Sean's new mobile app, marketing ChartJuice, and working together on a client project

Season 2: Episode 4

Did you know AI really loves the word delve? Sean and Andrew can't help starting the pod off with a little more AI talk. Then they get into Sean's new product he's working on. Meanwhile Andrew is putting aside his IDE and starting to shift his focus to marketing and selling ChartJuice. He talks about using Flow.club to focus and setting a goal of doing two hours of deep work every day. Sean asks Andrew if he would sell ChartJuice if someone made him an offer tomorrow. And Sean and Andrew talk about working together on a new client project!

Links:
For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00.77
Sean
What's up? What's up? How you doing?

Andrew
Not bad. What happened to our theme music? I thought you were supposed to be coming in every week with a new theme song.

Sean
So, you know, it's actually a little bit harder to use. than i Yeah.

Andrew
Isn't this the classic story of all of these AI tools is it's like, it seems great at first glance. And then you start trying to really use it for something and you start going, oh, this is so much work to get out of this, what I want to get out of it.

Sean
Yeah, 100%. I think like it doesn't have it doesn't have the levers I would want. you know I can't like dial a voice. I can't like switch. I have to use a prompt to change. like Do I want a male singer or a female singer? Do I want it to be you know louder here? I can't i can't say like I want to be louder here or different here. I feel like that.

Andrew
You need a cringe dial. Let me crank the cringe all the way down to zero.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah, i don't think i don't the thing is AI doesn't know what that is, which is crazy.

Andrew
AI doesn't understand cringe. AI is by default cringe. That's that's why we still have jobs.

Sean
You know?

Sean
um I've been looking at some other AI things and God.

Sean
which AI really likes the word Delve. Did you know that?

Andrew
Oh, interesting. I have not noticed that.

Sean
Yeah. I think Paul Graham had a tweet or something to say like that's like the one of the biggest indicators that someone's seeing AI and they never saw it and then until I finally like um I was pulling a transcription out and then trying to get a summary just to see how any of that works and the amount of times it uses Delve is astounding and

Andrew
That's fascinating.

Sean
There's nothing I can't, i you know, once it's like a wrapper around whatever sort of AI tool, I can't tell it to, you know, at that point, I can't even change the prompt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um.

Andrew
By the way, I really want to try out a couple of different transcription tools to see if any any of them can do a better job with our voices because Zincaster is not terrible, but it's a little bit of a mess.

Sean
Hmm.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
I do think the, Post edit transcription is usually better.

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Andrew
like I see a pretty noticeable improvement from pre-edit and post-edit, so that's kind of interesting.

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Andrew
But I'm really curious, like what if Podscan actually has the best the best transcriptions?

Sean
Maybe.

Sean
maybe

Andrew
Or yeah know maybe Transistor's new transcription tool will be better because that's all they're doing?

Sean
Maybe.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
I don't know.

Sean
Is there a job to be good at that?

Andrew
Yeah, I guess it's Zincaster's job to get that right as much as Transistor's job. but um It might even be the same person powering both.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Um,

Andrew
It might be the same tool under the hood.

Sean
um

Andrew
That would be funny.

Sean
so, so this podcast, uh, for a client, I was running it through, I tried swell AI by, I don't remember his last name, Cody something, um. The draft horse, now he's doing swell, um and I tried to script again. um Interestingly, I don't know what's going on with swell, but like so far, that's the best transcript I got back. um Yeah, so that's pretty good. um Okay, no, no, no, no.

Andrew
I also saw every, do you know them? ah Nathan used to be Bashaw and now I think it's Basquez. He was at Product Hunt and then at Gimlet and um then I think co-founded every with

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
Dan Schipler, if that, I might have that name right. It's kind of interesting. They were doing bundled newsletters. So taking different newsletter creators and creating a unified brand for them to publish under and then offering a bundled price where the creators split the revenue and they're now taking.

Sean
Cool.

Sean
cool

Andrew
that bundle concept to a new extreme and launching software products. And the only way to pay for their software products is by buying a bundle, a subscription to every. So for one price, you get access to all of their newsletters and their software products. And their first one was Lex, an AI powered document editor where you could

Sean
Okay. You use that, yeah.

Andrew
I, yeah, I've used it a little bit. It's, it's pretty nifty. And then it seems like they're leaning hard and to AI tools for, for everything. So there are two new ones. One uses AI to automatically organize the files on your computer, which is fascinating, a very niche problem, but very interesting.

Sean
Cool. Cool.

Andrew
And then the other one there, the positioning for the the other one is a little confusing. I think it's too broad. When I started reading the reviews, I realized it's primarily meant to be. a tool to repurpose content, but their positioning is so broad that it makes it sound like it's just sort of an AI assistant or sort of thing.

Sean
Got it.

