Welcome to the Software and Misadventures Podcast. We are your hosts, Ronuk and Guan. As engineers, we are interested in not just the technologies, but the people and the stories behind them. So on this show, we try to scratch our own edge by sitting down with engineers, founders and investors to chat about their path, lessons they have learned, and of course, the misadventures along the way. Should engineers and product managers stay in their lanes?
What big company habits should you all learn when transitioning to working at a startup? What habits should you keep? Could an Iowaska retreat give you more clarity on your career goals? In this episode, we are chatting with Arnab and Ilya, who recently left their roles as principal engineer at AWS and senior product manager at Google to bootstrap their startup Metacast.app. There's a lot of people that leave big tech to found startups.
But what I loved about this conversation was just how personal it was and how candid they were in sharing their struggles and learnings on bad journey. Without further ado, let's get into the conversation. So both of you recently started a company. It's called Metacast. Before this, both of you worked at big tech companies. Ilya, you were a damal at some point, then you were working on Google Maps as a product manager. Arnab, you have been a principal engineer at AWS as well.
So can you tell us more about how the two of you met and how did you think about starting Metacast? So Ilya and I worked together at AWS for like five years from 2015 to 2020. I was an SD to when he started and I think the day he started, his manager told him to come meet me because we'll be working together on something and we didn't know that we'll keep working together for like eight, 10 years after. But yeah, we had really good chemistry kind of immediately.
I love that he was in a product manager role. I love being hands on, but I love that he loves being hands on too. There are some product managers who are really good at their job but wouldn't get into the hands on parts or try not to understand the technology behind it and all that. And Ilya would like immediately come in and you don't have to tell him, you just point him at this is the data warehouse, go figure it out.
And after like a week, he'll come up with all this analysis and like this is what we should be going for next, right? And so I really love that aspect. And over time, like we work together, we built like we can talk more later on, but almost like a startup inside AWS. If you're curious, we can talk about that journey and love that process. So when I left my job and I was like kind of rendering around, I came figuring out what to do.
This seemed like, okay, maybe a chapter two of this could be quite exciting. So that's what we went for. Yeah. So I'll have to reciprocate now and freeze that phrase out of that, right? We can view the audio. That's fine. Just go freely. Yeah. But now when I joined AWS, my manager gave me a list of people to talk to and it was maybe a list of five or six people. And Arnab's name was one of them and he's like, yeah, meet with this guy like as soon as possible.
He's going to be a partner for many things that you'll be working on. And I think the thing I specifically joined to work on was an analytics platform. And yeah, so Arnab was already working on the plumbing for that. They were house data pipelines and all that stuff. So yeah, I think we met maybe the first day, maybe the second day, but it was definitely the first week. So that was really cool.
But I think what he said about me, like, you know, going into technical stuff, I can say exactly the same thing about him. So he really likes going into technical stuff, right? But I was watching him for three days as he was giving the crash course to me and our new hire on Flutter. Like I would just copy stuff from Stack Overflow, paste it, see if it works. If it doesn't like, makes it, makes it, makes it work. He doesn't do that. He like, he wants to understand how things really work.
So he would click through, you know, all those methods, see how they defined all that. Like we don't have. And you have co-pilot. And you have co-pilot, but he doesn't just copy paste from there, right? He really understands what he's doing. So that's kind of a defining feature of R&AP. That's what I really like working with him. Because of that, he would always be, he doesn't just guess, he knows. And that's what distinguishes an amateur from professional. And I always enjoyed that.
And I also see R&AP grow through the ranks from SD2 to principle. Well, a lot of the before you became a principal engineer, but I definitely saw that trajectory. But the other thing is that he's always deep into the product. And this is where I think we have this nice Van diagram where I'm on the product side. He's an engineering side.
But there is this thing in the middle where we can keep arguing about for a long time and coming to a solution that really is great both for customers and also from the technology perspective. So yeah, I really appreciate your R&AP. Well, let's say it's on the record. You know, you say enough privately too. So thank you for saying it publicly. But also when I want to add this thing where I found the screenshot in my Apple photos, I think it was the 2017-18.
It was a screenshot from this app called Chime, which is the thing that Amazon used to use in Jordan or Chats. Yes, the Chats Messenger you would ever use. Yes, built by some of the greatest people on the planet. But yeah, the product wasn't good. And the message says that I think we will do something together at some point, maybe like in five years or I forgot what the time frame was, but it was a time frame when you would you would turn 45. That was a time frame. You know, we calculated that.
And yeah, and then eventually he called me up. I was living in Stylen Seattle. He moved to Vancouver and he called me up and he's like, yeah, I'm in Seattle. Let's just meet up. And then we went for a stroll in Kirkland, Washington along the shore. And that's how Metagas was born, I think. Yeah. On the seeds of it. We didn't know we were going on a company yet, but yeah. Yeah, both of us were still employed. You were still at Amazon. So it was actually about a year before we started coding it.
But yeah. We need to really work on our meet-cute story, Ronnick. This has really inspired me. Ronnick never says nice things about me. So going back and zooming in on, so Arnab, you said that one of the things I impressed you a lot was Ilya being super technical and just going into the problem. I feel like some engineers would not have shared the same feelings about product people going into like the technical aspects.
So you mean like you're not happy that the product managers go into technical parts? Yeah, because I feel like some engineers see it as, hey, you know, this is my lane, right? Like I'm figuring out the how and then you were telling me the what and why. So why don't we stick to or you know, I feel like I've got to talk before. I was wondering if, I mean, is that something that you guys have faced before? I feel like this partially has to do with my personality.
If you look at, I would say most companies, they want people to stay in their lanes. Right. So engineering stays in their lane, marketing stays in their lane, PM stays in their lane, and then you have some kind of interfaces so that these people can interact between the lanes. Right. And things, and things just tend to break because there are always some things that fall through the cracks between the lanes that nobody picks up.
And my personality has always been that I don't let things slide through the cracks. So I'm naturally just being all over the place, whichever role I was in, I was always all over the place. Like, in sort of myself into somebody else's turf, some people would get pissed about that and that's just part of the game.
What I really liked about Amazon though is that because of this ownership mentality across the board, at Amazon, people are fine with that because they know you're not doing this out of ego or spite or something, right? They know you actually want to do things better. And then if you cross over into other function and you actually point out something that helps them or even helps you better understand what they're doing. So it helps you do your job better.
I think people were generally fine with that. If I would start to come to our Nubs desk and tell him that he names it, very well, very well, very well. Or like, if you come to the designer, it tells them that they need to use a different color. That's not okay. But like understanding how things work and maybe making some suggestions as in like, do you really have to do this now? Can this wait until after? And then we can cut the scope a bit and ship the thing faster, for example.
