6: We’re small. Should we act big?

I'm Mitchell Davis, world's best developer.

Oh, you too kind. Naravelle. I'm Gavin Tye. I'm okay at sales and marketing, I guess. I don't know. It's fine. Gavin, what are we building?

We're building a b to b SaaS platform called Six Sides to help bring event communities together for organizations and and businesses.

So Well done. It's called 6Sides.co. You can check it out. Gav, how's it going, mate?

Yeah. Good. Good, mate. It's been a, interesting week. Got to see under the hood of the platform. Like, we spoke about it last week, and it's actually sparked some, some thoughts about design and all that kind of stuff. And I'm enrolled in TAFE to do a programming course now. No. I haven't done think they

teach Laravel at TAFE. Yeah. Fair enough. You might be you might be doing some old school programming there, but yeah. Nice. It was fun. So let's let's talk through that. We we sat down we record on Fridays. We sat down a few days ago on Wednesday, I think it was, and we probably spent like an hour, maybe an hour and a half or something on a call.

A while. Yeah.

And it was really fun. So I showed you the progress of the meeting bookings feature

Yep.

In the Six Sides app. We sat down and we we went through how it was looking and and feeling kind of the the user experience of it of what it would be like to, you know, if you're an attendee or a speaker or a sponsor at an event to sit down and and book a meeting with someone. And it was really fun. You had a lot of good feedback on, oh, this is cool. It would be great if we could do it like this or yeah.

Kind of just had Let's call them one dimensional.

Yeah. One one Yeah.

And And to be fair, you weren't thinking about going beyond that original conference. So that makes why spend time on that? So Yeah. Yep.

Yeah. It it kind of. So I was as I was building out the app originally for LariCon Australia last year, I was thinking about, okay, how would this apply to other events in the future? But I was up against a a time crunch. Right? I had a deadline of this has to be ready by this date. And in addition to that, I also had my talk to prepare for. Yeah. And so it kinda just was like, this is going to have to be good enough. And I think it it was fine.

Yeah. Look. I can see both of us when we run our own business. Right? We just have our single train of thought and then have there's not a lot of people that can offer input and shaping things out, and I really value it. So even you're showing me some stuff the other day, and I was like, oh, yeah. Look. What if we could do mirror what we see on an iPhone with a like, there's a notification there. And it was like and you're like, yeah. Look.

Right? And Sometimes that's fun, like, being able to say something and then thirty seconds later, it's on your screen and, know, it might not be finished, but it's like, yeah, you can really quickly move.

And and I think when I when we say you say boring and I say one dimensional, like, I think the reason I use that language is because if you say boring and then the opposite of boring is unboring, right, it's not really a measure. So I think about one dimensional and we got, okay, well, what's the opposite of one dimensional? Multidimensional. And you go, okay. Well, then that's something we can shoot for.

Well, it a good example of this is, like, when you and I sat down at the start of that call on Wednesday and Yep. You brought up, you know, like, hey. These screens are a bit repetitive. I was like, yeah. I agree. What if we think about engaging a designer to, like, come up with some concepts here? You know? And immediately, you were like, what if we used AI instead? It's going to be a bit cheaper, just certainly. And then we're able to use our own you know, it's not like we're idiots.

A backwards hat old fashioned 32 year old man like that. Like

So I'm old now. That's it. So I I'm old school, but that's okay. Yeah. So yeah. So it was really fun. I think we've we've moved towards a design that we're both really happy with, and we'll continue to iterate on. When things like, when this business is successful and, you know, touch wood, hopefully, we will get there. I would love to invest in really good design Oh, yeah. Which I think would be even better than what, you know, AI can come up with.

100%.

I would really like our stuff to look the best in class.

I already know the guy. Already know the fellow. Haven't spoken to for a few years, but I already know the guy. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Okay.

So after our call, we had that call last week. I was speaking to Hiralee, which was he was on podcast three or four, I think. I can't remember. Four. And I just spoke to him about the use case, our conversation.

Yeah. I get you.