Andrew
But I think it's actually focused on repurposing content. um And now I can't remember why I started talking about them. Maybe it was just, I saw the, the repurposed content thing. We were talking about transcriptions and I think I saw their, uh, spirals is their newest, their newest product under the bundle.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
And I'm curious to to try it out at some point for our podcast and see how good it is. Cause I imagine the things it creates aren't fantastic, but who knows? Maybe they're decent.

Sean
Um, well, for what it's worth, swell wasn't bad. Definitely took a lot of, took a little bit of, you know, massaging and editing afterwards, but you know, it's nice to have someone write the filler words.

Andrew
Sure.

Sean
It's like an intern. Um, um, cool.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Spires is a good name. Um, I have a thing I want to talk about later about, I need you to help me name something.

Andrew
Ooh, I've actually got a tool that I've been using for naming.

Sean
Um,

Sean
Oh yeah, that's right. I gotta check that again. Okay. Okay.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Well, I'll still run it.

Andrew
You want to just jump into that? Let's, let's talk about it.

Sean
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So Sean Prairie last night, um, was Sean Prairie last night posted his like decision document. It's like 14 questions or something like that. And his point is every time he makes a decision, he writes. he He writes the stock and then revisits it a year later or X amount of time later.

Andrew
Hmm. Interesting.

Sean
um And I was like, that's an app. That's an app. You should just, that's just be an app. You should just kind of be able to log and journal down a decision you've made and set a time to revisit it, whether it's a single one off or every 30 days or something like that.

Andrew
Oh.

Sean
And then it was a really late last thing as I whiteboarded out the entire thing.

Andrew
Oh my God.

Sean
And then I found an MVP app developer and I sent it to him. and um and And now, you know, I'll see how it goes. Yeah. Like I don't have like a billion other things to do, ah but yeah, what a terrible idea.

Andrew
Yeah, I was about to say, how's your, how's your main business going or your side business or that other side business or, um, no, that's cool. It's a cool idea. I candidly, I feel like it's better as a free app, like just building it as a free service and keeping building it in a way that the infrastructure costs are almost zero.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And then just giving it away for free as a publicity tool.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
100%. 100%. That's exactly what I'm doing.

Andrew
Cool.

Sean
Honestly, it's it's really just like, um I don't know. I've always wanted i always wanted to like know what that process was like. and um

Andrew
Of building a free tool and launching it or.

Sean
No, um no, no, like a mobile app, like to have like a mobile app on an app store.

Andrew
Oh, oh, you're building it as a mobile app, not just a web app.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew
Oh, I was actually thinking a web app made a lot of sense.

Sean
What if it does make a lot of sense? I don't know, I just kind of wanted, I wanted to like... I wanted to have an app on the, yeah, I wanted to have it on the Apple Store and spend money, I guess.

Andrew
Build and launch a mobile app.

Andrew
Hmm.

Sean
Um, yeah, totally gonna be free. It's gonna be local. I don't, like, I don't know.

Andrew
Cool.

Sean
I've seen, I like bears.

Andrew
SQLite, it's hot right now.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah, I know. I saw, I saw. Um, I, I.

Andrew
Engineers are so weird. I say as a quasi engineer.

Sean
you You're more of an integer than I am, for what it's worth. um um Well, anyway, I i like Bayer's pricing in the past, which was like, it's all for free, but if you want to pay like five bucks or however much money a month, yeah it'll sync with your iCloud so you can get it on your phone and your computer and all that sort of stuff.

Andrew
Cool.

Sean
um Honestly, I think it's a cool thing to like have and use, and I just kind of want to see it come to life.

Andrew
Yeah, I would use it.

Sean
And like i but i whiteboarded I wireframed out all the screens in like a frenzy last night, and then this ended at the dev. So ah kind of my role is done, kind of.

Andrew
Fun. Yeah.

Sean
yeah And then he asked me for a name, and now I'm stuck. I don't know what to call it.

Andrew
You can have so much fun with that name. i like Nothing immediately comes to mind, but I feel like there's a lot of stuff around memory and decisions and like decision trees and

Sean
Uh-huh.

Sean
OK.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
and retrospectives and revisiting and honing and like there's a lot of fun words that come to mind when I think of a decision log app.

Sean
Yeah. Right.

Andrew
And so I think this would be a perfect thing to plug into my favorite I think I can call this my favorite AI tool that I've discovered yet. It's the first AI tool that I find genuinely leaps and bounds better than my process beforehand.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
um So this tool I found ah ah maybe a year ago, I think you and I have talked about it before on one of the Lost Tapes episodes because of this.

Sean
I bought so many domain names off of the school. You don't understand.

Andrew
ah That's awesome. um So the the tool is called Namelix,

Sean
Yep.

Andrew
nameli

Sean
Yep.

Andrew
n a m e l i x which tbh I think they should use their tool to come up with a better name for their tool because I think the name for the tool sucks.

Sean
100%. 100%.