It'll be one of the contributions I would make. And I think generally engineers I worked with were fine with that, but are not could correct me if I'm wrong. I led on to this. I think it really comes down to personality types, right? Like I have worked with product managers who did not want to get inside like trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes. I wanted to operate in the product space and they were great product managers, right?
There's like not one shape only for a product manager or an engineer. My personality type and maybe this is why Ilya and I gel so much together is I like to be not just in the technology side. Like I don't want to take requirements from somebody, build it and give it back to them. I actually want to be part of figuring out what to build, right? And similarly, I want the product manager to also come in and overlap into my role.
And they don't have to build it, but they need to understand why we are building it the way we are building it, right? Because both of those things influence the product and ultimately that's what you need is a good product for the end customer and it's not just the product is not just the UX side, right? It's also like, I mean, a big part of UX is performance and availability and all that and you need to have all of those things be integrated as part of a great UX.
It's not to say that Ilya and I don't have friction, right? So there are times when I feel like just trust me on this, right? It will save us so much time if we don't talk about it for the next three hours, right? And certainly there are probably times when he feels like I can just trust my instinct on this and let's go with that, right? But I feel like by talking, well, we don't spend three hours anymore because we're in a startup, we don't have three hours to spend on this.
But maybe we spend 45 minutes talking like about a critical decision, right? And at the end of it, we come out on the same page where he understands why I was going for something and I understand why he is going for. And I think that's huge for a cohesive team, whether you're in a big company or a small company. Yeah. I would add a couple of things here. So first, I think I've always had a hard time with senior people who swim in their lane.
Like, if you have a principal engineer who swims in their lane and they only care about engineering, I would be able to work with this person. Like I want people to really cross over, be specialists in their field, but then cross over to others as well. And I experienced a different culture at Google where engineering tended to differ a lot to product managers. So they would just not do the thing until you get them, you know, the specs they need or some green lighting.
And that often annoyed me because I'm like, you could have just either decided this yourself and maybe just showed to me like the final thing before starting to do it or like come up with options like I'm busy. I just don't I don't have time to actually like answer every single small thing about the product. And some things you can just take risk and do it.
So it was a very different culture from from Amazon where people were swimming in their lanes, which I was very surprised about because I always expected Google to be more. I did that. I want to ship driven free for all. Yeah. Yeah. I did feel like at Amazon, especially senior people, they didn't care about what role they were on. Right?
Especially at like principal level, whether it's an engineer or manager, product manager or a software development manager, they were not confined to their roles anymore. Everybody was just focused on like the product and the customer experience. And I really liked that part of it. Yes. I've written a post about this comparing the company culture at Google and Amazon. Sorry, earlier, which would be viral. And so we actually really want to get into that a little bit later.
But before I'm curious, do you see as a skill set of being able to write it? It's the tradeout that you mentioned of how much to explore sort of the areas that's now in your immediate expertise. And then the other part is like, Hey, you know, sometimes just got to just trust me. And then you know, do it. Is this like a skill that you were able to develop over time and how do you go about doing that? 100%. It's a skill, right?
Ilya. And I personally have worked with people who maybe like they went overboard in the amount of, let's say collaboration. That's the thing for, right? But it ends up in like weeks and weeks of discussions about the same thing. It cannot come to the same page on it. And at some point, my personally type is like, let's just think long term, right? Like this is okay. Let's take this decision. Whatever it is, there are almost no decisions in tech that you cannot reverse.
And this is a principle in Amazon. I'm sure other places have called it to one way door to a door kind of thing, right? Like you kind of evaluate a decision on, is this a door you can walk back through it? Right? And if it is, then I would say like, yeah, it's okay. Let's just go with what you're saying. It does definitely take a lot of work. And this is where I think as you work with various people, you'll find that you jail with the working style of some. You don't jail with, yeah.
As far as skill and can you develop this or not, it's actually hard to say because I think each of us are a certain personality. I don't want to say it word type, but we have certain traits, right? And I think we often start to exhibit them from the childhood. Like some people would read a lot about different things. They would pick 20 different books on different subjects whereas another person would pick 20 books on the same subject and they would go very, very deep.
And then when they grow up, maybe one becomes in a project manager. And that one becomes like a scientist or something, right? Or they continue drilling into the same thing for like 20 years with PhD, become professor or whatever, right? I don't know how much of that can be necessarily trained. So for example, if you this kind of very deep kind of person wouldn't come naturally to just go broad. I mean, you can and maybe you will find yourself that you are like happy doing that.
But I don't know if it's, I don't know if you can force this. I feel like, I think as I'm getting older, I'm almost 40 at this point. I'm coming to the realization that you should not push the river, just go with the flow. And one of the books that I read in 2020, I think because the pandemic just started. I remember working around the South of Kenya and listening to that book. It's called A Range by David Abstein. Epstein. It's a book about generalist versus specialists.
And he talks there that the traditional mentality in the post-industrialized world is that you have to be a specialist. So the train you to like go into a certain specialty and just drill, drill, drill, drill until we become like the top expert in this field. Whereas people who just can't do that, I don't have enough attention to do this myself. We feel inadequate because everybody around us tells us we should be doing PhD in this thing if you want to succeed.
But he makes a point that many of the high profile specialists even, they've actually been going very broad and then converged on some subject. But also people who never converge with anything. And then it's also fine. They just need to find that application of their personality and maybe like an entrepreneurship thing or a product manager role could be good application for somebody who doesn't necessarily who can't even focus on the same thing for a long time.
So yeah, I felt like that book kind of legitimized me quite a bit. And also another book I read it called the ADHG advantage. I don't know, I've never been diagnosed with ADHG. But when I was reading the book, I'm like, I'm recognizing myself, 80% here. And that book also, it talks about not that you have to treat ADHG, take all these pills and all that stuff. He's like, always is nonsense. You just have to master your traits that come with ADHG and write that.
And it also comes down to like being all over the place and finding the application for this all over the place it is in life. It's like what was the trend to shoehorn yourself in a specific path. But I don't think that's easy to do. But I think if you are able to do that, I think it could be very powerful. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like maybe it's a spectrum, right? So maybe the right, especially is who can't really go general because it's just against the nature.
You also, a generalist, for whom specialist being specialist is like a torture. But probably most people are somewhere in between. It's probably a normal distribution curve. And I think I'd ultimately say about like coming back to this, can you learn to work with others, right? Essentially, is start with respect and empathy, right? No matter who you are working with. Try to see their viewpoint, like actually try to see why they're trying to say what they're trying to say, right?
And there will be sometimes when you feel like, okay, you give it enough effort and you feel like, I don't want to work with this person long term, right? It's not good for me for whatever reason. Like a different path. It's okay. There's a world list full of people you can collaborate with. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a very good point, right? Like, should never suffer people you can't work with. Just go find somewhere else.
