's a playbook that we can repeat Sure. For Six Sides. Right?

So then we did get a referral from someone. I can't remember his name. I have to have a look at it where they will find the person, source the person, all that kind

of stuff.

I think that was from Sri Lanka.

Yeah. We we did. So, the reason I won't say their name was because, like, they I checked them out. I never got back to them because, like, they didn't have a website. I couldn't find them on, like, LinkedIn or anything like that. I was just getting real, yeah. Gotcha. Who the heck is this person that I'm gonna trust with this process? So Sure. Okay. That's why I just I never went back to them.

Sure. And then Roman gave us one as well, and I think that was out of The Philippines where they'll do a lot of the sourcing as well. I think we should check that out as well. I'll find out what that is from Roman.

Great. Well, that would be really handy across both both businesses. Yes.

Yeah. I'll ask him. But, yeah, look, I think it does make sense. Right? Like, we are not funding. Right? We don't have even if we did, we're able to put in a thousand a 100,000 each.

Yeah.

That's a carrying a wage, that's only, that's a hun if we pay someone a 150,000 doll no. I can't we can't afford that. That's $10,000 a month that we're paying a developer. Like Yep. Poor. Like, that's a that's a lot.

Right? Software is very expensive.

Yeah. When you don't think about like, if let's just say you hire one developer, then you and I work full time. Maybe we're a 120. You know, paying a developer that's more than us, you're looking at what's that? $3.90 a year just in salaries.

Yeah. That's $30,000 Expenses.

A month Yep. Just to support, three people in a business. And $390,000 a year in software is a is a growing business, and it's hard to get there. Right? It's I just don't think you have a choice. Right? Like, as long as you know what you're doing and give them the right support yeah, I I it's a smart I think it's smart. Like, I we don't have to throw money away.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. I I don't see it as like, certainly, are advantages. And, again, this is where maybe I'll put on my Atlas hat.

But then I also think there's part of it if you do it the right way and ethically and not trying to actually just, what's it called, take advantage of of a Yeah. Different class of people, different different society. I think that as long as you do the right thing and you're you're trying to upscale and do it for the longer term, I I think that's I think that's really beneficial too. So and I think ethically, we're we're both the same ethically aligned. So, yeah, I I think it's

Yeah. We're certainly not looking to rip anybody off. No. It's an it's an amazing opportunity for us that we do have access just in terms of how our economies work and the the strength of the currencies and things like that. Like, what an awesome opportunity for us. And similarly, if you are a good employer and are paying well, then what a great opportunity for someone, you know, that's in a different economy and has

Yeah.

Presumably lower expenses and, you know, cost of living and all of that. Like, it's it it does work both ways. So I gotta say when I went to Bali just couple weeks ago and that felt at times, it felt a bit gross because of how appreciative some of the, like, the local people there were. And it just kind of felt like we were put on a pedestal. It was like, oh, thank you so much, sir, and da da da. And it was just like, oh, hey. I'm just like you. Like

You do know you

look like economies. You do know you look like a Buddha with your bald head. Yeah. Yeah. A few people came up to rub my head. I thought that was a good play. No. But it just like that sort of thing Yep. But that's customer service

at all. Customer service. That's a holiday destination. That's where they that's just cut like, that's just the

Yeah. It it just it felt more than that. And I didn't like that, and Nicole similarly didn't.

Yep. Sure.

It was just like, so I'm quite attuned to that type of thing. And and if we were to hire anyone offshore, we would need to make sure that it's not like every message is yes, sir. No, sir. Like, I don't want any of that bullshit. Like, it's yeah. I don't know. Just my own personal thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't want

any of that. Sure. Fair enough. Yeah. That makes sense.

I agree with that. So

Yeah. So, anyway, so that's that too is an evolving conversation we can keep coming back to.

We got a couple of minutes

to go, mate. What do you got

on next week? How's for the rest of this week? So we're doing this on Monday this week. So

this week, I'll be going through looking at the getting the app, issuing out any updates that might need to go to it. Even though it's currently in review, we can still issue, like, real time updates to the app, which is really handy. So going through just making sure that everything's a 100% or adding new features like I talked about earlier. I also wanna do a test run with some people in my local net sorry, in my development network. Yep.

Yeah. That's good.

That's right. That's the thumbnail.

That's a gangs gang sign for PHP.

Anyway, so I might reach out to some of those people and just ask them, hey. Can you check out the app? Let me know if you encounter any issues, whatever. Just give this thing the best chance at at succeeding as Yep. As possible. Sure. Beyond that, mate, honestly, probably not a whole lot. Just kind of now getting back into the flow of normal work and working on stuff for clients under Atlas, etcetera. You know? Sure. What about you?

So, yeah, so we're starting to move into business development phase, so I'll start picking that back up again. I've got a my I think I spoke about this before where I'm gonna go to conferences, bigger ones, and and the ones that are being run around now, do an assessment, make a generate a report, and send it back to them. So I've got one of them coming up at the September. So I spoke to them last week. They're gonna issue me a delegate pass, which is a really big conference here in Queen in Brisbane, actually, in another industry.

get you a separate office.

I don't know what she's doing. She's yep. Anyway Living my life. Is living her life. So, yeah, so I'm starting to plan out. There's a couple of conferences that I can see that I've set for 2026. I've got a list, to start reaching out to them. But there's also the challenge. It's the way lead generation and marketing is going is we're moving from there's a shift from digital back to in person again.

Okay.

Because there's so much online content generated, and people are starting to not they're gonna start not being trustworthy of who's contacts them because of agents and things like that. Yeah. So we're gonna have to switch back to calling, doing cold calls, or, meet them in person so people can build trust again. I feel like that's the direction we're going. So I'm gonna take that into account of what we're doing.

Yeah. Cool. Yep. You will have to give us an update on where you're at with the the meetup, like, of of founders that you're talking about with Roman.

We haven't. We've been waiting for the, for six sides to get to a point where we can start doing it, but I think we're almost we're at a point we can do that.

So Yeah.

I talked to Roman this

in September or something.

Yeah. We'll do it in the September. I'll talk to Roman this week around that, and then we were gonna run a case study. We're gonna run this as a living, breathing

Yeah.

Business case for growing community through Six Words.

Yep. Hey. That's awesome. I'm excited. Awesome.

On LinkedIn. Gavin Ty, t y e.

That's the one. Perfect.

Yep. Alright, mate. Have a week. Again on the app, mate. Well done.

Thank you. Alright. We'll catch you all next week. See you. Bye.