Andrew
But you you give it some essentially prompt guidelines, some some context and prompt guidelines. And in theory, I don't actually know what's happening under the hood, but in theory, it's feeding that into a model that they've trained just to name things. And then cross-checking all of the names that it generates with available domain names. And so the magic of it is, one, it gives you just a lot of ideas. A lot, a lot of ideas.

Sean
Yep.

Andrew
So a lot of it's crap, but you don't care. You're quickly skimming it just looking for the good stuff.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And it does come up with some genuinely good stuff. And then you can quickly see at a glance is the domain name available.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
And so this is how I found chart juice. This is how I found link ferret, which was an idea I had for ah another tool that I'm not going to build yet.

Sean
Nice.

Sean
Hell

Andrew
I have also bought a lot of domain names. I used this recently to help Maddie brainstorm some names for her

Sean
yeah.

Andrew
pottery work that she does on the side.

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Andrew
um So I'm a massive fan of this tool. It's like genuinely the best use of AI I have found yet.

Sean
I have to say, I think you're much better at prompting that than I am, because the names you get are really great, right?

Andrew
Fascinating.

Sean
Like, I've totally registered ones that you didn't want off of that. When I do it, when I do it, it's like...

Sean
I don't know. ah

Andrew
That's so interesting. I feel like I must've just gotten lucky and picked a good number of settings or something. Cause I don't think I'm great at prompt engineering in general.

Sean
Maybe.

Andrew
i I really want to get better at it, but I do get great names out of that thing.

Sean
Yeah. um I have. I don't know, I usually have to kind of like just enumerate through all the different options and then and then see and then, you know, but it's still I mean, it's it's still definitely one of the better ones.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
So far, by the way, um it's just called decidery, like the cider with a Y.

Andrew
Cidery. Interesting. Decidery.

Sean
Decidery. Yeah, no, it's not great.

Andrew
Okay.

Sean
It's not great.

Andrew
It's not great, but it's not terrible.

Sean
It's not great.

Andrew
It's there's something there.

Sean
Yeah, yeah, I also thought it would be cute to like, you know, I don't know, you make 100 decisions, I'll send you like a pack of cider. Yeah.

Andrew
That's cute. That is cute.

Sean
um Yeah, I don't know. We'll figure we'll figure something out. um It could just be called cider. And and then it just be a decision tree.

Andrew
Oh, cider is nice. I don't, I like that a lot actually.

Sean
Yeah, I do think it's like very taken I didn't realize by the way, because I was making a like a GitHub org for stack wise.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
I should have checked that other things were called stack wise or not. There are so many things.

Andrew
Oh yeah, I bet.

Sean
So we'll see if I still call that I mean, it's not the domain.

Andrew
I bet.

Sean
um And it's not bad. How's chart juice?

Andrew
Church juice is good. i Finally got my image processing wrangled. So I am now generating a nice PNG. Of course, I ran into a new issue.

Sean
Congrats. Mm-hmm.

Andrew
So before I was generating SVGs, they were nice. um And then I got PNGs working along with TIFF, JPEG, WebP, and GIF. um and

Andrew
In this process, I went ahead and implemented custom fonts, too. So I've got three fonts that I support right now. Inter, IBM Plex Mono, and Bitter, which not interesting to anyone except hardcore design nerds who happen to know fonts off the top of their head.

Sean
Yeah, great. Great Google fonts.

Andrew
um Yeah. yeah but So I implemented custom fonts only the way I'm generating SVGs. is different from how I'm converting those SVGs to PNGs. So now everything supports those fonts except for SVGs. So now my SVGs look a little, the text in my SVGs looks a little janky, but I don't care. I'll deal with that later. I realized that supporting PNGs, doing it as much as a PNG is probably better anyway, because then you don't run the risk of messing with font supported on different machines and things.

Sean
Yep.

Andrew
so

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
um and it's what Gmail requires.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
So I finally got that working. It is... In theory, much faster. like The actual code execution is much faster, although I am seeing the lag time from what I believe to be the cold starts of the serverless environment.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
So at some point, it's possible that I move entirely away from serverless and just stand up stand up a little tiny ah DigitalOcean instance or something on render or fly.io or whatever and just do it the old school way so that I don't have cold starts.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
but But right now, I'm going to leave it serverless. I think it's fast enough. and don't think We'll see.

Sean
Yep.

Andrew
I think it'll get faster, too, as more people use it. And I might be able to do something where I hit the endpoint every so often um and keep it up.

Sean
Yeah, I mean, if someone's making a chart, once they so hit create a new chart, hit the endpoints so that it can start, you know, it it can start up and then by the time they actually are going to go render a chart, it's fine. Maybe that's, I don't know.

Andrew
Yeah, I got to figure it out.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
because it's also like their client will be opening the email and it'll be rendering the chart.

Sean
All right.