I think it can be a bit of a trap if you're working in a company like Google, for example, or Meta or Amazon, where it's like once in a lifetime opportunity to be in these kind of companies and then you really don't like it. And then what do you do? And for me, it was surprising because at Amazon, I rarely saw people who were happy or like say, my happy living. People were just like stick with it. Whereas at Google, at least during the pandemic, I saw so many people leave.
Like people who were successful, who were like on track for achieving great things, they just like, no, can't do it anymore. And they would go to startups or other companies. Take a look at that. Talking about that, like being at a big company, as you said, many people think of it as a once in a lifetime opportunity. Like even there are some cases when people leave, there might be cases where they're just unhappy with what they're doing and they don't see other options.
They don't try something else. But when you're on track to achieve something great or you're making progress, you're getting good reviews, you're earning more money. Just like gold and handcuffs of sorts. So both of you have been at big companies, but then you decided to do Metacast. And it takes courage. You're leaving a lot of money on the table. You're increasing unpredictability and losing predictability, which not everyone can go through.
So what did that decision-making process look like for the two of you when you decided to say, you know what, we're going to leave our cushy, big tech jobs, not that you guys don't work hard. But then go on this adventure and start Metacast. So how did you make that decision? Ilya, you go first. You were first. You were first to quit. So let's say. Okay. So I started in Amazon and I had a few jobs before and I left Amazon did some startups and all that.
So I always had an entrepreneurial like itch in me that I want to work for myself and I'm going to work for myself. Thankfully for most of my time at Amazon, I was on very small teams, very, very independent teams. See Amazon is a huge company, right? There's probably like 10,000 teams if not more. And I can't homogenize the experience, generalize it by saying it's always like that.
But the teams that I wear on, especially the team that Ilya and I kind of grew from two people to about, I don't know, about 60 people today, I think. But at the time, I had left very independent team, right? And as I grew from like SD1 to 2 to 3 and then principal engineer, luckily I always had projects like that where I could take part in the product building and the customer experience and influence it. And I loved that. At the same time as being hands on.
At some point, after getting to the principal level, I was still getting to do all of those things that I said first, like collaborate and influence even more than before. But the hands on part just went away from me. I was not able to make time for it. And I actually consider it as one of my failures is going for that promotion and getting it. And maybe we'll talk about it later on. You had a question about like most impactful failure. And I'm not lying.
That is, I consider as my most effective failure. So tell us more about that. I mean, this may sound like fake or too privileged to some folks. Like I was a principal engineer at a big tech company in a space like AWS. And with the kind of influence to shape the customer experience for like basically AWS customers, right? Which is a huge, that's amazing. But I think not being able to be hands on and do the things that I love doing, that basically took the passion out of the job for me slow.
And at some point, I figured out that I don't think there is a path for me here, even if I like switch to a different team. And not to say again, Amazon is a huge company. So I'm sure there are places where I could have fit in as a principal engineer and being like that. But I just didn't have enough of the passion left. And at the same time, I think building things, that's what excites me, right? Financially you asked about that. I'm very conservative.
Ilya is like an insane risk taker in that space. So I actually deliberated for like three, four months to financial advisors to figure out like, hey, if I didn't work or didn't earn anything for the next two, three years for our family, my wife is a software development manager. And I was an engineer at Microsoft. Now she is at a smaller company as a manager. What's our like ultimate financial outlook, right? Like, how does it change?
If I keep working on this Amazon job for, let's say, another 10 years, 15 years versus I take two, three years and take a break. And if nothing comes out of it, then I try to get back into maybe a smaller company, maybe less money, build some scenarios like that. And surprisingly, the difference came down to like less than 10% net income for the two of us by the time we're like 75 or eight. And that kind of told me that, okay, there's like just no way I should not take a risk right now.
And I decided to take. Ilya can tell you his more insane kind of like calculation or lack of calculation. I think he's something. This is like two-way doors again, right? You can always come back. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. And that's an interesting actually analogy here. Because as I'm reflecting on my career, I spent 80 years at a big company called DHL Express, logistics company. It's more a traditional business.
It used to be very entrepreneurial in the 70s and 60s when it started, but then it became just like any other big traditional company. And I always had this thing like, I'm lucky because they let me travel a lot. Because I moved countries and all that. But then I remember applying to Google in 2010, I think, in Singapore. Google and Microsoft and some other companies that were in the area, no one even responded to me. And I'm like, I'm not good enough, right?
So there was this thing like, I have to get in there. And I remember riding with the colleague on the metro train and I told him, like, if Google gave me any job right now, like I would just take it. And I reflect on that, the shuttle sunburst quote about riding a rocket ship. You don't ask what seat you're right on. But then I did my MBA, I got to Amazon. I'm like, okay, fine, I got, I made it, right? So I made it. I'm at Amazon, one of the big tech companies.
But then I'm like, what if I just got lucky, right? So there was more validation. So there was more validation, yes. So obviously it's got the, yeah, it's not like this because there's not enough validation. And I really wanted to work at Google, Google for me was like the epitomized kind of success, incorporate world. But I did want to finish the project that Arnav and I started with other folks at Amazon. So I didn't interview.
But when we were launched and I felt like we were done, our team grew a lot. I also started to feel like I just don't like doing what I'm doing. And very soon to Arnav, I worked my ass off to get promoted to Principal Product Manager only to be disappointed when I got the promo. I mean, the money was good. I can't deny that. I mean, there was a significant bump in income and also the status, it felt good.
But I remember sitting in a room with the, we had like an offsite in Seattle with a bunch of high level people. I think it was all like L7 plus. I was the L7 that got to L7, like last two months. Everybody else was in these roles much longer. And I just couldn't keep my eyes open. I was just, I was literally following the slip.
It was like, like the only other setting I experienced before was in lectures, like some very, very boring lectures about probability of something that I just couldn't pay attention. So I just couldn't pay attention for two days. And then in other Principal Engineer in our org, he came to me and he's like, dude, like you, you just can do that. Like you have to like become a principal. And for me, it was like, yeah, this is the beginning of the end. I just, I don't like the role I'm in right now.
Why did that make you fall asleep? Like what? So here's the thing. Our organization was responsible for the entire user experience at AWS. Not necessarily building the UX, but we were managing all of the, all owning and building all of the platforms and component library and kind of all the chevrons in the AWS console. So basically, it, it, it, it, it, it, it structures the way that it's easy to build their own interface.
But all the components of libraries, all the metrics, all of the, with the processors, all of that stuff is done by, by that centralized organization, the provides the platform. We were lucky to start our own thing called AWS chatbot, which was a Slack integration, which was very different from everything else in the org. I think the only reason why it was part of that org is because we were part of the user experience. Yeah. I think, I think we, we, uh, we repeated that vision later on.
I think the reason was because we were part of this org because it was more of a DevOps product than like user experience product. So I was working on this small little thing on the fringe of the org. And then I was brought into the bigger org. And I didn't like it. I'm like, I just don't care about all of these metrics that teams populate. I don't care about all these, you know, processors. I don't care about component library. I just want to do my thing and go very deep in it.