Yep. But he goes, if you don't know what you're doing and you use AI, it just you can't get out of it. So

Yeah. I might get stuck.

Yeah. So he he's offered to set, which I completely forgot about until just now. He's offered to set up a session just to talk through the journey of they've gone on just to give you some insights, and we can ask them about some of this stuff if you're open to it as well.

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Well, maybe we can try and do that in the next few weeks, and then Yeah.

Next let's do that. He he was just messaging me about something something else just then as we were talking. So I put my phone on silent before. So, yeah, I'll I'll set that up. It'll be yeah. Yeah.

That'd be really interesting Yeah. To see how someone that's doing this all the time does it. Because, yeah, a % there

are Yep.

Lots of tools out there, you know, that have exploded over the last few years that I just don't know about. You know? So, yeah, that would be amazing. Okay. Well, we'll do that, and we'll report back.

But on a side note, just watching you do that stuff and pro and and programming and all that stuff is amazing. Like, I've deliberately stayed out of that in a sales role. And generally, not being a founder, there is so much distraction. Like, there was when I was at Redeye, I've I saw myself this this at the software company, there are internal facing roles who get paid to be internally focused, and they have a lot of fun. And that's a startup culture.

%. It's like it's great. It's it's more than one plus one equals two. You know? It's probably one plus one equals four or five for what we're able to sit down and when you've got someone else who's like, you're living and breathing this with me, you know, as opposed to like an employee or someone doing consulting for us or whatever.

And then Yeah. Because it one of the things that come up the other day is currently it's a dark theme app, which is fine for developers. Right? But we are chasing a volunteer agency that's not a they're not a dark theme type of business. So I was like, oh, yeah.

Well, the app is fully themeable. So I have built it in that way where, okay, I just define basically a set of colors. Yeah. Like, this should be the background screen color. You know?

That's surprising. Like, you look like you were a redhead and you'd be sunburned under fluorescent light. Like

It's never that bad. But, yeah, I didn't I wasn't much of a an outdoors kid, for sure. But, yeah, flu fluoro lights, I could deal with those. That's that's just fine. So, yeah, I I am thinking about how can we do theming and branding for every event that we're that we're running through the platform, and it's an interesting space to be in because it's more than just, like, you know, adding your logo up the top right of the application or top left, you know, whatever. Like, it's more than that.

looking at. I'm looking on that volunteering website right now when they're red and white, and it'd be great. Like, you can see the banner, which is obviously not gonna talk about the business, but you can see the banner. It'd be great if you could just go like, because I think about, sorry. Just back up a little bit.

Yeah. So

and if we can show them quickly about, hey. This is how we envision the app to look like very similar to your website. It may not be that, but it's like, furnishing a house when you're trying to sell it. Like, you if you if it's just bland, you're asking them to do too much. But if we can go, hey.

Yeah. Well, what I would love to like, when I hear that, I would love to build into our marketing website the ability for you to like configure, hey, this is, you know, this business is considering using the app. Yeah. This is their logo. These are their colors.

Yep. So what about what about for now, could we use Figma? Because they they do click throughs. Right? Wireframes. Could we just set up a wireframe of the dash, like, front couple of screens? And then I can if I can configure at least to the colors and put the back like, I'm looking at just go put the banner at the back in the top corner. We'd follow some design principles that you set out. Yep. And then I can go, hey.

We could. Yeah. Could we do it before Tuesday? Maybe a little trickier.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So maybe I need to just to give this volunteering meeting the best shot, maybe I need to just spend a little time in the code and just update like a make a copy for them so that we can show them. But, yeah, this sounds really fun. And this type of demo experience being involved in the in the sales process Yeah. Is I find very fun to think of, like, well, how can the technology help sell that technology? You know? Yeah.

Yeah. And the outcome everything we're trying to achieve, and I always say it right, like, just doing it as a task is not enough. The the specific outcome we wanna achieve is is a I call it holy shit moment or a wow. Like, that wow is what we're looking for. Yeah. Because they'll that blows them away. That's like, yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah, that's interesting. That's not what we're looking for. Right? We want them to go, holy shit. Like, that's look what these guys have done.