Andrew
So there will be all of that. um So it might just be hitting it on a periodic basis. I'm not sure.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
um But um yeah, so i' I'm feeling good about where the product is. Still don't have billing implemented, but decided to set down my IDE for a little while and start moving into marketing. And so this week is the first week that I'm like really starting to focus on marketing again, which I'm really excited about.

Sean
Hell yeah.

Andrew
um And so I'm going to be doing some copywriting and hopefully get a cold email campaign started this week. But we'll see if I actually get that far.

Sean
I really like that this week is marketing week for you because according to is it coding week or marketing week dot, I don't know if it's that calmer.org, but, uh, it says it's coding week, but isn't that good because.

Andrew
Yeah, I got off. I got off on my schedule.

Sean
but But that's good because as long as you're marketing while everyone's coding and then you're coding while everyone's talking, you don't care.

Andrew
Don't get distracted and don't have to compete.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
That's funny.

Sean
yeah

Andrew
Yeah. So what Sean's referencing is this idea of like splitting things into a marketing week and a coding week came from a blog post that John Youngfook wrote, um who's the founder of banner bear and.

Sean
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Andrew
It's just this idea that he had that like more indie founders need to equally split their time between marketing and coding. And a good way that he has found to do that for himself is to do a week on a week off. So a week of coding, a week of marketing, a week of coding, a week of marketing. um I tweeted this out and a friend recommended that I try like to do both in one week and do it like two days of coding this week, three days of coding next week, three days of coding of marketing this week, two days of marketing next week.

Andrew
So that way you're, every week you're doing a little bit of both so that you keep the momentum up and don't set things down for too long.

Sean
Yeah. Mhm.

Sean
But do you or do you think you're able to like code for eight hours straight though? Like to have a full coding day?

Andrew
Not usually, it it varies wildly. Like some days, a coding day, I'll be distracted all day and get nothing done.

Sean
OK.

Andrew
Some days, I'll get two solid hours done. And that's my goal every day is two solid hours of deep work, which I stole from um Pat from Starter Story.

Sean
Oh, cool.

Andrew
I saw him talking about that and I was like, I like that goal. So two hours of deep work is my goal. And if I get that done, it's a great day. Some days I get into the flow state and I can spend six hours coding or something. And a lot of that is you know not typing on a keyboard. A lot of that coding time is reading, asking questions to chat GPT, Googling, searching, that sort of thing.

Sean
Sure.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
For sure.

Andrew
um I doubt I'll... That'll last for long. Like I feel like most likely that time will get, it'll get harder and harder as my interest wanes and more distractions come up to really get those big chunks.

Sean
Mm hmm.

Andrew
But in this phase right now, I can occasionally get a pretty solid day of coding in, but it's usually more like two to four hours tops.

Sean
Cool.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Cool.

Andrew
um

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
Yeah, so I'm working on some copywriting right now. I was having trouble getting started this morning, so um I tried Flowclub, Flow clubb flodite.club, which is one of these virtual co-working things that have popped up where you can join a silent Zoom call with some other people and just work alongside other people to trick your brain into focusing.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
I really liked it. i I've been a little skeptical because it seems a little silly. um But I really liked it. It was it was a nice environment. um I did, at least for now, it seems to be working. like I was able to sit down and focus pretty well.

Sean
Nice.

Andrew
So I think I might start doing one or two a week and trying that out. um I haven't gotten quite as much copywriting done still today as I would like. um I'm trying to stand up like feature pages um and hit several of the keywords that I was running ads against back in January and that are getting good search volume.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
So these are largely broad keywords, graph maker, chart maker, pie chart maker. um that sort of thing. So i'm I'm basically creating feature pages around each of my chart types and my chart maker as a whole, and then trying to flesh those out into to hopefully capture some trickle of of search volume.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
um And then I'm going to move on to

Andrew
cold email, and I was really hoping to get, I'm gonna write a a landing page for my productized service offering under my chart juice productized service offering.

Sean
Yep.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
I was really hoping to have that done before today, because I wanted to get your feedback on it, and I thought it would be fun to do that live on the pod, but hopefully I'll have that done by the end of the week, and maybe we can talk about it next time.

Sean
Gotcha.

Sean
Yeah, totally, totally. When you say copywriting in the feature pages, are you thinking about like other like content related things? Or is that sort of, are you are you just mainly focused on like use case product feature pages right now? or I guess I'm asking this because um alongside the product service that you're working on, Like in my brain, I would go and prioritize writing blog, long form blog posts on transactional emails and just nerding out about that. and And then starting the sort of like Twitter thread distribution method of, you know, this is how you write a good transactional thing.

Sean
And this is where blah, blah. Um, although I think a good one would definitely still take a lot of research to kind of attach it to retention and churn. So yeah.

Andrew
Yeah, I actually have one that's like half written that I started months ago in sitting in Lex and I plan to finish it.