That's why I think I could have changed this if I've moved to another org at Amazon. Uh, that the entire org would be working on something kind of more cohesive and like, not being on the fringe. Um, but yeah, then I decided to just, I'll go to Google and, but then what I realized that Google is that it's the same thing. It's not different from Amazon. Actually, I didn't enjoy it much working at Google, to be honest. I like, I realized it's like I was disappointed.
Um, maybe part of that was because it was during the pandemic and we were all remote and Google is not remote culture. And, um, I saw some of those things that I didn't like and the post that went viral talks about those things. Google is too cavalier, I think, about shipping things before they're ready. And yeah, so eventually I'm like, there was no point moving to another company because another company will be exactly the same. So I had this crisis.
I'm like, Google is a pinnacle of the corporate world. It's not working out. And what do I do? And then Arnav reached out and then we start talking about this. But then I was, I had so much fear about leaving the job and not having the income. And you know, the simnical Australia says monthly paycheck is the most addictive drug. I think that's what it's like. So I definitely experienced that. Golden handcuffs, right? With two keys and all that.
But yeah, but then eventually I went to the spiritual journey and I came back from retreat and I'm like, a screwed. I just can't do it anymore. And then it became a matter of planning. And then I did another spiritual retreat and after that it was like, I was done. I realized I have to do what I have to do. I think it's very important to realize whatever shape or size of company you are is like, what do you like doing? How much of that you're getting to do?
And especially at Big Tech, I think we're always chasing like the next promotion and all that. I thought I did enough homework before going for that principal engineer promotion. Like basically my manager came to me and said, Hey, you're doing so many things. I think we should try to get you to promote the principal. And then I said first I took a pause, said, Nope, let me think about it.
I talked to a lot of like my mentors, principal engineers kind of figured out what their days and then decided, Yeah, I think I'll enjoy that role, right? And I went for it. Took a couple of attempts. And but eventually I got promoted to like the principal engineer level. I think what I realized after that is what energizes me is when I'm talking to like other people who are at the trenches.
Even if I'm guiding them, helping them design something, I like talking to them way more than sitting in like decision making things about what date we're going to launch something or not launch and coming up with like three different ways of making that date happen. I want to make quick decisions on those things. What I saw myself more and more get involved is just those like what are the three options for us figure out what date we can meet, right?
And some of the engineering manager, but this is what I said in Amazon is engineering manager product principal engineer, everybody kind of morphs into the same role at that high senior level, right? And I found myself more and more in that and talking more and more to like leadership. And that did not energize me enough strangely. Some people would probably love that job, right?
But I think the takeaway is you have to figure out what you like doing before you start chasing like the next level and the next level and next level because you get enough money at pretty much any seniorish level at these big companies that financial this thing is not the only motivator any unless you up your lifestyle. Yeah, by a four million house in Quinlan in Seattle and then you can't quit your director job anymore.
Yeah. I thought that was a serious sort of staff at a rado who has recently bought a house. It's not four million. I have a ULAS smart gauge which I need to pay off, but yes, I don't think that's going on on on the record. I'm doing the editing for this episode. The justice sector record straight it was not a stab at your house by any means. I have a huge mortgage myself. But I'm prepared to lose the house. So that's that's the risk taking that I was talking about, right?
I don't want to touch my investments in the next however many years it takes to make this successful, right? And I feel like Ilya, me and Jenny, we love working with each other. And I feel like if we we need to execute quickly figure out what works and when we do that, we're going to start making money. But I am also like like I said, financially very risk averse. I don't want to touch the investments or the long term future of it.
Whereas Ilya on the other hand, Ilya feel free to like ask them to edit this out, but he's like, you know what worst cases will sell our house? I'll change my school kids schools from like this awesome school they go to and put them in like something else. That's a big deal. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Maybe like worst case, I'll move back to my parents in Russia. So I mean, this is like the absolute worst case scenario, but it's not the end of the world.
Like for me, like going back to a corporation and suffering that misery. And I'm not saying everybody who works in corporation suffers this, but like for me personally, like when I came back from that first retreat that I mentioned, it was October last year. The first meeting I was in, I saw those whatever eight phases in squares and Google meet. I turned off my video and I cried. It was so much emotion was coming out.
Like literally I just couldn't stop sobbing because I'm like, this is not my life. But it is kind of is kind of my life. So the second is not connected here, something is definitely wrong. It was very, very rough integration when I came back. And that it was at that point when I'm like, how's schools all that? It just doesn't matter to me as much as my own society and happiness. Getting that parity is not very common. Actually, can you touch on that spiritual retreat?
If you don't want to share, that's completely okay. But is it if you wouldn't mind, can you share what that was? Yeah. If you're really interested, you can look up the Netflix show called Unwell. And on one of the episodes, there is this person called Sasha Cobbrett. And or you can just search Sasha Cobbrett in YouTube. I think the video is called How to Be a Human. It's like a three to five minute video about her retreat. She doesn't do them anymore though.
I was at the very last one that she did. And it's just a lot of energy work. It's based on kind of tantra. But there is also very deep discussions and all that. For 10 days, you're with a group of, I think about 50 people or so. And you do a lot of practices geared towards getting the emotion out of your body. So some very interesting experience like you would lie down with a group of people, right? In that it's called a shallow. It's like a yoga place in Mexico.
And then you all breathe with a certain pattern. And then at some point people start crying, they start shaking, they start laughing. And then it causes a change of reaction. And you have like 50 people, making all sorts of different sounds, like shouting. And it all looks like a mental house. But you come out of it relaxed, relaxed and happy and like full of life. And for me, it was the first experience like this in my life. And I'm like, oh my god.
Like you really can't feel like this on a day-to-day basis. I want my entire life to feel like this, like, feel like bliss, right? And yeah, it is almost orthogonal to that meeting that I had the first day after I arrived. Oh, thanks for sharing that. Ilya Telas about the Peru, the Ayahuasca retreatals. I was gonna ask. I was gonna involve. So that was the first one. The Sasha Cobrary retreat effects. They wore off after maybe a couple of months.
Because you have to keep practicing this in order to maintain that state. And you know, as I sleep back into kids and to work and all that, I started to feel this kind of panic attacks again, which I had about leaving my job. And then I met a lot of people who did Ayahuasca in the retreat. So one of them recommended me a place. I went to Peru in February. The place is like booked like a year in advance. And there was one place out of wait list, like a month.
Like it was in January and that place was available in February. I'm like, just screw it. I'll just go there. And I didn't know what to expect. I just booked it and just went there. And that basically shook my whole life. It turned everything upside down. And I came back sort of fear less. And that's when I think the first week I talked to my man. I first wanted to take like an extended break to figure things out, but they actually denied it. And when they said, no, you can't.