Right? Yeah. And if we could if we could get it to a point where it was just punch in your website and we'll go pull in as much stuff as we can we can possibly know about you, all of your branding and whatever, that would be really, really compelling, I think.

Self configurable. We're getting that one step to self configuring. Right? Which is what we're I think that's our northern star is a self configuring. However, the we have some ideas around that, which we're not gonna talk about here, but it's somewhat self configuring for all sides Yeah. Which is Yeah. Interesting. It's been productive. Yeah. Here we what we're gonna talk about.

Yeah. It's fun. Like, sitting down and like, these are the fun moments for me. Like, yes, I I do enjoy generally the meetings that we have with leads or with, you know, eventual customers. I like getting to see you in your element, but I've really enjoyed being in my element and you getting to see that. And then not just that, like, you're giving really you're giving value in those product meetings as well. Yeah. So Yep. Mate, it's awesome. Yep. Cool. Do

have that board for that. So, mate, we got a couple of things to talk about. We, we talked about the iteration of design. Talk about redundancy or or risky the risk in the sales process. Right?

So Yeah.

I still I'm going into the city tonight to say good say goodbye to her and thank her for all the help. And and she said that, hopefully, she'll have an answer for us tonight. But that notwithstanding, if we don't get that answer, I still have the relationship with that other person to hopefully still get this along the line. But that's a person that I that's a not a person. That's a issue I see with a lot of people, especially founders, is they just have one point of contact in their business.

Yeah. It's it's interesting. Has this type of thing happened to you before where you've only had one so you've been in that position? Yeah. Oh,

heaps. Yeah. Like, it's not necessarily that they leave, but there was one company. It's called ARTC, Australian Rail Track Corporation, where massive, rail business here in Australia. And I was dealing with the head of engineering out of WA, out of South Australia for two years.

Something to to keep an eye on for us, I guess. Seems like most of the other leads that we're speaking with, it's probably there's at least two people, I think, involved in most of the conversations that we're having. Is that fair to say?

There is. And and if and if I'm also like, it was a it's a it's also a tactic as well is to get you involved in those conversations because you wanted to round it out. Like, last week, you we we were talking to this business around some functionality, I deliberately didn't wanna come into the meeting because I didn't want it to feel salesy, but I wanted that you to build a relationship there as well, so they can go holistically, they start having better connections. Yeah. And it's a it's the biggest it may not seem like a big thing, but it's a really big thing to have multi multi levels of conversations, multiple levels of conversations.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm glad you brought that up because I totally forgot that that was a thing that's happened since we last recorded. So so on that point, I mean, I guess I can say that was with Zoe. Like, we've named her a few times through throughout here.

That's okay. If in early days, right, then now it's just your your Yeah. Yep.

Yeah. And it was really good. It was and it it felt good for me to connect with a, you know, a customer or a potential customer because it is a big part of it. And often I think, like, people if I get on a call with someone, like, especially in this business, it's not to be salesy. I think maybe people bring their guard down a little. Yep.

I've said that's true.

Yeah. Which can only be seen as a good thing. Yeah. You know? Not even in like a like a yeah. They bring their guard down and then we hit them with the sails or whatever. Nothing like that. Just you're right. To build really good, like, strong relationships with people, hopefully, we it leads to business. Right?

Yeah. That's right. And you want evangelists. And and I try to think is even though, like, I'm responsible for getting people to buy it, if it feels like a sales meeting, it should not be a sales meeting. Right? Like, I try my hardest for it not to be that. Yes. I have an agenda. Yes. Yes. We wanna push it forward, but they should naturally want it.

Right?

Yeah. If we do the right thing, if we if we show them. We shouldn't be like, hey. What what will it take you to sign today? You will never hear me say that. Right? You will never hear me sign it.