Sean
Cool. Hmm.

Andrew
My thought process was this week I want to do stuff that's a little bit more SEO focused just to plant the SEO seeds so that they can be out there because that shit just takes time.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
And while those transactional guides are probably in some ways better for SEO than these little feature pages, like you said, they're going to take a lot of research. And um ah so I'll probably work on those at some point in the next couple of months, work on um one or two long form blog posts.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
I've got a couple of like. kind of shitty blog posts that I threw up when I first stood up the site. um But I'll probably work on some some long form stuff at some point soon. um But just wanted to get some of these informational product pages stood up quickly so that they can be out there and start potentially ranking. um Along those lines, I'm also like I found a ah service that'll submit you to a bunch of directories.

Sean
Oh, yeah.

Andrew
And um I'm toying with paying for it just again to like start the ah SEO flywheel spinning.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
But i I'm debating how much I want to sink into chart juice marketing before I've before i've um

Sean
Hold I just.

Andrew
validated a whole lot more because it would be a few hundred bucks, which is not crazy, but it's it's enough that I'm having to think about it.

Sean
I realize I'm a bad friend. I have a backlink like notion list that I can just give you if you want to. Well, depends if you want someone to, if you want to pay someone to do it versus if you want to just do it, but.

Andrew
Yeah, I think part of the appeal is ah part of the decision I'm trying to make is like, is it worth my time to sit down and do it myself?

Sean
sure.

Andrew
Or should I just burn a few hundred bucks to get someone else to do it for me so that it's done?

Sean
For sure. Is this, are you talking about, is the name John Rush or?

Andrew
No, this one is, it's actually funny.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
It's called submit juice.

Andrew
It might be John. I don't know who the person behind it is, but the, the product I service is called submit juice and they have a partnership with, um, this, this guy, I think he's in Eastern Europe.

Sean
That's great. Yeah.

Sean
Okay.

Andrew
He has a SaaS product and like info product called like back lingo or something like that.

Sean
okay

Andrew
Um, and so he has worked out a deal with them where you can add an, you can basically submit to all of the places he recommends in his info product as an add on to their standard submit juice productized service offering.

Sean
Cool. Cool.

Andrew
So you could spend up to like $600 or something to submit to a couple hundred directories or whatever.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
But um i don't I think I'd try to avoid having them submit to Product Hunt or something like that. But if I could submit to a bunch of the smaller ones just to get some backlinks and get Again, get that little bit of ah SEO juice coming in so that I can start that flywheel turning.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Mm hmm.

Andrew
It's probably worth it, but I just, I don't know.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
So trying and to figure out what to do there.

Sean
Just, I guess, depends your on your appetite for how much. I don't know how much does it cost to submit juice, you know.

Andrew
Let's see. I am going to pull it up. Right now, give them some free advertising.

Sean
ah So I think I should just call my app Decision Juice by the looks at this point.

Andrew
Then we need to we need to band together and buy Submit Juice so that we can create a juice empire.

Sean
For sure.

Andrew
All right, so their pricing for free, they'll give you a list of 152 directories so you can do it yourself. um For $200, you get submission to 20 directories and websites. um For $300, you get 50. And then you can pay an extra 197 to get up to 100 plus. um And then the back link, the back old.io. That's why it's called back old.io to get access, get them to submit to back old info product list.

Andrew
is an extra $97.

Sean
Got it. It's not bad. It's not.

Andrew
Yeah, so like if you went all in, that would be like $600.

Andrew
And then they'll also there's some graphics thing where they'll they'll make graphics for you for an extra $300.

Sean
I think it's like you for product hunt.

Andrew
Yeah, probably.

Sean
It's nice to have those sort of things.

Andrew
That makes sense.

Sean
It's not, it's not terrible. Um, uh, I wonder, it makes me think about like, cause this, this is like a productized service, right?

Andrew
Yeah.

Andrew
Mhm.

Sean
It makes me wonder if there are other niches you can hit. Cause this is very much, I think any hack or, or just like SAS founder.

Andrew
Mhm.

Sean
I, I, I'm just thinking about like locals, like local SEO, you know, HVAC sort of things.

Andrew
Yeah, yeah. like What would Submit Juice look like for Detroit restaurants or or for um you know AC companies?

Sean
Right.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
like Are there directories and places where you can easily get backlinks to get people started?

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
you know None of this is a replacement for long-term SEO work, like you know guest posting.

Sean
For sure.

Andrew
and press, like good press, good PR and all that, but it's a way to get the ball rolling.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew
Which again, to me, I'm looking at it as a very helpful way to test, to hopefully start getting a little bit of traffic coming to chart juice to start testing interest, gauging interest.

Sean
Mm hmm.

Andrew
It's like, you know, spend 500 bucks on this, spend 500 bucks on ads.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
Might do both.

Sean
Okay. So interesting question for you. Would you ever sell chart juice?