I'm like, OK, I'll just stick around a little longer. I mean, I didn't tell this. But it was my question. I mean, to be fair to them, I think they had just lost the only other product manager in that space. And they needed somebody for technical reasons. Yeah. Right. That's true. But it was also very, I guess, not like how you would see other people treated. So for whatever reason, right? I just said, OK. So I'm just going to leave. But I gave myself a few more months. And then I finally left.
So I went to Iwaski in February and I left in end of May. But yeah. I don't necessarily want to go into the details of what happens at Iwaski, because it's a very sacred experience. But like, it's something that you cannot explain in words. It's something that like only when you do it, you will understand why people can't explain it, because it's just something out of different. I think Alexa, they episode where he interviews with somebody about Iwaska, right? Oh, yes.
So there's episode with Paul Rosalie. I forgot the number of the episode. It's a great episode. The whole episode is really great. But he also has a part on Iwaska, where he tells a story where he got lost in outer space. He was like flying there with planets. He was very cold. And he felt like that was it. That is what the reality in life really is. So he almost got torn out of the matrix and put in there in outer space. And then he said, I came back and I saw my hands and I started crying.
Because I realized actually that was all not real. That is what is real. I had something similar there. So it's like you get much darker than what he had. So you just get lost in this. You feel like you break the barrier of the matrix and you cannot tell anymore what is reality, what is not. But when you come back, just think start to change. It's incredible. And just to put for the record, Iwaska is illegal in the US.
And most of the world except for Peru and a few other places in South America. Where it's like traditionally they've been using it for a long. Yeah, for thousands of years. Yeah, I think it's guided to be taken under like some observation and practice trackers of someone who actually understands the effects of it and how to monitor it. Well, yeah, the way it works in the traditional, so I was doing this with the Shopeebo Shaman.
So there was a group of eight and the Shaman actually sings the song for many hours. And then the song guides the experience. And also there are multiple people there, locals who make sure that you don't run into the jungle in the middle of the night. Because once you step out of that protected place into the jungle, well, you are done because jungle people just consume you. This is the Amazon rainforest you're talking about. Like deep inside it, I hope it's deep inside.
I'm also very civilisation. Yeah. Like there's no existing. But I don't remember vividly that you came back from that one in February and you immediately I think you said, okay, I need like two, three days to like re-equipmentize to life, right? But after that immediately when we have the next chat, you said, okay, I think I'm like leaving. And I just need to figure out how and where. Yeah, my mental state was, come with me. With the path I'm on cannot continue. It's not my path.
And that was this moment of clarity that I don't know if I would summon enough courage to quit my job if I didn't do that. One of my questions was how to get a co-founder. I didn't expect the answer was to send them out a plane to Peru and do a Alaska experience. So on the first side of that, Arna, has he convinced you to do it too? This is going to be a tricky thing to answer because he has, right? Based on what he's saying, he's almost convinced me right now. So yeah, yeah.
And like I do want to go at some point, but here's what I'll say, the kind of euphoric meditative high, right? I'm not talking about the recreational high, the meditative high that he's talking about where you get clarity. Maybe not to that same extent, but I get through some different avenues, right? One of them is when I'm out in the middle of nowhere hiking and there's like no connection to cities or cell networks and anything else, I get a lot of clarity.
The other thing is I do play a lot of sports and through that there's some sort of meditative experience for me where I just get lost in the moment, right? There's nothing else in the world focus on this green fuzzy ball right now, return it, right? And after that, I get this kind of like amazing, relaxed vibe, right? No matter what happened in the sport, I'm not very good at it, but I love playing it. And I come out of with this kind of like space for the next half an hour.
I can, I get a moment of like clarity. So sometimes after playing tennis for like two, three hours, I take like half an hour to come back to my house, even though it's like seven minutes. I know exactly what you mean. Talk about things. Yeah. Yeah. No, at some point I should do it, but I also tried very early on when I was like early 20s, I tried some sort of like breeding and the thing that you're talking about, like everybody breeds together.
Now maybe it wasn't as effectively performed or something, but I did see everybody around me exhibiting high laughing or crying their eyes out, right? And I just could not associate myself in there. Like I didn't feel anything. I was just observing this. Maybe I don't know how to do it well or maybe the instructor did not like figure out how to get that into me. I want my refund.
My reservation would be like, I feel like there's some kind of balance to all of this such that I'm worried honestly that if I experience such like intense euphoria, like I will be really depressed. Like afterwards in terms of like, man, like this is like the shit like every day that's so I think that might, that's honestly my biggest reservation of like experiencing something that extreme, but maybe things you know change in a few years. You're not wrong, right?
I mean, that is definitely a possible outcome. And Ilya told me the same thing that you can't control what you're going to feel in these spaces, right? You make them out with a lot of darkness and negativity, but ultimately I think you have to figure out how to use that energy to basically figure out what to do next year. And I'll just close this topic with saying that.
So Ilya waska in particular is it's very different from like smoking weed or even breathing because they actually call it, I think the shaman called it like the tool of God. So it's almost like he opens like a portal and I wask is this kind of channel that helps God sort of bring its hand and sort of cure you. Whereas like in Western traditions, it would be the God, right? In that local tradition, they are talking about the spirits of the plants.
So but we'll essentially what I realized there is we'll talk about the same thing. We just use different analogies for the same, this kind of higher consciousness, right? So and I waska under supervision of a kind of light good shaman is inherently good for you. It cures you like we had a guy who had asked my I was recently talking to him. It's been almost a year at this point. He doesn't have asked me anymore. Like I had some physical ailments that were gone after this.
So it actually it actually changes your body and it also changes your psyche and this is where it could be really hard to do because it will show you things in those visions that will feel like reality that will change you forever. In the long run, you will realize they changed it for the better. But in the short run, you feel so disoriented. It is just it's incredibly disorienting. Somebody compare this as like being hit by a bus and then like how do you put yourself back together.
And I would not recommend I have asked to anyone who has not done psychotherapy before. People who struggle the most there in my group, they're just, oh, I'll just go do it, right? No, those were. And then they're not ready to see the visions of their childhood trauma. They're not ready to leave through that experience over and over and over every single night, right?
So you just worked it into the age, maybe you were one or three years old and you had some experience with your parents and you get to really leave that there and it feels real, it feels very intense. So if you've done psychotherapy before, you would have gone through some of that already. It's just a level of authenticity is different. But if you've not done anything like that before and you face with this, basically you're faced with your worst dark sides there.
That's not going to go well for you. In the long run, you'll be fine, but in the moment, it is extremely painful. So that's why I'm like, if you want to do a Alaska, do at least a year of psychotherapy, then go there. You didn't tell me this before though. That makes a lot of sense. I was like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yeah, he didn't tell me this before. No, no, I've been in therapy since age 30. I'm almost, almost 40 now. So it's been for 10 years.