I'll keep you true to that. Pardon? I'll keep you true to that. I'll I'll report back if I ever hear you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll yeah. You will never hear me say that. So because if you're being pushed to say something like that, you've been lazy earlier. You haven't you're just trying to, you haven't done enough groundwork. And that's where I think we're we're trying to be different. Right? So Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You were you were not lazy.

There. Like, in any situation, like, I'll try to meet or introduce you into other people, like, to so we have that, I call it backchannel. Like, it's it's really an unofficial, like, hey. What's going on? Well, let me just make a call about something, and then I can see what I find out. Like, it's another avenue to find out some information or context if we need it.

So Yeah.

It's really, really important. People are gonna buy from us as a pair, not six sides. Right? They they love the functionality, but they're gonna love what we do. So

Yeah. Hopefully. And, like, to to be clear, on this call with Zoe, I did ask her at the end. I was like, so how are things going? You know? Like, what is this looking like? And I'm still free to ask that, but it certainly wasn't the point of the call. Yeah. It's no. Let me show you some things. Let me get your feedback. It's great. And then, oh, you know, well, I mean, I might as well ask how are things going and yeah. So very natural and felt great. It was great to get feedback.

Cool. Now thinking about this, like, I it feels like like, we are I think there's a very good chance we're gonna have three, if not four, opportunities or four clients who will give us a go. Right?

Yeah.

It's not massive revenue for now, but that's not what we're after. We're we're asking after case studies and learning and stuff like that. I Yeah. It started to dawn on me is we need to start transitioning to onboarding. Mhmm. Right? Like, thinking about onboarding and and not taking our eye off clients, finding clients. I don't I just don't think we have the capacity for 10 clients. Like, we just don't want that right now. Right? It's more about

Probably not. Yeah. Yeah.

So my mind's starting to switch to onboarding or how we actually give the different messaging. Because one of the clients we spoke about, potential clients the other day, was saying, oh, it's interesting. And we spoke about the potential how they could actually go to sponsors and say, hey. By the way, like, we're would that sorry. They were saying we're not actually profitable until right before the conference, and then we might say yes.

as I said it, I was like, shit.

We haven't written any of that stuff down. So now we gotta start doing that being prepared. So We got more documents. Right? Thinking about that. As soon as someone says, yeah, that's great. We'll take you up on that. And I'm like, okay. Now we gotta write that content. So how do we onboard them? Like, given the messaging for that, then simultaneously, how do we onboard them in an efficient way that does not drown you in work? Right? Yeah. Or and and allows for them to do some self onboarding.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a challenge. I've never of any of my own projects that I've launched, so not client ones, I've never really felt great about the onboarding. Okay. That probably hey? Why? Just because it's like onboarding means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Right? Sure.

I think I yeah. So onboarding is yeah. Onboarding means different things to different people. Like, one one thing my like, the founder that I worked with before, he said, do it, document it, then improve it. Right? So if we figure out let's just say we have four clients. We get no more this year. I reckon maybe, yes, you've got all this stuff to build. Right? Yep.

about operating procedures.

Yes. Sorry. Standard operating procedures. If we can do it, you build it, and we figure out you you can teach me first level, then we can turn that into a a standard operating procedure, then maybe we can hire an EA to do that. And then

so that assistant. Man, I'm just trying to help the audience.

You know? Okay. You a hole.

That means asshole.

So if we go if we build us, like, standard operating procedure for this stuff, and then that's one step closer, then we go, okay. Can we automate that in the future? But we at least we can bring in a some type of EA, on the lower like, to to that is at a cheaper price point because we'd still have our day jobs. So and then we could essentially build that out. If and he says, Dan Martell says, if you should build a business all on SOPs.

Yeah.

And you can't manage properly. So I think that is where building an SOP around that, about onboarding, what does onboarding mean and learn from each one, I think that's probably the way to go forward. Yeah. Yeah. Thoughts thoughts feedback, criticism?