Andrew
Yeah, totally.

Sean
Okay. so Um,

Andrew
I mean, if someone came along right now and offered me a million bucks, I'd be like, hell yeah.

Sean
and

Sean
Well, okay. So what is the, what is the minimum viable ah price for charges? So I guess my question is this, um, like, like I would never sell miscreants. Well, I don't know. ah you're You're right. If someone all came along and offered me like a million dollars, but I think for a reasonable price based on our, our EBITDA, I don't know if I would really sell it. I, you know, it's hard to say if I'm feeling really down about the business. I'm sure you can be convinced, but like, I found that with miscreants, it's like because it's been built with blood, sweat and tears, it feels much harder to let go of, right?

Sean
It's the darling sort of thing.

Andrew
Mm hmm.

Sean
Whereas I think, I don't know, someone was like, I'll give you like ah X amount for like, I think I'm building stack wise or even like to Saturday with with ah not necessarily at the thought of exiting, but ah being completely okay with it because I feel attached to it because I don't feel like I don't feel like I'm working in the business as much with it.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
So now that you've kind of been building this project, how do you feel about it?

Andrew
Yeah, that's a great question. And part of why I settled on the idea for chart juice, I had another idea. I think I've probably talked about it publicly before. You know, I'd love to build something for therapists and like the mental health community at some point. I think that's very in line with my

Sean
Right.

Andrew
values and like how I it's something I could work on long term. And honestly, part of the decision making for me was like, I'm not ready to commit to something for that long. And so I wanted something that I could be okay with selling. Now, church juice is in a place right now, where

Andrew
You know, I'm feeling pretty good about it. I've put a lot of work in. I'm like learning a lot and I'm expecting to learn a lot more over the next two to three months. And so that learning is valuable to me.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
So someone would have to give me, offer me a price that doesn't make sense right now for me to feel really compelled to take it. Um, it wouldn't have to be a million dollars. If someone offered me a hundred grand, I'd sell it in a heartbeat.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
Um,

Andrew
maybe even if someone offered me 50 grand, 50 grand is like 10 months of runway for me.

Sean
Hmm.

Andrew
It's only taken me three months to build Jart Juice. um But that's three months and a lot of like mental energy. And I'm really excited about this next phase where I finally get to learn what's working.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
And so it would be this decision make the decision for me would be, OK, it's it might take me another two to three months to get back to this point. and a good bit of mental energy, what is that worth? And I think you know someone would have to offer me like 50 to 100 grand for me to like feel like it makes sense. And did I say 100 grand is 10 months of runway? 100 grand is like 20 months of runway for me. That's like a good chunk of runway.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
50 grand would be 10 months of runway.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
um And so 50 to 100 grand, i I'd have to take that, I think.

Sean
Got it.

Andrew
But um anything less than I'd probably say, like, nah, the learning I'm going to get over the next three months is worth more than that to me. Now, if I get to a point where I've decided chart juice isn't the right fit for me, I'm not getting what I want out of it, I've put it on the back burner, that price starts to dwindle really fast.

Sean
For sure. For sure.

Andrew
Now, if I get it to... 5K MRR that price probably goes up even, and this is the hard thing with like early stage startups, like people who do build things and sell them is like that zero to one is so hard that like we as entrepreneurs value it at more than the um MRR is actually worth.

Sean
100%. Yeah.

Sean
For sure.

Andrew
Like even one or 2K MRR like would be worth more in my head than like the multiple would act that would actually make sense on paper.

Sean
100%. I think if a like a thing is making, yeah, I would imagine that if a thing is making me $500, I would feel significantly more attached to it because it's like, look at this thing that's on the internet that kind of does. Yeah. Um, okay. Well, uh, as, as chart juices talent, uh, like acquisition scout, not charges sub submit juices, acquisition scout, I will let them know that they needed at least a hundred grand to start their empire.

Andrew
yeah Nice, nice.

Sean
um Cool. Cool. Cool. You want to talk about the miscreants one?

Andrew
What's going on in...

Sean
I was going to talk about miscreants, but I was going to talk about how you're related to miscreants right now.

Andrew
Oh yeah, yeah, this is fun.

Sean
Yeah. um But miscreants is great. the Kind of drowning in work at the moment. um It's conference season soon, DEF CON's happening. um

Andrew
Everyone always wants things like a month before dead DEFCON and they never think to tell you two months before DEFCON, three months when...

Sean
Right.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean
Unfortunately, that is the case. Everyone wants something. Worst part is, I think because we've gotten it really popular for the t-shirts that we design, everyone wants a little bit of the, honestly, the Ben magic, but the mystery and so magic on t-shirts. And I don't think they know that the turnaround time for t-shirts is like, there's like a whole supply chain to that someone has to print and has to get shipped.

Andrew
yeah Yeah.

Sean
And then you got to figure out all that sort of stuff.