It's another thing about, you know, achievements, right? I moved to the US. I was like, I'll go to this Ivy League MBA program that will make me feel good. It will change my life because I'm done with this DHL thing. And I come in and a few months in, I feel depressed again. And like, I expected this different environment will change me. And that's when I realized that it's not about the environment. It's about what you have inside.
And that's when I hit the bottom and that's when I started doing therapy because I'm like, okay, so this is just not working. Life is not working. I'm not doing something right here. That's impressive, though. You're like, oh, let me try therapy because I think a lot of people don't do that. They're just kind of, you know, try to pretend and then put on a mask and then go on with their lives. So since my wife doesn't listen to podcasts in English, I can say this here.
She started doing therapy first. And then she said, like, after a few sessions, she said that I'm feeling like I'm getting off that path. And it's making me feel differently and all that. If you don't do it, you will fall behind and the gap between us will widen. And I don't know if you will actually be able to be together after that. And I went to therapy out of fear, but also out of that deep depression I was in.
So like, I wasn't against it, but that fear was the final kick in the past that made me do it. That's really cool. And for the record, my wife and I, you know, we have to be beautiful children. So it's all, I made the right decision. She sounds very wise based on what you just said. Oh, yeah, she's a wise around, you know, family. Sure. Like, in a lot of this, I think, finding the right therapist is also a key. Like, I have no friends who have tried this. They've tried a few different ones.
It just doesn't work out until you find the right person. So there is some aspect of luck to an extent and also the right amount of search that you do. I was born in Russia. I'm American now. It's a few months ago. So my first language will always be Russian. So I never even considered going to an English speaking therapist here in the US. I found someone in my hometown who a friend of my wife was going to, and that's how we tried it. And also I never tried working with men.
Only worked with women. For some reason, it just feels more natural to me to share something to a woman than to a man. Whereas a friend of mine, he also works with a Russian speaking therapist also based over in Russia, but he is based here in Florida. But he can't work with a woman. He only works with men. So it's just this trial and error. So I've had three therapists. My third one is I've had her for maybe six or seven years at this point, and I don't intend to change her in time soon.
But the first two, you know, after a while, you just feel like it's not quite working out. And I think the risk there is that you just stop doing this. And then you can, we're all in a fallbacker to like old habits. So it's important to actually, it's like a job, right? You'll end up in you offer before getting a job. So I kind of echo what Ilya said and what Rona, you're saying, finding the right therapist, right? Because I've done some where I felt like I'm not getting anything out of it.
But I'll give you one great positive experience is when we move to Canada, my daughter, like, we were figuring out, can we move or not? Because she had already started making deep friendships and all that. And after we move, she did struggle quite a lot, right? Like fitting into Lex. Cool. And everything. And we tried to. And I think the kind of tools and framework that she gave us, but also to this young child about like how to think about your emotions, right? Like how do you categorize them?
Like just like you're feeling frustrated. What does that mean? Right? And giving these kind of tools and all that, that I would have never known to tell her myself. Yeah. There is a top stigma still. I think it's gone into this world, but there is still some stigma there. Like why are you going to therapy and all that? I think it's totally like it's the right thing. I think especially among men. Yeah. Yeah. And the question of why do you need it? You seem normal. You don't need it.
And it's something wrong. You're strong. You can do it yourself. Yeah. Well, guys, honestly, we really appreciate you being so kind and it's not easy to talk about. I mean, we are all adults and people listening to this podcast. There are no two and many people know this is normal and okay, but it's still not easy to talk about. I think this needs to be normalized more.
Yeah. And so I've been podcasting in Russian quite a bit and I've been talking about these topics and I was surprised how many people would write back to me and some of them had questions because they would be like, I was thinking about this for like years, but now you can convince me, right? Or some people will just be like, oh, that's exactly what I want to hear. And it just validates their experiences because I feel like stuff that is stigmatized, people still have to live with it.
And it's like, I don't know, we should talk more about that. So I want to go back to the founders topic, right? Yes. So I was listening to a podcast yesterday. And the guys said very interesting thing. The interviewer asked him about finding co-founders. And he said that he read a study, which I can't validate. I don't know what study it was. He said the worst performance is when you have one founder. Then the second worst is when you have four founders. Then the third worst is three founders.
And then the best is when you have two co-founders. And he said very interesting thing. He said like the best co-founders are those who have sort of different, I'm trying to translate now because it was not in English. But you have your own weak areas, things that you freak out about. And then he said, these should be orthogonal for these people. Complimentary strengths. It's not just strengths, but also the weaknesses, right? Not just strengths, but also the weaknesses.
Yeah. It's easy to reason about. Right? Wichnesses are harder to reason about. For example, I start to freak out and an artisans kind of place of stability for me. That's good. Or if he's uncertain and he comes to me and I'm like, yeah, I did this just all fine. We could defer to each other in these areas. Whereas if we both freak out about the same thing, it's very hard to get. Right.
I think especially early on in a startup, you don't have the support environment of anybody else other than your co-p聖. Like in a job, there are certain limits to what could go wrong, right? And you're kind of shielded and protected from everything else outside of it. There's like leadership and management. That's kind of why you want to break the chains and get out of it because you want to make those mistakes. But also like in a startup, you don't have that kind of support structure.
Yeah. So like I do think it's really important to find that person where you could lean on for. Yeah. Would a heart take me that? And I think this applies to general relationships with people and also romantic relationships, right? Where I think if you focus on the strength, sure there's a lot to admire, but it's sort of your weaknesses and having someone to accept and then to be a safe place for you, right?
When you do experience those that I think necessarily like fosters like trust and which then is, I mean, that's the key to building foster relationships, right? So that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. I think the thing is, whereas it's like friendship or a romantic relationship or a co-founder, when you meet somebody, you're almost always going to focus on the positives, both of you, right? Or all of you, however many you are.
It's hard to be public or open about like your shortcomings and sometimes it's even, you don't even know what your shortcoming is. Right? So it's hard to talk about it. So pretty much the only way to figure that out is to work with somebody for a while or be with somebody for a while, not commit to early, but also kind of figure out like, okay, I think this works together. Yeah. And have you guys have that explicit conversation about, hey, like this is like these are my pet peeves.
This is like, you know, these are the situations I hate the most. Like, have you guys like talked about that? I don't think so. Not really. It wasn't framed this way. I mean, maybe these things came up in different discussions, but it will never frame this way. So yeah, but now that you and I have worked together for many years, I think the biggest thing that I get confidence is, like I said inside AWS, right?
We kind of like got the opportunity to start a startup without having to think about the funding part of it as much. We did have to think about the funding part, but not as much as we have to literally it was like the two of us with help from a principal engineer at that time. And then we grew to like one more person that we a few months later, one more person and slowly trickle until we started seeing success. And then we got the funding to like, okay, go big, right?