Yep. Or no criticism. I have thoughts and feedback is yes. I agree. Like, in principle, having if we can document as much of our process as possible as we try and grow and scale, add more people into the mix that can do all the different things that we need to do to get an event over the line, you know, not just in sales but actually run it.

configuring, right, and adding people in. Right? Which is the Yeah. Yep. So maybe

that Sorry. I started looking this week at at Zapier or zapier for some of the, like, the ticket platforms that are out there, you know, like TicketTailer, for example. They have a Zapier or Zapier. I'm gonna use Zapier. I don't know.

Can you do that again? Mhmm.

We'll cut that out. That could be our new

our new about a theme song. Yep.

That's when we're onto, like, a really good thing. We could they can Zapier can send that to wherever, and we could have that feed into Sick Sides. Right? So now there's no, like, download a spreadsheet from

Yeah.

Yeah. Dick and Taylor and then upload it into Six Sides. I would like to get us to that point. I know it's, like, it's probably too early days for us to be doing that, but we could likely we could have that, you know, towards the end of the year, we could have a fairly standard integration with a few of these platforms, and then they don't even those other platforms don't even need to be involved with that at all because they've already done their side, which is like when a thing happens here on TicketTailer or whatever, send it out into the ether, and then it's Zapier's job to deal with that of where should that get routed to. If I'm trying to think ahead of, okay, how can we make this as easy as possible for when we are at scale?

So my mind goes to prop profitability. Right? Like, our current price point, I suspect, is way, way too cheap. Like but it's okay. So we're gonna lose I think we're gonna lose money on this, and that's okay.

And we wanna deliver great ROI, right, For the

100%. One hundred %. And then out of that, it's how do we currently, we're sales led a sales led business because it has to be as a founder. And some things we're talking about to you is like, how do we make this one event? If it's sales led, it needs to be, be it.

Yeah. Me too.

To but we gotta just know where we are. Like, on the first one, we gotta capture our hours to say, hey. It took us twenty hours to deliver this at at a $2,200 an hour. Yeah. You know, at least we at the starting point. Right?

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It's it's very early days. We'll certainly know a lot more as we get more runs on the board. Yeah. And we'll improve the efficiency of this process because it is it's not like, this business is quite interesting that it's largely focused on these, like, one off events. Sure. We would love to have, like, monthly meetups and things like that, like, starting to think more regular events, you know Yep. That sort of thing into the future.

Yeah. It's interesting because what is some of the conversations we're having with these event organizers is then they say, we know that there is ongoing value. Like, when I've sponsored at an event or attended an event as a sponsor, if you

Yeah. Yeah. So it's we don't have a full scope, you know, of exactly what the next twelve months looks like. It's early days. Like, you so you, listener, are really following along as we figure this out in real time. You know? So

Well, they're certainly not watching on YouTube, Mitch, because we haven't got any views on our first upload from last week. So

It was a flop. I think we might need to we might need to look at the the thumbnail, the artwork situation. Maybe we wanna

What's wrong with that?

No. I just think maybe we could do we could make it a little more appealing. Maybe the the duotone thing that we've got going isn't

Mate, that's that's just the first one. I've got ideas. I'm gonna keep the duotone but change the colors all the time. Yeah.

Alright. Okay.

Yeah. I have I ideas, man. Come on.

Do you?

I have a design I let, you keep essentially cyberbullying me about. But I think it's the fluoro lights that are making you angry on you.

You know? That's right. Yeah. It could be. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll we'll talk about that offline. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No. No. I have some ideas. Those might be that bland all the time. I don't like the thumbnails. I'm gonna I wanna change it already. But Yeah. Just slightly different so people know it's a different episode. Right?

Yeah. And we're we're thinking of, we were talking just before we started recording about putting the a link to the podcast on the six sides website itself. So you can see show notes for this at journey.6Sides.co, and maybe we can get a link to that on the marketing website for Six Sides. We also discovered that I was Slack, and I didn't add any website analytics. So we have no idea how much traffic we've had to the six sites website.

Oh, yeah? Do have a

Google log through,

haven't we?

Yeah. I think I kind of assumed that that was doing some tracking for us, and so I was just like, oh, it's fine. I won't worry about it, but I don't think that's the case. So I'm gonna get that sorted out by, you know, next week's recording. So, yeah, just trying to think of how can we leverage.