Sean
But ah we're making it through. um I'm super excited. I just hired a new head of demand gen. Very, very excited for him to start this Friday.

Andrew
Oh, cool.

Sean
um

Andrew
I didn't know that. Congrats.

Sean
Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. um Yeah, shout shout out. Well. away from the start and then yeah away from the side I guess officially sign his offer letter but I'm sure he will um um but you'll have to meet him but we're also interviewing designers I'm super excited about some of the talent that we got really like

Andrew
Yeah, yeah, probably good.

Sean
um I don't know why I didn't just do that before and why like the amount of times I've spent stressing out at night thinking Where am I where am I gonna get my next like really awesome creative and just never thinking to always being scared of post-injurable What I have learned this weekend though

Andrew
Hmm.

Sean
Or what i've what I've come to a realization in the shower is that an agency is just a two-sided marketplace. um Or we have two pipelines that are important. We have a sales pipeline that's really important and a recruiting pipeline that's really important. And I totally forgot about the latter. um And super focused on sales. And I think the team's been able to obviously deliver on a lot of work. but

Sean
Not having not, I can't believe we live this long without, without setting up recruiting things and just interviewing, you know, every week, every other week. So doing that. Um, but I think that's, you know, a luxury sort of thing to say, because we had just have, we've been able to build our brand and get that sort of inbound. Speaking of inbound, um, we had someone reach out and and for product design work and now we get to work together, which is cool.

Andrew
yeah Yeah, they're an old friend of both mine and Sean's.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
um Both of us have gotten to work with them a little bit in the past.

Sean
Yep.

Andrew
um They're fantastic. one of We're always one of my favorite clients.

Sean
For

Andrew
um Hopefully, i'll I'll ask them once we start working together if maybe we can we can

Sean
sure.

Andrew
talk on the podcast about who they are.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
um But they're doing some really cool shit, and um it made a lot of sense for for us to team up like on this. So I'm coming in on a on a project basis, um which we've done once or twice before, and it's always been fun.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
um Hopefully we'll get to do it again. It's it's a nice chance for me while I'm in this this phase of building to to earn a little bit of income. and also ah to flex my my you UX design and product strategy chops in a ah slightly different way. So um I learned a lot the last time we worked together. It it was really helpful for honing my processes that I you have been honing for the past few years. and um

Andrew
I'm constantly kind of trying to figure out how to tweak, and so this will this will be a fun chance to do some more of that.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And yeah, hopefully we'll be able to talk more about the specific client, because we're big fans of them.

Sean
Yeah. Absolutely. And I'm sure I can take some of the funds and and just pay off Zencaster for a little bit too, or any other podcasting tool, which is which is doubly cool. um Yeah, I'm excited to work together again. I think the last time it came out, I mean, I think the client really liked it. Honestly, I'm pretty sure that client would love to hire us back again. They just, you know, it's always easier to do do draw it on Figma than to actually build it on the back end.

Sean
And I think we came up with really cool stuff that poor, poor them.

Andrew
Yeah, shit takes time.

Sean
But no, I think it'd be good. I think. um Yeah, and it's always been very cool to me to see you in your process and also like not even just I mean, you did a lot of the sort of sales work this time as well and just watching you kind of do that has been yeah, it's been cool. um

Andrew
Yeah, vice versa. It's, it's fun to get to see more clearly inside of misgrants. Like I've always, you and I have always talked a lot on the podcast, but it's just different being in your Slack, hanging out, talking to you, talking to JJ, talking to Ben, figuring out how to get shit done.

Sean
For sure.

Sean
For sure.

Andrew
Um, it's always just a little bit different. So it's fun. Um, yeah.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
And I, uh, yeah, I, I consciously wanted to do a little bit more of the sales stuff this time. One, because I like it. And two, because I know you have a lot on your plate.

Sean
I appreciate it.

Andrew
And so I'm like, all right, let me let me take some of this if I can.

Sean
Thanks. Thanks, thanks, thanks.

Andrew
And it works well in this case, because like I have a relationship with them. you know If they're coming to you for your relationship, then it's harder for me to insert myself and help out with the sales stuff.

Sean
for sure for sure cool cool what else is going on what else

Andrew
So yeah.

Andrew
What else is going on? um I feel like I had something else I was going to ramble to you about, but I can't can't think right now. um what's What's happening with Stackwise? Anything there?

Sean
Yeah. Um, oh, actually I do. Oh, by the way, for anyone listening at home, we don't edit these things anymore because we don't have ah money to prefer a producer and editor or any of that.

Andrew
No, it's remember, stop.

Sean
We just, right.

Andrew
you You were the one who taught me. It's because we believe in authenticity. It's not because we're broke. It's because we believe in authenticity and we want you to get the realest possible experience, but the raw unfiltered Sean and Andrew.

Sean
Right. Exactly. Why would I edit out? Yeah. Yeah.