But I think in that time frame, we did have our struggles. We worked with some people that did not work out for the team or we didn't like working with each other. And I think in there, we had a lot of tough conversation, Ilya and me. And that kind of gives me the confidence that I can pretty much go to any kind of depths of despair. Yeah. Like for a while, he was my manager too, right? We didn't have a software development manager. He was my manager.
And we did have like deep discussions about like I went and told him again, like, I remember the discussion. I remember what happened. You told me that I'm too lenient. And that was a big lesson for me. I can't work with this person, right? Yeah. Oh, okay. It was a different conversation. But I remember that one as well. Yeah. Tell us more about that. The 20 million. I don't want to go too much into details, but there was some performance issues on the team.
And I think I was not taking decisive action fast enough because it's not in my nature. There's also one of the things like in a big company, you eventually have to manage people if you want to like also very hard to do. Yes. And I don't think it comes to be naturally. I mean, I can be pretty good at leading people.
But when it comes to like managing people inside of corporation where you have processes and all that, promotions and undergirded and attrition targets and all that shit, you know, I did not like that job. And yeah. I should have let somebody go, but I didn't. And I was not happy about that because it was affecting the morale of the entire team. Yeah. So talking about like company building, you both came from big companies and now you're running the startup.
What aspects are you consciously keeping in aspects that you're consciously choosing to not keep? Think we making it develop organically. So we just try to not do any extra stuff we don't have to do. But then there are some like process, for example, like we never liked much process, but we also recognize that some process is important. So for example, we have a Kanban board with tasks. We have a priority rubric P0P1 P2 that we use.
We did write a press release doc, a PRFQ doc, when we first started, it gave us a lot of clarity, but we didn't polish it. So we do a lot of those things at like 80%, so Amazon would look at this and say it was not good enough to get the principle, but for us, we just borrow enough process to make us make ourselves more effective. So for example code reviews, we don't do code reviews.
Well now we've started now that you have one more person, but when it was just two of us, he would review my code, but I wouldn't review our nubs code because he would just push in a merge straight domain. Push domain. Yeah. Push domain. Actually, CIC is a good example, right? We have CIC for our mobile app because it saves us a ton of effort by not having to build it locally, like upload all those files, babysit them, it's a lot of work, right? So we've invested a few days.
We've used a series called Tramline. There's an episode that's coming out on our podcast with the founders of Tramline. It's our nubs friends from the past. Great tool saves us a lot of time. Totally worth all the money we pay and all the investment of time we put into it. But in the Firebase, like we have the backend on Firebase. Well, I don't have to tell us how we deploy to Firebase. If you're not ashamed to do this publicly. No, I didn't get, like, talk about what?
Firebase. How do you play Firebase functions? Oh, we just go to our code terminal and say deploy these functions. I think I got the judges. Jenny joined us last week and she comes to our Amazon after like years and years. There is a senior engineer. And I told her, like, okay, we don't have integration tests. We don't have like our backend doesn't have CI CD. You would probably find it surprising because I was, I don't want to say the word zealot because I'm never a zealot about anything.
But this was one of my main things that Amazon is like, just set this up, have the integration test and then you don't have to think about this ever again going wrong, right? And this time I'm taking a completely different path. But that's okay. That's what we need to validate the idea first. Or we take the time to do all these things. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I think we learned, I have peak productivity at certain hours, like at work. You have a 9 a.m.
You have to be there and you know, swallow at 9 a.m. Especially the product manager, you have to talk a lot, right? So it can be really rough for somebody who is not a morning person. So after I left my job and started doing this, I started to force myself to start into work like at 7 at 8 at 9 to be sort of more productive in the morning because every book you pick, you pick productivity time is in the morning. Well, so I started to forgive myself for being unproductive in the morning.
In the morning, I can do things like field, field, passport forms or whatever, like go print something out. Maybe like until 10, I might not even do anything for work. And then I started doing, start getting to the groove. And then maybe around 1 p.m. 2 p.m. Is when I reach my peak productivity. And I would work until 6 and have a dinner, spend time with the children. Then I would start working again at around 9 p.m. 9, 9, 30. And that feels good.
So my day is kind of fractured, but I'm always at my peak productivity for deep work. I suppose to be in the big company. They don't care when your peak productivity is like everybody has worked the same time. But it was a habit that was hard to undo it first. Yeah, I'd head on one more thing, Rona Q asked for the company, right? How different? What are the things that we're doing? One thing is we want North Start for us is we want to build a common environment. Right?
And this is important for Ilya, me and Jenny, our first engineer. She kind of joined us because of that. She's a big believer in that too. Sometimes we have hard conversations about this. Because we are trying to get to like a public release for the app. It is crazy sometimes. But I think that is one of the goals is every single meeting that we add. And we only have like one or two meetings, I think, recurring. This needs to be a conscious decision.
The other thing is like Ilya said, it is a hard transition. But I'm finding myself that I'm really enjoying this like going in and out of the flow state. Right? I no longer force myself or feel guilt if I have an unproductive, like completely unproductive. There are days like that, right? And you can't force yourself to be the same person every day. But then when I get into the zone and this is happening maybe three, four times a week or so right now.
I'm completely like in the zone, sharning out some things and next day I'm happy. It is a hard transition though coming from like I think bigger team kind of environment where you have to be working with so many people that you have to be kind of the same person every day. Otherwise it would be weird for others in the team. Is this influencing how you guys are shaping to build a company? So as like it grows, as the team grows, there's more people, there's more meetings.
Are you guys thinking about maybe having things more done in writing such that people do you have more sort of these blocks to kind of dictate their own schedule? Have you guys thought much about that? Yeah. For sure. I think one of the things we also recently talked about in the newsletter but just quickly talk about is we started using Slack now that we are 3p, right? But one of the first things we did there is we named the channel Async DevChatter. Good one. Good one. Right?
It's like there's no expectation that anybody is going to reply to anything immediate. At the same time we did say the first few weeks, both Ilya and Jenny are kind of like coming up to speed. I'm going to be more available here but our aim is like not be addicted. Actually, this is I think one of the things about Slack is the user experience is so good that you get addicted to it and I feel like it's a bad product because of that.
It's a great product but it's a bad product because it's a collaboration environment that gets you addicted. So we've been observing both of you and the progress meta-gas is making from the outside since we last spoke. We've seen you posting pictures about you listening to the podcast on your app with your I think the car screen picture that I think are not you posted. We see you talking to more and more pop that gets like Jason Fried and I think you had this conversation a couple months back.
So from the outside we see you making a lot of progress and we're rooting for your success too. I want to know what have been such milestones which have kind of been influencing the trajectory of your company over the last three to six months. So we started the podcast preemptively to build the audience and all that. We've made a couple of people on the podcast already because it has not been picking up steam as much as we expected it to be in the initial version of it.