Yeah.

But are you comfortable promoting it, is maybe the right question.

It's a double edged sword there, I think, because in some instances, we're if we go for a big opportunity and we say, hey. We're just new when we're starting and we're thinking about this, like, does that bring doubt? Could that bring doubt into a client's head? Like like a potential client's head? Does that give them a lack of confidence?

I've never heard of that before. Or shit

in one sock.

In a sock?

Shit in one sock. Yeah. So Never heard of that. So I'm not it's a it's a fine line there. Right?

I have heard other, like, podcasts in in the past in this type of space of, okay, a new business starting up and they're kinda recording their journey and stuff. I've listened to quite a few of these, and often it seems to be a benefit early on to own up to that we are small. You know? It's a small it's a new business. We're figuring it out.

Yeah. I guess I'm I'm when that skin comes from when we were, like, going for enterprise government clients. Yeah. Right? So large organizations where they're highly risk averse.

Okay. So there's levels to it. Right? Yeah. There's levels

to it. Right? Like, if you're going for a massive multimillion dollar conference, and it's just us two in different thing. Like, I don't. I think the reality is is, like Probably not. There's no

gonna get those in

your market. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So, hey, if if we're gonna be honest and we're gonna be transparent about what we're doing, Fuck it. Be honest and transparent with everyone. Put it out there and saying, hey. Look. We're documenting. If you wanna get to know maybe that's it saying, like, the people in volunteering business saying, hey.

Yeah. So We could also put ourselves on the website. That's one option. To make it like a I I know one business, it's called Tupil, and they're kinda like Zoom, but for developers. Yeah. Do screen sharing, and you can click in and, like, actually type code on the other person's computer. It's amazing. It's changed our lives as far as programming goes.

Sure.

And early on they had for years, they blew up during the pandemic, right? Because now all of a sudden everyone's working from home. So you got to hear their journey on the The Art of Product podcast. Yep. And Ben Orenstein, who was one of the founders, he was front and center on their website doing, like, a little demo video, I think it was or something like that.

Well, let's do

it. Yeah?

Yeah. Alright.

Let's do it.

I'd this too. Let's do it.

So let's say by next episode, I'll have that done because I'll I'll have to we'll have to build out some some profiles and stuff and then get

it out. Yeah. That. And then we can do a demo on the on the website. And, like, I was just looking at the website just then, which is the chat's not coming up in the window. So I've got we'll talk about that offline. I've got some just quick ideas on that. Right? Cool. But yeah. Look. I think because I have been a bit hesitant about that, but just let's just do it. Like, what Yeah. If they don't like it and they don't like like, we're gonna tell them where we are anyway.

Yeah.

If they don't like it, they're not for us. But if they they

They might have appreciated it.

Genuinely trying to help, then Yeah. It is what it is. Right?

So because that's totally whenever we get on a call with someone, I feel that, like, you can tell when it's working well, you know, that sense of connection. So if we can kind of preempt that and say, hey. This is us. You know? Now let's meet you.

Yep.

Maybe that will help. You know? Yep. Okay. Yep. Cool. Alright. Awesome, mate.

Next week, we got some yeah. We're wrapping up real quick. We got some interesting meetings next week, some sales meetings with different businesses that we're we're looking at. Yep. I've got I think I had looked before. I've got three decent ones. Right? So Yep. And then hopefully, we'll find out something this afternoon. Yeah.

Well, that would that would be in our winter, right, which would then be their summer, and I much prefer winter. So that's a shame. But look, we'll see. It's early days. Yeah.

On LinkedIn, Gavin, Ty. So, yeah, you can find me on there as well. I've actually just released an AI bot in my side of the world in sales market fit to help people with their marketing messages and things like that. So

Yeah.

If you are listening to this with that filter on, jump on there. And yeah.

It's actually really cool. Gavin's shown me, and I, yeah, I encourage you to check it out. It's really cool. Yeah. Alright, mate. Awesome. Alright. We will catch you all next week.