Sean
So, I've reached out to a friend in a bug, you know, who's honestly also been an awesome supporter of Miss Green's, but I just asked him to like pen test my app because I feel like I should.

Andrew
Oh, that's hilarious. Oh, I do not want anyone to pin test chart juice. Absolutely not.

Sean
It just occurred to me that like it's not a medical app, but like would be good to I don't know, not and have a security thing. Um, um, also, I don't know, it's in the new tropics space.

Andrew
That's hilarious.

Sean
I, it's, it's, you know, my target market, not yet, not yet.

Andrew
Did they tear it to shreds?

Sean
I haven't, um, they haven't done it yet.

Andrew
Okay. They haven't done it yet. Okay.

Sean
We just, we literally just started talking about it.

Andrew
Okay.

Sean
I'm super excited to tell you about the experience. I'm very ready for them for what it's worth. I think, I think my dev is.

Andrew
If this is who I think it is, you're you brought in like, for some reason I have a name in mind, and if it is who I think it is, then you brought like a nuclear bomb to a knife fight.

Sean
Um, I don't think it's who you think it is, but it is on the same level.

Andrew
Okay, okay.

Sean
It's like, you know, one of the guys that gets invited out by hacker one to go and fuck shit up. It makes, you know, uh, maybe makes a lot of money off of bug money. And also is like a director of security somewhere, you know, that type of guy. Um, uh,

Andrew
Oh, this is going to be hilarious. I can't wait to hear.

Sean
Um, I'm a little bit nervous. Also when I sent him the staging link, it was down. So I protected it.

Andrew
Hey, you can't hack it if it's down, baby.

Andrew
That's hilarious.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
Are you, are you opening yourself up to like phishing attacks while this is happening? Like is everything on the table or is it purely like purely web like network?

Sean
No, no, no.

Sean
Purely web. Purely purely web. I'm going to give him access to the source code as well, just to make his life easier. I think he's mean he's doing me a favor. I'm not trying to hide.

Andrew
yeah yeah yeah yeah

Sean
um um No phishing yet. Maybe that would be something for miscreants as a thing. So if anyone wants to run a phishing exercise against us, let me know before you do that. But I'm happy to talk. um Yeah, I mean, I'm excited to see him fuck it up. I trust my dev. I think he's a great dev, but ah who knows, man?

Andrew
I can't wait to hear about this. This will be great podcast content um or it'll be really boring podcast content.

Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew
If you are successful and nothing happens, you know, which I feel like I kind of feel like the earliest stage of development in some ways is maybe this is dumb, but I feel like it's the most secure because you haven't brought in a ton of extra crud.

Sean
Right.

Sean
Mm-hmm.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
That often is. you know, has vulnerabilities lying around in it. Like sometimes things are simple enough that if you've got your eyes dotted in your T's crossed, there's not a whole lot you can do. Is my, is the thought process in my head, but you also haven't taken the time to do a lot of security stuff.

Sean
Right.

Andrew
So maybe there's.

Sean
And there's definitely founder code in there, you know, in in terms of like early things to kind of get somebody to work for the, for the sake of it being an MVP.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
Right. Um, yeah, I don't know. I'll let you know. I'm excited.

Andrew
Yeah, very curious.

Sean
Um, yeah.

Andrew
That's fun. I think the biggest risk I would have is like accidentally exposing keys that I shouldn't expose in my and my code somewhere, which I don't think I'm doing.

Sean
Yeah. For sure.

Andrew
Knock on wood. Fingers crossed. I don't think I'm exposing anything important.

Sean
Yeah, I mean, it would I think the like the biggest the biggest risk in charge use is you know someone being able to hijack and ah you effectively get to implant images to inject images into other people's, like, giant transactional emails.

Andrew
I think all my environment variables are not in my code, hopefully.

Andrew
Yeah.

Sean
So that's the yeah that's the that's the existential risk.

Andrew
yeah Yeah, that'll be interesting.

Sean
Yeah.

Andrew
We'll see.

Sean
um Yeah, I think on our end, it's like a privacy thing. right I think we promise people that they are allowed to make their bio data private. Not that we tell anyone to put their exact name and and ID and everything, but probably probably not great. Probably we'll stop using it. um Yeah, I don't know. We'll see.

Andrew
Cool.

Sean
We'll see.

Andrew
Cool. That'll be fun. Awesome, man. Well, um, I think that's really all I've got right now. Um, unless you, you have anything else?

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
No, I saw you. I saw you yesterday ah for the sales call.

Andrew
Yeah, we're going to see each other a lot over the next month, which will be fun, but, uh, maybe it'll actually help us finish our podcast recordings on time.

Sean
Yeah.

Sean
Uh-huh.

Sean
Okay. I will see you next week.

Andrew
Alright man, peace, this was fun.

Sean
I think we can. Bye. Bye.