So thank you guys for coming on our show when we were still in the very early days. I really appreciate that. At some point specifically for the podcast when we got I think when we got brand so we were really lucky with our first guest actually similar to you guys had a healthy guy. We had brand Macala who is very prolific podcaster take me right home into an history podcast and then you name drop.
So like every sub secret episode you name drop they look at at least okay so Jason Fried is in there. Okay sounds legit. So then they're much more lucky to say yes and then that's how you build that roster. As far as the as far as the app goes we are currently in closed beta we so I was I was in Vancouver where our nub is based for a couple of weeks in in the summer and we worked our asses off that's maybe when what I'm not prefer to it's been intense.
We really worked our asses off to get the close beta out we might list it about allow listed I should say about 15 people at this point maybe 20 and yeah we will be adding more and more people and we hope to launch publicly November maybe so we might have to do in intense sprint to do that. Classic product manager and engineer conversation right here I love it. Stay on brand. Yeah in real time.
But the thing is like if you don't launch in November it's peels into December then you have the holidays and it's peels into January you know how it goes right. The big difference from the big companies that money runs out. So that's a real challenge the downside is not limited. It is unlimited downside. So time is money in our case because we didn't take any funding we are churning through our own savings while doing this and so yeah it's it's not fun.
And I think in terms of like big milestones you you called out like what what you can see from outside right internally I think when we receive that first email from actually did we have them on our episode no we never have them on our episodes but we received an email a long email very emotional email and I was like okay even if there's like 50 people in the world listening to us but they are feeling these things okay we're doing our job right.
It's kind of one of the pivotal moments when we decided that I think people want to hear more about the journey and we've kind of done enough about the podcasting because there's only so many times you can talk about like what microphone or what the post process and all that and starts to get all you get the same old same old feeling. Whereas the journey for every person and every human is so unique that that's been kind of amazing and people love to hear about that.
It forms like deep connection. In terms of the podcast itself I think that's the pivot we made is we kind of think about it as our community engagement channel right now rather than a way for us to like get big like lots of popularity and all that because we know that the people who are using our app and who believe in us and who trust us they're listening to it and they're getting a lot out of that and we get emotional like kind of fulfillment out of.
And in terms of the app similar things I think like Ilya said we've only allowed this at 15 20 people I think max because there's still a lot of like basic podcast table stakes features we are yet right and forget about like integrating revenue and all that and we have to do that too.
But every person that we on were pretty much every person that we on board we have a UX review this is something that we also got from like the big companies right and we go deep into try to understand why how they use podcasts not the apps but why they use why do they
listen to podcasts and all that and there's been so much learning from that I think a few of them said like okay this is magical even though there's like 15 things missing it's buggy this part I really love right and that's what I think gives me confidence that we need to basically build all these other things that support the app but it's on a good path.
Yeah we can talk much about the functionality just yet but there is a bunch of stuff that every podcast app has like you have to be able to play an audio you have to be able to skip you need to have like this down controls.
Yeah that's so all of that stuff we kind of punted on I mean we but we really focused on the thing that makes our app magical so that is the part where we hear from users that it does feel like magic and that's what we wanted to validate but now we have to build all of that plumbing that a podcast cannot kind of be without right and yeah and it's just a lot of work but now that we have one more engineer we hopefully we'll get through that much faster by November.
Yeah one thing I want to know but the good thing is Ilya is coding too now so we have like three people coding now so yeah and I'm like why can't they do it faster? I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I mean they're much more proficient than this so they should do it faster yeah.
So one thing I wanted to add is one of the decisions we made is to make our app more personal not as in personalized to you which also be a part of that but personal as in you know like if you go to a Walmart like every time you see a person behind the you know the counter it's different person you never remember them they never remember you but like if I go to my local coffee shop I know every single person who works there by name they know me by name.
They start making me my drink before I even approach the before even pay them they were just like usually I'm like yes and then by the time I pay I really have my drink on the counter so that's the kind of experience that we want in some way so we that podcast
that journey we will also have release notes as a podcast so we will have a lot of that personal touch to where people can hear our voices can hear who is behind the app writing in the app itself as one of the kind of I don't know I guess emotional touch
points which you will never get from Spotify or Apple like there is a different let's say assuming you get the same coffee at Starbucks and at the local coffee shop which one would be preferred to go to right I mean I would always prefer to go to local to support the people I know support the people who whose name I know and all that and she's chatting them with us to go to some random corporation faceless yeah. One example here is Ilya touched upon it so I'll talk about it a little bit.
The getting started experience for apps is very important right like um we're trying to do something really unique and I think experiment we'll see if it succeeds or not when you start you install it the first time the getting started experience for our app is actually a podcast audio tour that Ilya and I walk you through it in like two three minutes.
That's pretty cool and we haven't seen it anywhere we'll see if it succeeds or not but that's the kind of like emotion we want people to get to know us immediately and connect with us. Yeah like one comparison I could also do here is let's say if you take a description squad cast it was very easy for podcasting they have people who know those videos they host by people who are hired to talk about the product which is great there's nothing
wrong with that but then there is a podcast hosting service transistor.fm and Justin Jackson the founder of the company he does all his videos himself and they just it just it just makes me feel more connected to an audio main to the product yeah yeah for sure. Well we know we're we're at time at this point a little over so guys thanks so much for staying over this has this was an awesome chat for I mean I speak for going to in this case and hey Ernest Doc.
So thank you so much for he's actually part of our company. Oh that's awesome. Chief dog. Chief dog officer. Nice. So before before we bring this to a close is there something else you would like to share with our listeners. I would just say this like few basically give us a chance go go look at our we just have the landing page right now so if you want to be on the beta tell us about it go sign up there and. Metacast.app if you're good to see you.
And Ilya does an amazing job with the newsletter and I feel like I love reading it myself we are hearing the same thing from other people too. See if you like it give it a try and that would mean the world to us like basically three people trying to do something yeah amazing yeah yeah so you can find us at metacast.app and that's where you can put your email and get notified when the app comes out but if you do want to get on the close beta you can just email us at team at metacast.app. Awesome.
We'll link these in the show notes and make sure people check you out and we highly encourage people to do so too and as as I mentioned before this has been awesome we love chatting with you when you were hosting us on the podcast and this was a blast.
So you hear it too yes and we do hope this is one of the many conversations we'll have going forward on and off the record so thank you so much for your time folks this was super helpful or this was awesome was amazing yeah thanks for having us yeah was amazing
check yeah I really enjoyed it so going you had what like eight topics how many you do that's why it's very fitting that you know we're going to slow troops into many conversations but yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and we got two more I think that's more than at least yeah
that's how we roll as well it's it's meant to be this way that's cool yeah awesome last thanks guys awesome cool thanks guys thank you thank you bye hey thank you so much for listening to the show you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at software misadventures.com you can also write to us at hello at software misadventures.com we would love to hear from you until next time take care